Alchemy: Dire Straits Live is a double album and the first live album by the British rock band Dire Straits, released on 16 March 1984 by Vertigo Records internationally, and by Warner Bros. Records in the United States. Recorded at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on 22–23 July 1983, the album features the band's best-known and fan-favourite songs from their first four albums, along with the Mark Knopfler - Local Hero soundtrack. Many of the songs have reworked arrangements and extended improvisational segments. The album cover is taken from a painting by Brett Whiteley.

Trumpeter Nicholas Payton is teamed up with Wessell Anderson (who doubles on sopranino and alto), pianist Peter Martin, bassist Christopher Thomas and drummer Brian Blade for an unusual set of music that shifts between hard bop and New Orleans jazz. While "Rhonda Mile" (which uses the chord changes to "Indiana") is pure bop, other selections combine the two idioms and "Four or Five Times" (listed as an Anderson original but actually a standard from the 1920s) is strictly Dixieland. A highpoint is the 16-minute "He Was a Good Man, Oh Yes He Was" which musically depicts a New Orleans funeral. Throughout, Anderson (particularly on the sopranino which he plays like a clarinet) and Payton work together quite well in the exciting ensembles and show impressive knowlege of earlier forms of jazz while carving out their own individual voices.

Electric Light Orchestra's third album showed a marked advancement, with a fuller, more cohesive sound from the band as a whole and major improvements in Jeff Lynne's singing and songwriting. This is where the band took on its familiar sound, Lynne's voice suddenly showing an attractive expressiveness reminiscent of John Lennon in his early solo years, and also sporting a convincing white British soulful quality that was utterly lacking earlier. The group also plugged the holes that made its work seem so close to being ragged on those earlier records. "Showdown" and "Ma-Ma-Ma Belle" (the latter featuring Marc Bolan on double lead guitar with Lynne) became AM radio fixtures while "Daybreaker" became a concert opener for the group and, along with "In the Hall of the Mountain King," kept the group's FM/art rock credentials in order.

Importante debutto discografico di Barbara Casini per Via Veneto Jazz, che si misura in questa produzione con il repertorio della leggendaria cantante Elis Regina, in un disco che “vuole essere un gesto d’amore e gratitudine per chi ha così tanto nutrito la mia anima canterina”. L’album è realizzato con il contributo di numerosi e importanti musicisti di formazione jazz ma estremamente versati nelle sonorità sudamericane, e gli arrangiamenti di Paolo Silvestri vestono con stile ed eleganza i brani, dando il giusto equilibrio e risalto a una delle voci più cristalline che il nostro Paese possa attualmente vantare. Un excursus attraverso brani immortali della musica brasiliana, ricchi di energia, sensualità, allegria e con il giusto pizzico di saudade. Una prova importante, come tutti gli omaggi ai grandi interpreti del passato, che Barbara Casini riesce a superare brillantemente.

This album is broken into two sections. The majority of the disc is devoted to archive recordings of the Second Esquire Jazz Concert. The legendary event took place on January 17, 1945, in New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles. The concert featured many of the day's best-known jazz performers: Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and more. The second section of the album highlights a performance by Louis Armstrong at the Winter Garden Theater in New York on June 19, 1947. This particular performance by Armstrong commemorated the world debut of the film New Orleans.

All that is known of Bernardo Storaces life derives from the title-page of his sole collection of music: in 1664 he was vice-maestro di cappella to the senate of Messina, Sicily. It is not known whether he was an antecedent of the Storace family of singers and musicians active in England at the end of the 18th century. His surviving music is all contained in his Selva di varie compositioni dintavolatura per cimbalo ed organo, published in Venice in 1664. While the work of Frescobaldi was surely not unknown to Storace, the later composers voice is individual and original.

Many first recordings on a comprehensive, newly recorded survey of a distinguished modern Italian guitar-composer.Joining the extensive library of guitar music in the Brilliant Classics catalogue, Franco Cavallone is a worthy successor to Italian guitar composers from Giuliani to Castelnuovo-Tedesco. He is an accomplished performer himself, having studied with the likes of Leo Brouwer and Angelo Gilardino, and the pieces recorded here have been composed with an intimate knowledge of the guitar’s technical and timbral possibilities, which Cristiano Porqueddu exploits to the full, with the composer’s enthusiastic approval: ‘He has managed to create a kaleidoscope of sound and sense that is truly rewarding for the listener. I am convinced that this CD set is a benchmark recording for my music for the guitar.’

