Neil Gray - In The Streets - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

In terms of instrumentation, repertoire and pioneering spirit, Seldom Scene opened all kinds of new doors for bluegrass. This 1975 double-LP is a progressive-bluegrass classic brilliant spins on City of New Orleans; It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, and If I Were a Carpenter plus Georgia Rose; Dark Hollow; Rawhide 23 in all!

Written only six years apart, these two works share a common narrative of frustrated love, and the concept of the forest as a metaphor for the subconscious mind. Musically they are wildly different, however; Pelleas, which Schoenberg wrote in his late twenties, is the epitome of his late romantic style, indebted to Richard Strauss. Erwartung (his first work for the stage) was written after his conversion to atonality. Maurice Maeterlinck's play Pelleas et Melisande fired the imaginations of several of the greatest composers of the time. Debussy began writing his opera almost immediately after it's publication in 1892, and within a decade or so Faure and Sibelius had created elaborate incidental scores for different stage productions of the play. Schoenberg composed his tone poem in 1902 - 03, for a large-scale (Straussian) orchestra. Schoenberg seems to have put himself into a state of free association to write Erwartung, which he completed in just seventeen days in August 1909. 'In Erwartung, the aim is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour', he wrote. Not only the first solo opera, this is perhaps also the first cinematic one.

Formed in 1963 as the New Jazz Orchestra, the band had an evolving membership featuring the cream of Britain's young jazz musicians. At the time of these recordings, the band featured (amongst others) Barbara Thompson, Mike Gibbs and Harry Beckett, plus the musicians from Colosseum. Material includes Jack Bruce's 'Rope Ladder To The Moon', Ardley's 'Shades Of Blue' and Michael Garrick's 'Dusk Fire', the latter immortalized by the Ian Carr/Don Rendell Quintet on BGOCD615. Ardley left in 1971, and not long after the New Jazz Orchestra disbanded, reappearing for a one-off concert in 1993. Digitally remastered and slipcased, and with extensive new notes by Charles Waring.