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ID: FHR02
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection: Jazz
The Teak Project brings together three of Britain's finest young improvisers to make music that defies definition. This is not 'jazz' or 'Hindustani classical', at least not as you've known it. It is a unique piece of joinery: classic, seamless powered by solid and individual vocabularies.
Songlines:
"At last-an East-meets-West to be proud of"
Recording information: Temple Studios, London, England (12/2006). |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
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ID: FHR01
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection: Jazz
Subcollection: Ensemble
John Mayer's success through the 1960's with Indo-Jazz Fusions saw the release of four LP's over a four year period. Indo-Jazz Suite (1966), Indo-Jazz Fusions (1967) ,Indo-Jazz Fusions II (1968), and Etudes (1969) Sonet SNT603 which is the only LP not to have been re-released until now.
Radha Krishna was originally released by EMI in 1971. Comprising of a large ensemble, including sitar, tabla, drums, sax, string trio, soprano, tenor etc... this ground breaking recording (along with Etudes) has been wonderfully re-mastered at Abbey Road Studios. |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
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ID: FHR10
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection: Jazz
Recorded and mastered by Nick Taylor, Porcupine Studios.
With Special guest - Digby Fairweather - Trumpet
One of the leading jazz vocalists in the UK, Wendy Nieper is a very versatile, sophisticated jazz vocalist and a gifted scat singer. Her rich vocal colors are complemented by wonderful phrasing and great musicality. Her wide experience as a singer includes being a member of the Swingle Singers with whom she recorded five albums. She has appeared on numerous albums both as a classical and jazz singer and has toured extensively around the globe. On this album, Nieper is accompanied by a great band including the talented composer/ pianist Roland Perrin and the jazz legend Digby Fairweather. First Flight is an explosive mix of styles from Cuban to jazz and pop to funk. If you like Diana Krall, Stacey Kent, Claire Martin then we are sure you will love First Flight.
Booklet notes
When you break open the packaging of a new album and put it into the CD player, do you always start at the beginning? Maybe it is years of building radio programmes and reviewing CDs, but I tend to make for the standards first. Of course it is interesting to hear completely new music - and there’s plenty of it on offer here - but I confess to having started listening to this album with Good Bait and Ponciana. The reasoning goes that you’ll quickly get the measure of a singer and her accompanists according to how they tackle familiar material.
I wasn’t more than half a bar into Good Bait when my ears pricked up. Here was Tadd Dameron’s epitome of a four-four swing theme transferred into a dancing 6/8 rhythm. After a quick zip through the vocalise of the verse, a nice scat chorus is followed by some deft unison between voice and piano. Meanwhile, Ponciana escapes nicely from the shadow of Ahmad Jamal, and becomes a fresh-sounding piece, with some inventive vocal harmonies on the introductory theme and a sweetly sung chorus that steers a neat course between the gauche ingénue qualities of an Astrud Gilberto and the more knowing approach of a Julie London. Clearly Wendy Nieper is a singer who is prepared to tackle familiar material with originality, and she is paced every step of the way by pianist and, on several tracks, composer, Roland Perrin.
I knew Roland’s work from the Blue Planet Orchestra, and as a pianist who had worked with many visiting stars, especially the South Africans in exile who had congregated around the Brotherhood of Breath. I had not realised that like Wendy Nieper, he had a foot, if not an entire leg, in the classical world as well.
For pianists, there are plenty of precedents for straddling the classical and jazz worlds. Fats Waller and James P. Johnson were both accomplished classical players, as was Art Tatum. Bud Powell recorded his personal take on J. S. Bach, and more recently both Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett have moved effectively between the worlds of the Mozartian concert hall and the jazz club. It is less usual for a singer to make a reputation in both the jazz and classical worlds.
Wendy Nieper, however, is someone who has, with duo recordings of Chopin, Canteloube, Sondheim and Bernstein to her credit.
“I focussed on classical singing first,” she told me, “because it demands that you train your voice before you reach a certain age. Classical singing involves a completely different technique from jazz, because you have to develop a core sound, and aim for very clear pronunciation. I’ve always stressed that what I do involves two very different voices. The classical voice is designed to project. It’s very loud, and has a brilliance and ring to it. My jazz voice, on the other hand, is very quiet and intimate, and it plays on things that the microphone gives you. It can be breathy; you can distort your vowel sounds for effect, and be more casual about your consonants. It comes from a different place physically, so you have to change your vocal position.”
