News from the Music Industry

Market Wire - New Josh Groban Christmas CD ‘NOEL’ to Be Released for Holidays
October 2, 2007 — Christmas joy arrives early this year formillions of Josh Groban fans as 143/Warner/Reprise Records announces therelease of ‘NOEL,’ the artist’s…

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 07:00:00 GMT

LOU ANN THOMAS/Special to The Capital-Journal

Musician and author Billy Ebeling, of Lawrence, played “I Have Ants in My Pants” last week for a group of Jefferson West Elementary School first-graders as they just “have to dance.” Ebeling recently released a CD with five accompanying booklets titled, “Lay Down Lullabies.”

Jefferson West Elementary School teacher Todd Decker danced with one of his first-grade students during Ebeling’s performance last week at the school.

See BILLY EBELING, page 10

Billy Ebeling: Author and musician entertains Meriden kids

By Lou Ann Thomas

Special to The Capital-Journal

MERIDEN — Even before musician, songwriter and new author Billy Ebeling finished his performance, the audience was begging for more.

“When are you going to come back?” Haley Siess asked.

The rest of her fellow first-graders all looked wide-eyed at Ebeling, hoping his answer would be “tomorrow.” Ebeling, who usually plays much larger venues from Kansas City to Austin, Texas, with his group, The Late for Dinner Band, had all 19 of Todd Decker’s Jefferson West Elementary School first-graders tapping their feet, clapping their hands and even dancing a jig. The Lawrence-based musician recently released a CD with five accompanying booklets titled, “Lay Down Lullabies” and played several songs from the CD for Decker’s class on Nov. 14. This wasn’t the first time Ebeling has played for one of Decker’s classes. The two men are friends and Decker believes his students benefit by being exposed to a variety of careers and the arts.

Randy Jackson?s Music Club Vol.1
Randy Jackson?s Music Club Vol.1 01 Feb Posted by Mike as CybersMusic, CD, New Release, Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson Randy Jackson is releasing his first solo album on his new music label, Dream Merchant 21.  The new album, Randy Jackson?s Music Club Vol.1, will be available this March. Yeah, he?s the guy from American Idol.  There?s a bunch of big names and even bigger voices on this album too.  The first single is ?Dance Like There?s No Tomorrow,? which is Paula Abdul?s first new

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:20:12 -0800

Set in Victorian London, Sweeney Todd shows how the cruelly treated barber exacts his gruesome revenge (with a little help from Mrs Lovett), and earns his reputation as “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”. Thomas Allen and Felicity Palmer take the lead roles for this new production of Stephen Sondheim’s opera, with Paul Gemignani making his Royal Opera conducting debut. Until 14 January 04. Royal Opera House, Covent Garden WC2. 020 7304 4000

Blue Mountain Begin New CD (antiMUSIC)
(PR) On the heels of their successful reunion tour that commenced in the summer and fall of 2007 and fifteen years after their first release, seminal Americana band BLUE MOUNTAIN will go into Elmwood Recording in Dallas, TX, with Grammy-winning producer/engineer Stuart Sikes (Cat Power, White Stripes, Loretta Lynn) to record a full-length CD of new material tentatively scheduled for release in …

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:42:34 GMT

BBC Radio 3’s The Cardinal’s Household Chapel told the tale of how Henry VIII got wind of the fact that Cardinal Wolsey’s chapel choir was outstripping his own Chapel Royal choristers in its virtuosity and summoned both choirs to a contest - which focused their sight- reading abilities among other things. It seems that Wolsey’s singers came out on top, and the mortified Henry was only placated by the gift of an outstanding boy treble trained by Wolsey’s Master of Choristers, Richard Pygott. If he could read and sustain the highly arching lines typical of Pygott’s Mass Veni Sancte Spiritus, which took the lion’s share of this programme in a majestic performance by the Choir of Christchurch Cathedral (once Wolsey’s Cardinal College) under Stephen Darlington, he must have been quite a singer.

A further trawl through Tudor history was offered on the same channel by Spirit of the Age, which casually though informatively continued its historical tour of Westminster Abbey with music to match. It is a well tried formula, but radio can do this kind of thing so well, and the nape of one’s neck tingled as a few words set the scene for the arrival at the Abbey of French ambassadors prior to the betrothal of Prince Charles and Henrietta Maria. It was night, torches flared, and “The organ was touched by the best finger of that age”, that of Orlando Gibbons. Television could not have matched the intensity of that characteristic moment of radio, coloured as it was by the building’s haunting resonance. Given the cost of mounting performances of new orchestral music, and the financial risk involved - especially if the composers are little known - the BBC remains its most generous promoter, and the BBC Philharmonic’s programme under Sir Peter Maxwell Davies on Tuesday evening was a typically brave enterprise. Three world premieres were broadcast, including that of a BBC commission, Maxwell Davies’ own Sails in St Magnus No 2, and the works of three young composers, all of great interest. From the throbbing pulses and swirling figuration of Marc Yeats’ I See Blue to the concentrated beauties of Stuart Macrae’s Witch’s Kiss, and the almost Baxian texturing of Joby Talbot’s Luminescence, one admired the ability both to invent memorable sonic images and control their musical growths. The climax of the programme was provided by the Maxwell Davies, whose slow, inevitable unfolding - involving his own music and plainsong over passacaglia processes - established links with his big neo-medieval symphonic works of the Sixties. A fine, bold work with hints of seascape and the resonance of Viking exploration, it achieved evocative expression in the by no means helpful acoustic of Manchester’s Studio 7.

