Hans Loelv – Grand Piano (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 32:39 minutes | 270 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Do Music Records
Uppsala-based jazz pianist Hans Loelv continues his streak of impressive productivity by turning his full attention to his main instrument, the piano, and aptly titles the album Grand Piano. What we are treated to here is the fabulous Fazioli grand piano inside ABBA-Benny Andersson’s Stockholm studio, a coveted instrument that Loelv has already acquainted himself with on his recent albums, and so became the natural musical partner for this intimate solo outing. Loelv’s tasteful, balanced and evocative compositions as well as delicate phrasing and touch truly come to life on this amazing instrument, recorded by the equally amazing Roxette-producer Alar Suurna. Enjoy a creative musician’s inner musical journey through different moods, upbeat jazz, solemn blues, sweet romance as well as sadness and joy and introspection, through a set of original tunes that highlight the experience and undeniable talent that only years of playing can procure.
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Hans Koller Quintet – All that Jazz, Vol. 134: Hans Koller & Friends (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:35:11 minutes | 676 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Jube Legends
Hans Koller (February 12, 1921 in Vienna – December 21, 2003 in Vienna) was an Austrian jazz tenor saxophonist and bandleader.
Koller attended the University of Vienna from 1936 to 1939 and served in the armed forces from 1940 to 1946. Following World War II, he returned to Vienna and played with the Hot Club of Vienna; in 1950 he emigrated to Germany and formed a small ensemble there. In the 1950s, he played with Freddie Brocksieper, Albert Mangelsdorff, Jutta Hipp, Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Russo, Lee Konitz, Stan Kenton, Eddie Sauter, Benny Goodman, Attila Zoller, Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Clarke, Wes Montgomery, Martial Solal and Jimmy Pratt. From 1958 to 1965, he directed the jazz workshops of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hamburg, returning to Vienna in 1970. Soon after he formed his own ensemble, Free Sound, and later in the decade he worked with the International Brass Company.
In addition to his playing and bandleading, Koller also composed; among his original works are a ballet entitled New York City, completed in 1968. Koller was also a recognized abstract painter.
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Das Hans Koller Oktett, Das Wolfgang Dauner Trio – Jazz Studio – H.G.B.S Number One (1962/2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 32:58 minutes | 594 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © MPS
This is a classic – the jazz album that signaled the beginning of Hans-Georg Brunner-Schwer’s storied SABA-MPS record company, and pointed the way to the label’s next two decades of creative, beautifully recorded music performed by some of the greatest players in jazz.
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Hans Koller – Vision (1966/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 28:43 minutes | 522 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © MPS
Vision I portrays canonically overlaid sax parts played at breakneck speed before moving into a relaxed bluesy groove, then turns to blistering multi-horn solos. The dirge-like For Dolphy, with the plaintive vocal cries of the altos, was dedicated to the great alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy. The med swing and skewed bluesy feel of For H.G. features the tenor out front. Tryptichon is a challenging angular composition in 3 parts with free improvisation moving from slow to up-tempo and back. With its Dolphyesque melody, Music For Jule is a frenetic excursion with an oblique reference to Monk. For Koller, Ballad For Marlies evokes the essence of a ballad. A Different Theme comprises three phrases played in different times – perfect food for the soloists. Vision II is a free-form ballad with Rittenbacher doubling piano and Koller’s expressive sax solo.
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Hans Koller – Relax With My Horns (1966/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 29:40 minutes | 534 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © MPS
The re-release of Hans Koller’s 1966 Relax With My Horns (MPS, Germany) shows a master at the top of his game. For the listeners, the disc is composed, arranged and produced with a sense of cheekiness… Trio of jazz musicians, with overdubbing of up to four saxophones on the session. The sum is a tidy little package of swing, blues and multi-tracked sax that echoes the iconic group Supersax.
