Legere Recordings Germany Vinyl & CDs

Review: Diane Birch returns with that spellbinding voice - a transportive powerhouse packing a timeless quality that resonates through her music. The American recording world doing what it has always done so well, creating huge, heartbreaking, hopeful, and captivating mini operas disguised as pop. Or, if you want to get technical here: soft rock, country, folk, r&b and soul. OK, so there are elements of funk and jazz, too, and the result is a heady brew that's pretty inescapable. Harking back to the balladry heydays, with shades of Dolly Parton, Whitney Houston, and Carly Simon, to name but a few - in delivery and performance, if not necessarily tone - no matter where you're listening from it's going to be hard to forget this one.

Review: During the various pandemic lockdowns of 2020, BBC Radio Wales suggested to multi-instrumentalist Carwyn Ellis that he joined forces with their National Orchestra of Wales and Brazilian band Rio 18 for a one-off, audience-free concert. In the end, Rio 18 were not permitted to travel, so instead their contributions were recorded remotely and assembled by Ellis and his producer Shawn Lee, to which the orchestrated parts were then added live. Despite this complex recording process, the results are stunning: sublime songs, sung in Welsh, with an attractive mixture of Brazilian rhythms and instrumentation, soaring orchestration and attractive melodies aplenty. It has a conceptual theme - it's meant to be a sort of musical day in Rio - but that doesn't really matter; what matters is the music, and it's uniformly spellbinding.

Review: 'Zeus' is the first ever full-length album by Max Beesley's High Vibes ensemble, who released two classic 12" singles on Boogie Back Records at the height of the acid jazz movement in 1993-94. Dropping thereafter, the album hears eight tracks of floor-ready jazz-funk fusion, gathering together some of the greatest session players in the world - Steve Gadd on drums, Dean Parks on guitar, Luis Conte on percussion, Walt Fowler on trumpet, Christian Sands on keyboards, Jerry Meehan on bass, and Mike Davis on trombone - for an electrifying odyssey all led by Beesley himself, who helms up piano, vibraphone, synth and vocals responsibilities.

Review: Such is the authenticity of Super DB's sound that you'd be forgiven for thinking that this album was not in fact brand-new, but rather a long-lost European LP from 1984. Their sound is synth-heavy, colourful and analogue-rich, with vocals reminiscent of Steely Dan rising above a musical bed full of nods to 80s synth-pop, Italo-disco, NYC boogie and sax-sporting AM radio soft rock of the period. Super DB are not American (they're English and based somewhere on the South Coast) but you'd never know - it's like you're listening to something on Californian AM radio 40 years ago. That's not a criticism though, because Downtown is a genuinely entertaining and expertly executed album.

Review: In the spring of 2020, during the UK's first COVID-19 lockdown, Nichol Thompson and Shawn Lee decided to join forces and make an album inspired by their love of smooth jazz, fusion and turn-of-the-'80s jazz-funk. The results, credited to the Super Highway Band and collected together on this essential debut album, are little less than spectacular. Both Thompson and Lee are highly talented multi-instrumentalists with a deep love of the sounds they're emulating (think CTI Records, George Duke, Quincy Jones and the Crusaders), and you can genuinely tell. Funky, polished, brilliantly performed and blessed with some genuinely righteous horn arrangements, it's a hugely enjoyable romp full of memorable moments and floor-fillng workouts. Oh, and quite a bit of languid trombone.