With It’s All About Love, seasoned jazz vocalist Donna Byrne makes a radiant return to Challenge Records, delivering her ninth studio album and reaffirming her place among the great interpreters of song. Spanning a rich career of nearly four decades, Byrne remains true to her roots, offering a heartfelt collection that honors the traditions of jazz while showcasing her timeless artistry.

For her second recital with piano, mezzo-soprano Adèle Charvet reunites with Florian Caroubi, who has been her regular duo partner since 2015. Together they celebrate the belle époque of the great French melodists (Massenet, Debussy, Fauré) and their protégés, including Chausson, Hahn, Koechlin, Aubert, Caplet, Messager, Enesco, Albéniz, Madeleine Dubois and Nadia Boulanger, as well as the much less known Xavier Leroux and Ernest Moret. This is a programme about lines of descent and musical transmission, energised by the texts of great poets such as Verlaine, Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Banville, Leconte de Lisle, Louÿs and Toussaint.

Whether melting away like a singing gondolier on the Grand Canal or tumbling around like Eulenspiegel, whether chuckling melancholically in the depths like a brooding hen or springing acrobatically across the high wire: once the clarinet had outgrown its infancy, its rapidly expanding possibilities soon made it “the talk of the town” – praised by enthusiastic advocates such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, technically advanced by new virtuosos, and given a wide variety of tasks by composers eager to experiment. At the forefront of these pioneers was Carl Stamitz, one of the first Mannheimers of the second generation, who wrote almost a dozen concert works for the slender instrument, leaving the guild of clarinet players with a precious little catechism, which can now be heard in its entirety on record for the first time.

The Far Flung Trio are Katherine Hunka (violin), Dermot Dunne (accordion) and Malachy Robinson (double bass): the name reflects their sense of fun and the eclecticism in their programing and performances.

Three years after their album of works by J.S. Bach (FUG 792), flautist Toshiyuki Shibata and keyboard player Anthony Romaniuk now record works not only by Bach but also by his sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Wilhelm Friedemann, "the most original and innovative" of the lineage, according to Shibata.

In 1777, Mozart met the wealthy Ferdinand Dejean, an amateur flautist and retired surgeon of the Dutch East India Company. Dejean commissioned a handful of works from the young composer, who termed them ‘some simple, short little concertinos’. Nevertheless, these pieces, which actually demand great virtuosity from the soloist, as well as a sensitivity to tonal nuances, have continued to be popular favourites ever since.

The debut Hubro album by the highly regarded Norwegian power-trio Bushman’s Revenge – cult stars of the Rune Grammofon label for a decade – operates on several levels simultaneously. It can even sound like the work of several different trios. After a hypnotic experimental prelude that creates a sort of audible weather system, with the delicate, bare-wire glissandos of Even Helte Hermansen’s soprano guitar heard against Gard Nilssen’s Pink Floyd-ish beaten drums and the unusually reticent, elegantly dancing measures of Rune Nergaard’s electric bass, ‘Et Hån Mot Overklassen’ (which Google Translate renders as “A Mockery of the Upper Class’) begins to settle into a form of strikingly virtuosic and proggy jazz-rock; the instruments sound pretty much like guitar, bass and drums are meant to do, and the opening numbers follow a recognisable jazz model of theme/improv/theme.

Formed in 2003, the Oslo based trio are upfront about their love for the progressive rock of Cream and Jimi Hendrix, the galactic jazz of Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Sharrock and Alice Coltrane, plus the raw power of Black Sabbath and The Pixies. «Thou Shalt Boogie!» is their sixth album on Rune Grammofon and has a velvety, warm sound that was captured at Athletic Sound in Halden, Norway, a legendary old school studio with a 30-year history.

Recorded during a show at the Storyville jazz club in Molde in May 2012, this could very well be their finest recorded effort during their ten years as a band. Bringing new meaning to the concept of loose but tight, they blend the freedom of jazz with the energy of rock in the most convincing ways as they race through numbers from all their previous four Rune Grammofon albums, taking no prisoners along the ride. On top of everything it´s also really well recorded and mixed, with a great punchy sound.

With “Your Bliss My Joy” - Sex Magick Wizard’s debut for Rune Grammofon - this young quartet take a big step forward from their promising first album, “Eroto Comatose Lucidity”, released in 2019 on the small Finito Bakalao label. Since then Ingvald André Vassbø (Kanaan) has taken over the drum duties from Axel Skalstad (Krokofant) and forms an explosive and fine-drawn rhythm section with bass player Henrik Sandstad Dalen.

Only nine months after her momentous debut solo album Ekhidna, the guitarist is back fronting her trio. With their previous album, Smells Funny, this explosive and expansive trio experienced a breakthrough of sorts, having gone from strength to strength through five albums since their 2011 debut Shoot!, gathering respect from both rock and jazz camps.

Hedvig Mollestad must surely be one of the hardest working musicians on the Norwegian music scene at the moment, with "Tempest Revisited" being her third album in a mere 18 months, all at a consistently high artistic level.

After seven albums spearheading Hedvig Mollestad Trio (still very much active!) and three solo albums, the guitarist is here introducing a brand new, exciting trio while breaking some new ground in the process. Ståle Storløkken (keys) is known from Supersilent and Elephant9, while Ole Mofjell (drums) is part of a young generation making waves on the European improscenes. Weejuns is a solid step into shimmering, hardcore improvisation and breathtaking instrumental interplay, echoing The Tony Williams Lifetime, Henry Cow, Soft Machine, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Supersilent and 73-74 period King Crimson.

"Memorable Mozart … so fresh and vital that it suggests the joy of first discovery … a celebration of music as tirelessly inventive as it is richly human … superb sound makes this a memorable issue."

A blend of intelligent musicianship and artistic authenticity.