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Hans Koller – Free Sound & Super Brass (1977/2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 43:04 minutes | 815 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © MPS
After 20 successful years in Germany, where he rose above all in the 1950s with his “New Jazz Stars” to the scene central figure, the Viennese saxophonist Hans Koller returned to his hometown in 1970 and concentrated here above all on his new, free jazz-oriented “Free Sound”band with young musicians. Every now and then, however, he still had the sense of large-format big band sound, which he had lived out in 1968 in the expansive orchestra suite “New York City” :
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Hans Henkemans – Hans Henkemans plays Debussy – The Philips recordings 1951-1957 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 04:27:57 minutes | 1,30 GB | Genre: Classical, Piano
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Universal Music Division Decca Records France
A brainchild of two veterans of the Philips label – including Tom Deacon, the instigator of the phenomenal “The Great Pianists of the 20th Century” in the 1990s – this re-release of the recordings of the complete works of Debussy played by Hans Henkemans for the Dutch label from 1951 to 1957 will remain one of the most beautiful celebrations marking this centenary year. These historic recordings, which have yet to be released as a single collection, were made at about the same time as the recordings by Marcelle Meyer (Les Discophiles Français), Albert Ferber (Ducretet-Thomson), Walter Gieseking (His Master’s Voice), Menahem Pressler (MGM Records) and Reine Gianoli (Westminster): but they stand out from their contemporaries for their concern for textual precision and above all a complete absence of impressionism. The composer Hans Henkeman, born in 1913 and a major figure in the musical life of the Netherlands from the 1930s to the 1960s, was mainly interested in the range of the French composer’s rhythmic vocabulary.
Very often, and in particular in modern cycles (Estampes, Images, Children’s Corner), the rhythm seems to overshadow the purely harmonic aspect, even if Hans Henkemans’ naturally clear and limpid piano playing style reproduces these elements of Debussy’s musical world without adulteration. Reflets dans l’eau stuns with its rapid tempo, its somewhat pithy expressiveness, but also with its fiery surges, its powerful accents in the fortissimo passages: there is also a freedom, a great broadness, in Henkemans’ piano, which lends an almost austere aspect to the music’s overall rhythmic stature. Moreover, Cloches à travers les feuilles, the greatest and also the most difficult of the Images pour piano, surprises the listener as much for its variations at a fulgurating tempo as for the great clarity of its articulation. But for many, the best of Henkemans’ treasury of Debussy remains the 12 Etudes, where, naturally, his strict and utterly original playing style is perfectly matched to this mature, extreme cycle. Few musicians have brought such speed to Pour les degrés chromatiques or such a rage to Pour les agréments. Stunning!
Hans H. Suh – Beethoven, Debussy, Liszt & Schumann: Piano Works (Live) (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:08:04 minutes | 1,26 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Genuin
The pianist Hans H. Suh presents both large and small works on this Genuin album with piano music ranging from Beethoven to Debussy. The winner of numerous international competitions, including the 2018 International German Piano Award, is a master of the moment as well as of sweeping lines: Schumann’s, Beethoven’s and Debussy’s “little things,” i.e., preludes, bagatelles, and other snapshots, shine with tremendous and enduring radiance. Suh brings Liszt’s gigantic B minor Sonata into the present and lends it the magic of the moment. This combination of successful repertoire selection and exquisite interpretation invites more than just piano lovers on a virtuoso journey through time.
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Henk Neven, Hans Eijsackers & Jan Bastiaan Neven – With Love from Russia (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:02:37 minutes | 547 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Onyx Classics
Baritone Henk Neven and pianist Hans Eijsackers are joined by Neven’s cellist brother Jan Bastiaan for a unique survey of Russian song. Ranging from Glinka in the early 19th century to Rachmaninov in the 20th century (via Borodin, Dargomyzhsky and Tchaikovsky), the program also features a selection from Prokofiev’s Chout in arrangements for cello & piano. A wonderfully intimate sound world is conjured by the musicians in this recital of well known and less well known songs – with love from Russia.
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Hans Ehrlinger – Vintage Pearls: Trombone Blues (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 50:33 minutes | 552 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Intersound
Hans Ehrlinger. Profile: German composer, arranger, trombone player, conductor and producer, primarily in jazz, easy listening and library music. He was Born 16 January 1931 in Nuremberg, Germany and died on 25. July 2010.