Biographical information on NicoloÌ Corradini is scarce, but we do know he spent most of his life in Cremona, the city where he was most likely born. His works include a Book of Madrigals for 5 to 8 voices with viol consort (published in Venice in 1620), the First Book of French Canzoni (Venice, 1620), Motets for 1 to 4 voices (Bartolomeo Magni, Venice, 1624) and the 4-voice Ricercari recorded here, from 1615.

This portentous tribute to Domenikos Theotokopoulos (16th-century painter "El Greco") divides its ten tracks among as many separate movements (complete with a disc-closing "Epilogue") and explores them with all the excitement of a day at the art gallery (this concept was, in fact, inspired by the National Gallery of Greece's efforts to obtain El Greco's "St. Peter"). Which means it's very studious, very meticulous, and very good for you, but ultimately the (very few) thrills here are intrinsic at best and not really all that thrilling. Composer, arranger, producer, and performer Vangelis gooses up the action with occasional bombast, but the overall tone of El Greco's classical new age is as solemn and washed-out as a centuries-old painting.

If one had to point to a single initial salvo that launched the garage rock revival movement in the 1970s and ‘80s, it would have to be the release of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968 in 1972. Elektra Records had approached rock critic Lenny Kaye (not yet the guitarist with the Patti Smith Group) with the notion of compiling an album of great, overlooked rock tunes, but what Kaye came up with was something significantly different – an overview of the great, wild era when American bands, goaded by the British Invasion, began honing in on a tougher and more eclectic rock & roll sound, and kids were reawakened to the possibilities of two guitars, bass, and drum…

Third studio album from the ex-Spandau Ballet singer. Here Hadley loses the 80's synth pop sound and dives head first into swing where his powerful voice sounds as good as ever. A project close to his heart that he's been working on for some time and hopes that his choice of songs, and vocal and musical arrangements, will challenge the normal format of current swing and delight not only his existing fans, but also some new ones.

Like Dave Edmunds, guitarist/pianist/vocalist Mickey Jupp was a champion of traditional rock & roll during the late '70s, a time when it had been all but discarded. Unlike Edmunds, Jupp wrote the majority of his own material, which updated '50s rock & roll with a tongue-in-cheek irony.

Michael Nyman is the third album release by Michael Nyman and the second with the Michael Nyman Band, having previously contributed tracks to new music compilations. Most of the music on Michael Nyman was material from the early films by Peter Greenaway such as "Bird Anthem" (Act Of God) and "Bird List Song" (The Falls). The album also includes his first concert work for the band, "In Re Don Giovanni" which was released as a single on Les Disques du Crepuscule (home of Cabaret Voltaire, Durutti Column and Josef K amongst others) under the title Mozart. The most groundbreaking track on Michael Nyman, however, is "Waltz in F", a piece Nyman wrote for art students whilst teaching at Trent Polytechnic in 1977, Nyman subsequently commandeering two modern jazz improvisers, Evan Parker and Peter Brotzman, to "destroy" this piece. Ultimately, Parker and Brotzman ended up playing over and around ten separate tracks whilst Nyman and Cunningham mixed in their Waltz.

Suzi Quatro is a performer as famous for her image as her music; Quatro was rock & roll's prototypical Bad Girl, the woman in the leather jumpsuit with the enormous bass guitar (well, it looked enormous, given that Quatro is only five feet tall), looking sexy but ferocious as she banged out her glam rock hits in her '70s glory days. Quatro is a woman who titled one of her albums Your Mamma Won't Like Me for a reason. But there's more to Suzi Quatro than all that, and she seems determined to show off the full range of her 50-year career in music on the box set The Girl from Detroit City. Quatro is a rocker but she's also a showbiz lifer, and the music spread over these four discs is the work of someone up to do a little bit of everything, and along with Chapman/Chinn thunderboomers like "Can the Can," "49 Crash," and "Daytona Demon"…