The opening track, Blower’s Daughter makes this point perfectly, with Wendy caressing the lyric in a manner a classical singer could not contemplate. Yet the purity of her sound and her use of different registers is a clue to the rigorous training she has undergone, and her mastery of vocal technique. Originally, she had intended to give the first chorus of Solomente a classical treatment, projecting her soprano voice over Perrin’s deft classically inspired rhythmic figures. But it sounded wrong, and instead she ended up with the humming chorus that introduces Pablo Neruda’s Spanish lyrics. The closest she comes to revealing her classical voice is in the link between these and the English version of what she describes as a “landscape song”.
Landscape is important to Wendy in her own song writing. In Roland Perrin, whom she met at a house party she threw a while ago, she has found a collaborator who shares her love of terrain, and of experiment. She says. “I love singing descriptive lyrics like in Empty Beach (a song about someone lost in thought on a seashore) where it runs ‘Clouds drift high in a vast rose sky, time dissolves in a sea bird’s cry’ or ‘Holding on to a silk thin thread, of images forming then quickly shed’. We experimented with the music so that in that same song we do a contrary motion scale (piano going up, voice going down) just before the words ‘Can Echo’ which I then echo in a different key!” From our conversation, I was intrigued to learn that Digby Fairweather’s Harmon muted trumpet here is representing a seagull!
Tree also explores landscape themes, although Wendy confesses this song has been with her a long time, saying, “The rhythmic theme came from a ditty that I wrote as a kid. And Roland kindly made it into something real and quite different.” Their partnership nods in the direction of the jazz tradition as well, on the quirky Monk-ish What’ll it be?, which was written about a waitress in a restaurant where Wendy once worked in Richmond, Surrey.
Overall, the album is a highly successful blend of new takes on old material, and new takes on new material. Although she and Roland had met and discussed the music before the session, Wendy stresses that it was recorded in the age-old manner of jazz records, where four musicians who had not recorded together before arrived on the day and played music that was new to all of them. Each take was an adventure, and the same applied to the second day of recording when Helder Pack replaced Guy Silk for another voyage into the unknown. And as a bonus, Wendy adds quite a few improvised sections at the end of the songs, scatting or humming as an instrumentalist, playing off her fellow musicians, and turning the entire album into a genuine musical conversation, which like all discourses, runs deep and shallow, and hot and cold, and fast and slow, as it develops.
© 2011 Alyn Shipton (Jazz critic, The Times) |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
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ID: FHR08
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Saxophone
Genres: Jazz/Avant Garde & Free Jazz, R&B/Funk
“All in all this music has something everyone will love” Rolling Stone
Recorded in 1978, ‘Fat Doggie’ is a genre-defying fusion of jazz, funk, disco, soul and Latin. Solid rhythm section, tight horns, great tunes - imagine Average White Band, Santana, James Brown, Albert Ayler, & Tower of Power all on one album! The Greg Alper Band featured the finest jazz players in New York, including Richie Morales (Spyro Gyra, Brecker Bros), Chuck Loeb (Bob James, Fourplay) & Ray Anderson (Best Trombonist: Down Beat magazine critics poll 1987-91). The disco infused funk opening cut Hole in Your Pocket, was a dance floor classic. The combustible Give it Up is a scorching tightly-syncopated funk workout that wouldn’t sound out of place on a vintage Tower of Power album. The mellower mid-paced Latin grooved bonus track Many Moods with exquisite horn parts, lit by celestial shimmering guitar accompaniment. The original release elicited positive press reviews including Rolling Stone which said “...all in all this music has something that everyone will love” as well as Billboard’s “Top Album Picks”. In recent years, the hard-to-find ‘Fat Doggie’ album has become something of a cult collectable with groove spotters, DJs and jazz-funk disciples the world over. Remastered at Abbey Road Studios using the original source tapes, ‘Fat Doggie’ has once again been unleashed from the kennel! |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
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ID: FHR11
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection: Baroque
Subcollection: Cello
Rohan de Saram was a member of the legendary Arditti Quartet for over twenty years and has performed as a soloist with major orchestras around the world. Preethi de Silva is the director of the celebrated US early music ensemble Con Gioia. A multi-award winner for her performances and literature, de Silva has performed with many internationally famous period instrument musicians including Chiara Banchini, Monica Huggett and Wieland Kuijken. Harmonic Labyrinth, a special collection from First Hand, celebrates these two great Sri Lankan musicians and features repertoire from their recent, highly acclaimed concert tour with Con Gioia. |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
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ID: FHR09
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Collection: World Music
Subcollection: Flute
Out of Genre, the solo debut album from distinguished sitarist Jonathan Mayer, spans world, jazz and classical genres. Featuring jazz trumpet legend Kenny Wheeler, the program includes the premiere recording of sitar transcriptions of works by J.S. Bach. Son of the late composer and co-founder of Indo-Jazz Fusions John Mayer, Jonathan studied sitar with Clem Alford (the first ever European sitar player), Pandit Subroto Roy Chowdhury of Senia Gharana and Wajahat Khan (direct descendent of Mia Tansen the great musician, one of the nine jewels in Moghul court of Emperor Akbar). He also studied composition with his father and later with Andrew Downes at the Birmingham Conservatoire. Out of Genre also features the first ever recording of the newly invented pygmy sitar. |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
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ID: FHR13
CDs: 1
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Piano
First Hand CD 'Aria' has just been named by Classic FM as one of the best albums of 2011!