01-18-2008 - Songs of love & protest at La Peña CD—release party
01-18-2008 - Songs of love & protest at La Peña CD—release partyLa Peña Cultural Center will host a bi—lingual evening of ‘trova,’ songs of love, the human condition and political protest, on Friday, Jan. 18. Three acclaimed songwriters – MamaCoAtl, Steve Taylor—Ramírez and Alfredo Gomez – will offer their latest compositions, in Spanish and English, a…Read the full post from The Squid List
via Blogdigger blog search for cd release.

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 03:00:00 EST
Brian Linne Releases Single Shared Cross To Aid Catholic Social Services
Port Huron, MI-January 28, 2008 Brian Linne is an independent rock-pop artist on mission, not only to spread the word about his music but the meaning and purpose of it. Driven by his own motiva…

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:14:42 EST

THE STAFF AT DEAN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, in Wisconsin, discovered an unlikely resource when trying to find fresh material for an annual music concert. Much to their surprise, one of their own second-grade teachers has a hidden knack for songwriting.

“When music teachers write programs, it’s expected, explains the school’s music teacher, “but when a secondgrade teacher writes them, that’s pretty special!”

Maria Simpson’s penchant for penning tunes led to “What Will I Learn Today?” a collection of original music performed by Dean Elementarys entire second-grade class last February. All of the tunes applied to the students’ curriculum, including making change and telling the time.

Simpson first began writing music, mostly ballads and gospel hymns, at age 13. When she became a parent, she drafted instructive ditties to further her sons’ development. Now that her boys, Jaron and Taylor, are teenagers, writing music is a collaborative effort. “Writing children’s songs with my sons has created a special bond between us,” she says. “We have special memories from their toddler years to the present day that have kept us smiling and singing.”

The argument about the timing of concerts received new focus these last few weeks. Clearly the cliched way of thinking is to put orchestras in the early evening (around 7.30, when it is assumed the audience is at its most general); choirs, especially those singing sacred music, towards the end of the day, perhaps because we are all supposed to be feeling a bit religious by then; and chamber- music groups at lunchtime. The Proms stick rigidly to this; and I wonder if it doesn’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you only ever put on symphony concerts at the peak time, and always get your largest audience then, you will never find out what might happen if you were to juggle the pack. Some promoters take unbelievable risks by these standards: in the Festival of La Chaise-Dieu it was possible to hear a fully professional performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at 2.30 on a Tuesday afternoon, squeezed in between the lunchtime violin recital and an evening oratorio.

Listening to the offerings of many different festivals around Europe, I was struck again by how thin the Baroque achievement was. Take away Bach, Handel, most of Purcell and some of Vivaldi, and there is almost nothing left. Nothing except drearily formulaic imitations of the best, a description which covers an awful lot of music whose emotional world is infantile. I pity those conductors who make their living having to cry up yet another `lost masterpiece’ by a second-rate 18th-century composer, because the B-Minor Mass or the Matthew Passion or Messiah has been heard once too often. It would be otiose of me to go on here about the depth of achievement of the Renaissance schools of composers, but even the 19th century has real depth compared with the 1650-1750 slot. What was the matter with the cultural climate in those years, and why doesn’t anyone talk about it like it is?

I don’t think there’s any piece in the world I would rather be listening to than Walton’s First Symphony. In another mood I might say such a thing of Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli or Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony or Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C-Minor, but I would be thinking of the Walton anyway. Henry Wood wrote, `No orchestral work has carried me away so much’; John Ireland wrote that the piece had established its composer as `the most vital and original genius in Europe’, and for me, 70 years later, all that is true. How Walton was able to express the hope and yet the crazed urgency of capitalism in those opening bars is one of the many miracles of the piece. Nor has anything about it dated, despite the constant changing of ‘modernity’. The performance of this masterpiece by the BBC Welsh under Hickox at the Proms on 4 September was very fine, but I can’t help asking, if this is such a significant composition, why I have never heard it played by a foreign orchestra? Why, when the Vienna Philharmonic come to London later this month, are they serving up only their own music? Why do they see Walton, and even Elgar, as being too marginal to bother with? And why do we welcome them so reliably always playing Strauss and Brahms? It annoys me (but I’m still going to hear them).

Walton himself is reported to have been rather more parochial in his reaction to the strengths of his First Symphony: `With this I may be able to knock Bax off the map.’ This reminded me of a strange rebirth of Bax’s star which I thought I had witnessed in, of all places, Moscow. I was visiting earlier this year, trying to interest the natives in the music of William Byrd, and saw plastered all over the public hoardings elegantly designed posters for all manner of classical music concerts, many of them emanating from the pupils of the Tchaikovsky Conservatoire. I was struck by the number of references to Bax. I saw advertisements for concerts of music by Bax and Vivaldi, Bax and Mozart, even Bax and Holst (The Planets). I started to wonder how many holidays Sir Arnold and his family had taken on the Black Sea with his unexportable royalties. Eventually I transliterated a poster which appeared to refer to J.S. Bax - and the penny dropped.

New bluegrass pairing piles up plenty of 'firsts' | www.tennessean.com |
and just last week the duo became the first bluegrass act to have its CD release party at The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “We’ll be able to write that in our book someday when we’re 85 ” Jamie Dailey one half of the duo said of the firsts.

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST
Limited Russian CD release for Recoil single \’Prey\’/\’Allelujah\’ - Side-Line
Side-LineLimited Russian CD release for Recoil single \’Prey\’/\’Allelujah\’Side-Line, Belgium - 4 hours agoAlan Wilder (ex-Depeche Mode) announces, due to popular demand (”a direct result of fan pressure” so he calls it), a limited edition CD release of the …

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 05:06:24 GMT