Duke Robillard and His All Star Band - Blast Off - VINYL LP

Back in the early 2000's I was given the OK to start a new blues album for Stony Plain. Somehow after recording nine hot blues tracks, I got another album concept so we started another album session. I said we'd get back to the blues album soon after finishing the new project. As things sometimes go, we got busy with gigging, touring and life. That early blues album we cut kept getting put aside and we kept coming up with new album concepts within months of of the last one. Finally, after two decades and dozens of recordings, we got to the place where it was time for my final Stony Plain record. All this time I knew we had to get back to the album we had started back in 2005. I knew those tracks were really strong but until I listened to them again, I didn't realize just how strong they really were. - Duke RobillardDuke Robillard is a legacy blues artist who launched his career with A Roomful of Blues in 1967, joined the Fabulous Thunderbirds, played with the Legendary Blues Band, was one-third of the New Guitar Summit, leads his own band and continues to do solo shows, now in his 75th year. With 37 of his own albums plus contributing to dozens more with other artists, Duke is a master of Blues, Swing, Jump Blues and Jazz, and has won the Best Blues Guitarist WC Handy Award twice. He is twice Grammy nominated, has won 4 Blues Awards as Best Guitarist, 4 Maple Blues Awards for International Artist, the Keeping The Blues Alive Award for record production, and is ranked among the World's Best Blues Artists by Downbeat and Living Blues. As a session guitarist and producer, Duke has recorded with Bob Dylan, John Hammond, Ruth Brown, Billy Boy Arnold, Rosco Gordon, Jay McShann, Jimmy Witherspoon, Maria Muldaur, Pinetop Perkins, Joe Louis Walker, Johnny Adams and many more.

2016 . We're going to be digesting the 20th century in music for at least as long as it lasted. The Shivas - typically versed in garage and surf and psych, pieces of Nuggets and Pebbles, touring regularly with The Dandy Warhols and playing Austin Psych Fest - have laid down Better Off Dead not with the raucous anarchy of the John Cusack movie of the same name, but instead with this lilting grace of static and radio waves from the past century falling all around, studying not the fuzzy chunks that fell off in the wake of the '60s psychedelic crisis. This is something earlier, slower, not a Inchnew direction,Inch but just a natural branch off the same tree. Better Off Dead is like a hall of mirrors, but instead of seeing yourself everywhere you look, it's Roy Orbison, and then it's Les Paul & Mary Ford in the fogged glass - ghosts in the mixing board, all old and full of hiss, rattled loose and flying around. We're all digesting the past century of music; The Shivas have been doing this the whole time and just happen to do it a lot better than the other bands attempting the same thing.

Until their dissolution, the Verdi Quartet was one of the most prominent ensembles in the German chamber music scene for over three decades. They have made invaluable contributions far beyond their home with their highly-regarded complete recordings of Schubert and Brahms and the, until now, unique recordings of the string quartets of Ernst Toch. Cpo has now released the Inchfarewell giftInch of the quartet, fulfilling a long-held wish by the ensemble - the three quartets of the British Inchlate RomanticInch Ralph Vaughan Williams. These again offer the InchVerdisInch the opportunity to live out their much-praised virtues in all their intimacy and go full circle from his early declaration of love for the English folk song to the consoling swansong that the great composer wrote in the darkest of times at the age of 72.