This brilliantly devised CD from Gerard McChrystal is a deeply personal album; at times mystical, the music is always beautiful and captivating. Indeed, Aria has similar qualities to Jan Gabarek's Officium (which sold 1.4 million copies) and will appeal to this fan-base. Featuring soprano and alto saxophone with a colourful array of different ensemble accompaniments - string orchestra, choir, guitar, piano, solo, string quartet and electronics. Baroque music blends seamlessly with contemporary; Handel resolves into Michael Nyman, Debussy's Syrinx morphs into Ravel's Piece en forme de habanera. All the tracks lead to the next by key or by starting and ending on the same note. Other works include Philip Glass Façades, Faure Les Berceaux, Bozza Aria, as well as original works by Billy Cowie, Karen Tanaka, Andy Scott and Michael McGlynn (from the vocal group Anúna who featured in Riverdance). Accompanying Gerard on this album are some of the UK's finest classical musicians including the Smith Quartet and the No. 1 best-selling classical artist, guitarist Craig Ogden. Gerard McChrystal is a multi-award winning saxophonist who has performed as a soloist in over 30 countries with many of the World's leading orchestras and ensembles. |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
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ID: FHR04
CDs: 2
Type: CD
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Collection: Chamber Music
Subcollection: Piano
Like many other artists, the great Russian pianist Shura Cherkassky fled from what became Soviet Russia and settled in the USA. A student of Josef Hoffman, Cherkassky is considered by many critics to be the last great Romantic pianist. This release from the brand-new First Hand Records label is published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Cherkassky's birth. Most of the tracks here are issued in stereo for the first time and many have never before appeared on CD. This set, which features over two hours of music, is a significant historical classical piano release and provides a major boost to the limited Cherkassky discography currently available.
A 2CD set of Shura Cherkassky's complete and unpublished stereo recordings made for the HMV record label over 50 years ago. Remastered from the original stereo tapes, First Hand Records released the recordings in May 2009, the majority of which have appear for the first time in any format.
Recorded in 1956 & 1958 at Abbey Road Studios, London and remastered there in 2009. The set spans over 400 years of keyboard repertoire, from Bach to Poulenc.
Recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 3, London, 1956 & 1958, and Kingsway Hall, London, 1958 (Litolff Scherzo)
INTERNATIONAL PIANO MAGAZINE AWARD WINNER FOR BEST REISSUE/VINTAGE RELEASE OF 2009
Issue note:
Throughout his recording career, Cherkassky flirted with different record labels, never really settling with one company. His first recording for an EMI company was in 1929 (HMV) and the last, a recording of the Litolff Scherzo, in 1967 (New World Records). He was wary of the recording studio, feeling happier performing to an audience, which resulted in a comparatively limited discography. Cherkassky was probably at his peak in the mid to late 1950s, just as his career began to accelerate in the UK. These HMV recordings, made in 1956 and 1958, contain some of the earliest EMI stereo recordings, when the technology was still at an experimental stage (EMI introduced twin-track 7.5 ips stereosonic tapes in 1955, followed in 1958 by stereophonic LPs). Quite often, these stereo recordings suffered from technical problems, including equipment failure, which resulted in many recordings not even making it to tape. Some EMI recording sessions from this period were taped in both mono and stereo concurrently, including these Cherkassky recordings. Only the mono versions were intended for immediate release as the equipment for playing stereo LPs was not yet widely available. Indeed, the majority of the tracks on this CD release have only ever been published in their mono versions. The Chopin works, apart from Ballade No. 3, was released on stereosonic tape in 1957 and the Litolff Scherzo appeared in 1963 on a stereo LP entitled “An Evening at the Proms”.
