Winner of the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet's Landfall, inspired by her experience of Hurricane Sandy, is the first collaboration between the iconic storyteller/musician and the groundbreaking string quartet, who perform together on the recording. Landfall juxtaposes lush electronics and traditional strings by Kronos with Anderson's powerful descriptions of loss, from water-logged pianos to disappearing animal species to Dutch karaoke bars. The Washington Post calls it "riveting, gorgeous."

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.

Pines of Rome, P 141, is a tone poem in four movements for orchestra completed in 1924 by the Italian composer Ottorino Respighi. It is the second of his three tone poems about Rome, following Fontane di Roma (1916) and preceding Feste Romane (1928). Each movement depicts a setting in the city with pine trees, specifically those in the Villa Borghese gardens, near a catacomb, on the Janiculum Hill, and along the Appian Way. The premiere was held at the Teatro Augusteo in Rome on 14 December 1924, with Bernardino Molinari conducting the Augusteo Orchestra, and the piece was published by Casa Ricordi in 1925.

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.

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.

Fifty-three years since he delivered the bolt-from-the-blue of Roxy Music’s debut LP as his calling card, Ferry’s latest project is just as startlingly unexpected an arrival. On the one hand, Loose Talk is his first album of new music since 2014’s Avonmore. On the other, little here, from the sounds and shapes of that music, to the uses it gets put to, resembles any previous Bryan Ferry album. Then again – on the third hand – it’s also a piece that is deeply rooted in his past half-century of work. “A conversation between two artists,” is how Amelia Barratt, one of the artists involved, describes Loose Talk. “Something we’ve created together that neither could do on our own,” adds Bryans Ferry, her interlocutor in the creative exchange. “And, for me, it seems to have opened up a whole new chapter for my work.”

Pines of Rome, P 141, is a tone poem in four movements for orchestra completed in 1924 by the Italian composer Ottorino Respighi. It is the second of his three tone poems about Rome, following Fontane di Roma (1916) and preceding Feste Romane (1928). Each movement depicts a setting in the city with pine trees, specifically those in the Villa Borghese gardens, near a catacomb, on the Janiculum Hill, and along the Appian Way. The premiere was held at the Teatro Augusteo in Rome on 14 December 1924, with Bernardino Molinari conducting the Augusteo Orchestra, and the piece was published by Casa Ricordi in 1925.

It may not sound like it, but my new record, Moving Through Light, is a solo fingerstyle guitar record. In fact, all the sounds on this record came from one guitar, with their many voices stretched, bent, processed, and superimposed over top of one another, sometimes hundreds and hundreds of times. The only other sounds you’ll hear throughout this 1 hour 14 minute album is the occasional drum machine sample, all recorded off of an app I have on my phone.