In 1955, Louis Armstrong, along with vocalist Velma Middleton, got into the studio to pay tribute to the late Fats Waller.

With his Christmas album It's Christmas! Jonas Kaufmann 2020 succeeded an atmospheric and extremely successful holiday album.

From the opening track, "Runaway," which rode to glory on E Street Band-mate Roy Bittan's distinctive keyboard riff, to the sweaty arena rock of "Get Ready," which closed the album, Bon Jovi's debut is an often-overlooked minor gem from the early days of hair metal.

The Witch Doctor is an album by American jazz drummer and bandleader Art Blakey and his group The Jazz Messengers recorded on March 14, 1961 and released on the Blue Note label. It features performances by Blakey with Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Timmons, and Jymie Merritt.

The group’s final studio album, 2300 Jackson Street, released May 30, 1989.

Interpretations by the Stan Getz Quintet is an album by saxophonist Stan Getz recorded in 1953. It was the first 12-inch LP released on the Norgran label in 1954.

Emma Rawicz’s ACT debut features a prominent quintet with pianist Ivo Neame, bassist Connor Chaplin, guitarist Ant Law and drummer Asaf Sirkis - all of whom are established figures on the UK scene. "Chroma," Greek for "color," shows the full spectrum of an artist who has long outgrown newcomer status. As Jazzwise Magazine stated: "Emma Rawicz is already the real deal!"

Pianist Jan Lundgren from Ystad in Sweden and guitarist Yamandu Costa, from Brazil’s southernmost province Rio Grande del Sur might seem an unlikely pairing, and the combination of guitar and piano is well known to be fraught with difficulty. But the collaborative affinity of this duo, the chemistry which they have found through playing together, first in a handful of concerts, and now on this fine album, are something truly exceptional.

Bloom, the ACT debut of pianist and composer Bill Laurance as leader, marks the transition from the smallest possible form of musical interaction to a large-scale, broadband format: Following the internationally acclaimed ACT release Where You Wish You Were in duo with multi-instrumentalist and Snarky Puppy bandmate Michael League, Laurance now teams up with Manchester-based 18-piece string orchestra The Untold Orchestra and creates a work of convincingly epic pro-portions. Combining Bill Laurance’s classical sensibilities with jazz, pop grooves, and powerful orchestral synchronicity, Bloom runs the gamut of emotions and moods.

Moondog's second Prestige album solidified his standing as a rare breed: a musician whose work was both highly experimental and approachable by listeners without a taste for the avant-garde. That's what enabled him to make a living as a street musician in Manhattan, after all. On this album he produced a variety of wonderful shaking percussion sounds and rhythms with an oo (a triangular stringed instrument struck with a clave) and even "Ostrich Feathers Played on Drum" (as the title on one track reads). The percussion is sometimes backed by sparse, Asian-sounding melodies, and there are also unpredictable interludes of solo piano, street sounds, and an eight-minute "Moondog Monologue." One of the round-like vocal numbers, the minute-long and inexpressibly sad "All Is Loneliness," found an unexpected second life in the 1960s when it was covered by Big Brother & the Holding Company.

Accepted as a young student at the Stuttgart University of Music at the age of 15, multiple awards as a teenager, the ACT debut "Natural Energy" at 19, winner of the Baden-Württemberg Jazz Prize at 21 - is the unstoppable rise of the now 22-year-old saxophonist Jakob Manz over? Not at all, as the new album "The Answer" proves.

Any conversation about the piano trio in the European jazz of recent decades will inevitably touch on the topic of the "Nordic sound". The leading exponents of it – Jan Johansson, Bobo Stenson, Bugge Wesseltoft, Esbjörn Svensson… – have not just drawn on the vast palette of American jazz, they are also musicians steeped in the songs of their homelands, as well as in the European classical music canon and contemporary music. With their strong feeling for melody, harmony and dramaturgy, pianist Benjamin Nørholm Jacobsen, bassist Martin Brunbjerg Rasmussen and drummer Lasse Jacobsen create a cinematic sound, music which can at times be melancholic, at others enchantingly beautiful, and which is full of twists and turns.

Verdi, Wagner, Beethoven, Bach…Germany’s premer jazz bassist Dieter Ilg has instigated several creative projects, in which he has taken the great composers of Western classical music off in new directions. Here, alongside pianist Rainer Böhm and drummer Patrice Héral, his focus turns to Ravel.

“The best new thing that has happened in European jazz for a long time” (Le Monde), Emile Parisien has formed a top-flight American-European sextet for this album, his seventh as leader or co-leader on ACT. The band will be touring in 2022, the year which also marks the tenth anniversary of Parisien’s first appearance on an ACT album.

The Four Last Songs, Op. posth., for soprano and orchestra were composed in 1948 when Strauss was 84. They are – with the exception of the song "Malven" (Mallows), composed later the same year – the final completed works of Richard Strauss.