The recordings on this CD issue were made at Abbey Road Studios, London (Litolff Scherzo was recorded in Kingsway Hall, London) and remastered there in 2009 using the original EMI stereo source tapes. These tapes had been left dormant in the EMI archive for over 50 years, alongside masses of other unpublished stereo recordings from this era, which still remain untouched.
The preservation of the piano’s natural acoustic sound was a vital part of the remastering process. With this in mind, we chose not to make an issue of removing the audible hiss that is present on the tapes, to avoid diminishing the acoustic depth and dynamic range of the piano.
Although remembered mainly for his performances of romantic repertoire, Cherkassky had wide-ranging and sometimes idiosyncratic tastes in programming. Alongside standard repertoire, he was also known to perform music by Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti and even performed boogie-woogie! This CD release illustrates this diversity of style in a mixture of musical bonbons, warhorses and encore works spanning three centuries. Cherkassky’s trademark lyricism, his exciting unpredictability and his dazzling virtuosity are in abundance throughout this significant historical issue. This is a significant addition to the Cherkassky discography. |
| 25.00 eur Buy |
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ID: FHR12
CDs: 2
Type: CD
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Subcollection: Voices and Orchestra
From 1955 through 1964, Judy Garland was one of the most celebrated, acclaimed, and best-selling album artists on the EMI/Capitol roster. On several occasions during those years, she had the opportunity of recording at Abbey Road Studios. This 2CD set assembles her work done there between October 1957 and August 1964. Not only are 12 previously unreleased alternate takes included but, more significantly, a completely unknown/undocumented recording of a song called Please Say 'Ah'! The Mort Lindsey orchestration of this song is complicated and marvellous, the band on top form; Garland and her vocal partner, Saul Chaplin, are having a wonderful time and this great piece of fun, liberally sprinkled with Garland's infectious laugh, demands to be heard! This historic issue is the very first composite compact disc celebration of its kind and a guaranteed collector's item for anyone who appreciates the Great Popular Songbook - and "the World's greatest entertainer."
CD 1
Track 1: Orchestra conducted by Geoff Love Abbey Road Studios, 2-9 August 1960
Tracks 2-21: Orchestra and chorus conducted by Norrie Paramor
CD2
Track 1-4: Orchestra conducted by Mort Lindsey Abbey Road Studios, 6 & 12 August 1964
Tracks 5-8: Orchestra conducted by Harry Robinson
Tracks 9-14: Orchestra conducted by Norrie Paramor
Tracks 15-18: Orchestra conducted by Harry Robinson
Track 22, vocals: Judy Garland and Saul Chaplin
Tracks 19-22: Orchestra conducted by Mort Lindsey
Track 22, vocals: Judy Garland and Saul Chaplin
Tracks 19-22: Orchestra conducted by Mort Lindsey |
| 25.00 eur Buy |
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ID: FHR05
CDs: 3
Type: CD
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Collection: Orchestral Works
Subcollection: Orchestra
Following First Hand Records award winning set of Cherkassky HMV recordings, they now publish the complete HMV stereo recordings made by the London Mozart Players and Harry Blech. They are issued here for the first time on CD, most for the first time in stereo. This welcomed tribute is released in 2009 to celebrate both the 60th anniversary year of LMP and the centenary of Blech's birth. Selling at a great 3 for 2 CD price, this set comes in an attractive 4-panelled digipack.
Recorded at Abbey Road Studios, London, in 1956 & 1957, and sympathetically remastered there using the original HMV master tapes, these recordings sound magnificent for their 54 year age.
LMP are the longest established chamber orchestra in the UK and have always been greatly respected worldwide. These HMV recordings were made in the Golden Age of LMP and illustrate why the legendary LMP/Blech 35 year partnership was so successful. Once again, we are able to hear that unique ensemble sound the LMP were famous for in these, their earliest stereo recordings.
Highlights from this issue include Mozart's great 'Posthorn' Serenade and a magnificent reading of the 'Jupiter' Symphony both displaying LMP and Blech at their best.
The 1950s were the Golden Age of the London Mozart Players. Harry Blech had an incredible musical instinct which, coupled with his unfailingly musical and heartfelt performances drew faithful capacity audiences to the ten regular Royal Festival Hall concerts each season - a difficult act to follow these days! These HMV recordings were made in 1956 and 1957 at Abbey Road Studios, London and were remastered there in 2009 using the original EMI stereo source tapes which had lain undisturbed for over 50 years! |
| 32.00 eur Buy |
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