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Gerald Finley – Kaija Saariaho: True Fire, Ciel d’hiver & Trans (Live) (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:00:15 minutes | 570 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ondine
This programme offers an immersion into Kaija Saariaho’s magical and poetic world, with three works that were recently recorded for the very first time. The Paris-based Finnish composer is among the most prominent names on the music scene today. Born in 1952, Saariaho has successfully crafted her own musical universe, with unique colours and whispers, drawing inspiration from the great spectacle of nature as well as her own mental landscapes, imagined from her dreams, philosophy and international literature.
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Hannu Karjalainen – Luxe (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 44:04 minutes | 449 MB | Genre: Electronic, Ambient
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Karaoke Kalk
Four years after the release of his debut album under his given name, »A Handful of Dust Is a Desert«, on Karaoke Kalk, Hannu Karjalainen returns to the German label with the audio-visual work »LUXE«. Following up on two more LPs, the last of which was released through the Helsinki-based Signature Dark in early 2021, the album sees the award-winning visual artist, filmmaker, photographer and composer explore the emotional qualities of ambient music. While most ambient these days is being used as a purely functional background sound that supposedly helps consumers with their work or relaxation—»a sleeping pill designed to maintain the status quo«, as the artist himself puts it—»LUXE« is anything but and instead highlights the stylistic richness of ambient music while offering an adventurous journey through radically different sounds and emotional states.
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Matthias Goerne, Thomas Larcher, Ensemble Resonanz – Hanns Eisler: Ernste Gesänge – Lieder with piano (2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:03 minutes | 947 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
From 1920s Vienna and the Berlin of the Weimar Republic to emigration to the USA, then back to Vienna after the defeat of Nazism, to end his days in East Berlin: Hanns Eisler’s life was one long exile against the backcloth of the artistic, technical, and political revolutions of the 20th century. Distance, irony, and melancholy are the aesthetic corollaries that characterise the lieder presented here, their atmosphere often evoking the despair of those dark times. The early piano sonata gained the young Eisler an admiration that has never dimmed since.
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Hannover Philharmonie & Iain Sutherland – Bernstein: Broadway to Hollywood (Live) (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:15:23 minutes | 764 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © SOMM Recordings
SOMM Recordings celebrates the centenary of Leonard Bernsteins birth in style with a remarkable 1993 live broadcast recording never before issued and newly mastered for CD with the Hannover Philharmonie conducted by Iain Sutherland. Five of Bernsteins era-defining works for Broadway and Hollywood revel in his inexhaustible gift for memorable melodies, his vivid sense of drama, infectious playfulness and captivating sense of poetry. Robert Matthew-Walker, author of Broadway to Hollywood: the Musical and the Cinema, provides insightful booklet notes that illuminate Bernstein the man, the composer and his wonderfully inimitable music.
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Hannibal & The Sunrise Orchestra – Hannibal in Berlin (1977/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 45:26 minutes | 895 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © MPS Classical
The New York Times dubbed him “the Mohammed Ali of jazz trumpet players”. Born in 1948, Texas trumpeter Hannibal came to fame in the early 70’s from his work and records with the legendary Gil Evans Orchestra, drummer Roy Haynes’ band, and Pharaoh Sanders. His oratorio African Portraits was recorded by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Daniel Barenboim.
The album was recorded live at the 1976 Berlin Jazz Festival. Pianist Cochrane and cellist Murray are once again on board, and tenor saxophonist George Adams, whose work in Charles Mingus’ last great band had already put him on the map, is a welcome addition. Hannibal calls The 23rd Psalm “my musical dedication to the art of perseverance”. Trumpet and piano deliver inspirational solos. Playing with beautifully phrased lyricism, Hannibal offers up the evergreen Willow Weep for Me to“that vintage wine I call Princess Sarah Vaughan”. Bessie’s Blues was John Coltrane’s tribute to blues queen Bessie Smith. The solos do justice to both of those greats. Hannibal uses the traditional gospel Swing Low Sweet Chariot to capture his childhood impressions of the sounds and colors of the Texas cotton fields. He tells his story over a dramatic musical background. The evening ends with the band taking on My Favorite Things, a piece that Coltrane transformed into a jazz classic on his album of the same name. Adams’ solo shares Trane’s legacy, and Hannibal’s euphoric intensity is a fitting homage to the master.
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