Quincy Jones - Reflections - Live at Budokan, Japan - 1981

Quincy Jones has been known for his magnificent arrangements and compositions. In his entire musical career, he has produced albums from different well known artists like Michael Jackson, James Ingram, Frank Sinatra and more. In this dvd concert held in Budokan, Japan.

Quincy played along with Carlos Rios - guitar, Toots Thielemans - guitar and harmonica. Played his ever popular song Bluesette with whistling effects and Brown Ballad composed by Quincy Jones. Patti Austin - singing - Razzmatazz, James Ingram - singing - Just Once and I know Corrida. The singers are all accompanied by a 50 piece -Tokyo String Symphony Orchestra and Quincy Jones as the conductor. If you are a big fan of Quincy Jones you will surely love to watch this concert. It will bring you back in the 80's. An hour of good swinging jazz melodies from the maestro himself Mr.Quincy Jones.

Silje Nergaard and Band - Jazz Im Zelt - 3Sat Festival - Mainz,Germany 2003

Silje Nergaard (born June 19, 1966 in Steinkjer, Norway), is a Norwegian pop and jazz musician. While some very old titles of her songs rather have a distinct pop feel, she has now almost completely given up making pop music, which is the reason why virtually the entirety of her later releases consists of jazzy tunes. With her debut album produced by the jazz guitar maestro Pat Metheny, Silje is one of very few Norwegian artists to have been commercially released all around the globe, on most continent and major music markets -- including Brazil, Germany, USA and the United Kingdom -- and doing so with great success and phenomenal feedback. In this dvd concert held in Mainz ,Germany 2003, was one of her first few jazz concerts held in 3Sat Festival. Along with some fellow jazz european musicians. If you are familiar with her songs, here is a complete list of the songs, Borrowing Moons, Be Gone, How Am I Supposed To See The Stars, You Send Me Flowers, If You Love Somebody, Dance Me Love, Tell Me Where Uou Going, I Don't Want To See You Cry, This Is Not America, Take A Long Walk and Japanese Blue. Enjoy 1 hour of jazz music from Silje!

Al Jarreau - Tenderness - All Star Cast - "Live" - Studio Recording - 1994

Al Jarreau- A Living Legend. Once again Al Jarreau proves himself to be one of the foremost voices in the music industry and THE consumate musician with his album and Live video TENDERNESS.

This dvd video is 60 minutes of pure artistry and musicianship comprised of the creme de la creme of the music industry supporting one of the greatest assets Jazz, R&B and Pop music has ever seen. Owners of the TENDERNESS CD will really appreciate the fact that most of the performances on the Video are of different takes than the ones that exist on the album; showcasing, in my opinion, one of the most amazing facets of Jarreau's performing: his ability to make the same song a completely different musical experience no matter how many times he has performed it.

There is no one quite like Al Jarreau. What a unique voice he has and he displays it beautifully on this "Live" studio recording video. Backed by some of the industries best jazz musicians -Steve Gadd on Drums, Eric Gale on Guitar, Marcus Miller on Bass, Joe Sample on Piano ,Paulinho daCosta on percussion, David Sanborn on Sax an more. Al takes us on a musical journey from the past to present, leaving you well satisfied. Check out his rendetion of "Summertime" ,"Masquenada" and a new classic "Dinosaurs". He's Hot and yet so Soothing! Al Jarreau will always be at the top of my list as one of the best jazz vocalists of our time, and I guarantee the same for your list if you view this dvd video for yourself! Enjoy!

Madeleine Peyroux - Live at the Basement, Sydney, Australia - January 21, 2007

On stage American singer Madeleine Peyroux seems so shy, nervous and awkward that it almost hurts to watch her. "I didn't go to concerts for years," she told the audience at the Basement in Sydney in 2005. "That's why I'm not very good at this."

Despite her obvious fear of the limelight, the girl with the folksy Billie Holiday voice is enjoying great success on both sides of the Atlantic. Peyroux, 32, has just released her third album, Half the Perfect World, and is about to return to Sydney as one of the hot tickets of the 2007 Sydney Festival.

Half the Perfect World has followed her best-selling 2004 album, Careless Love, with almost unseemly haste. After all, there was an eight-year gap between Careless Love and her debut album, Dreamland. Was it that same blend of self-doubt and self-preservation that makes some artists wary of early commercial success? "Wow!" she says, over the telephone from New York. "I think you hit the nail on the head. I had many doubts about it [performing music] being an appropriate job for me. As a career it's quite a different thing than just to say that I love to play music."

Born in Athens, Georgia, but raised in Southern California and Paris, Peyroux's voice still betrays a trace of the South. After her parents' divorce in the late 1980s, she moved to Paris with her mother before being sent to an English boarding school. At 15, she ran away, back to Paris, where she joined a group of street musicians.

Initially, she just passed the hat around for the buskers. Then she began to sing, joined another troupe and lived hand-to-mouth without a home as a busker for three years. It is a period that she recalls with great fondness.

"I have to be very careful not to look back and romanticise it too much," she says. "But I must say that I learned to find the muses at that point in my life. You can be touched very deeply when you're on the street. The exchange is so intimate - you really feel that you've changed someone's day - and it's completely serendipitous."

By her own admission, Peyroux struggled with the fame that followed her debut album, which was described by Time magazine as "the most exciting, involving, vocal performance by a new singer this year". Her response was to disappear from the music scene for a while. "I stepped back and took a breather."

This tendency to go AWOL has not changed much since her school days. While on tour in Europe last year, Peyroux failed to turn up for a television interview and her record company had to hire a private detective to track her down. She had skipped town for New York.

But Peyroux promises she will arrive in Sydney, armed with an eclectic mix of jazz standards, songs by Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits, plus a smattering of original compositions.

"Frankly it's a very dramatic show; a show that has a theatrical aspect to it," she says. "The show has been growing over the past six months in a way that suits the music better."

Not that this most tentative, awkward and beguiling of artists is in danger of finding a comfortable, mid-career groove. "I actually think of myself as still being at the very beginning stages of what I do."

This High Definition Broadcast from Australia was taken right after her concert last January of 2007. It lasted for almost an hour of pure Madeleine -Folksy-jazzy type of music.

Antonio Carlos Jobim: An All-Star Tribute

Billboard Magazine- Catherine Applefeld…(jobim) is paid brilliant tribute in this video that captures his last-recorded concert appearance, features a cornucopia of jazz greats. DISCoveries Magazine- Steven I. Ramma "must own"…gets the highest recommendation Spectator Magazine- Philip Van Vleckabsolutely killer…sound quality...is first rate,thank goodness,because the concert footage is excellent and the performances are memorable in every detail… JazzTimes- Chuck Berga wonderful souvenir from one of jazzdom’s great…it’s musical lovefest. The Brazilian Sound by Chris McGowan and Richardo Pessanha…rivals, in sophistication and originality, the music of 20th Century composers such as George Gershwin and Heitor Villa-Lobs." Product DescriptionWINNER OF...1995 JazzTimes Reader Poll- Best Video- First Runner Up

Direct from Brazil in his last recorded performance, Antoine Carlos Jobim (1927-1994) is joined by an international delegation of jazz giants to recreate his classic melodies in a beautiful, concert-With over four hundred songs to his credit including the unforgettable Girl From Ipanema, Jobim virtually single handedly brought the world Bossa Nova by adapting the percussive excitement of the samba to the intimacy of the guitar while echoing the melodies and harmonies of Cool Jazz. This classic, concert-length "Thank You" includes: Girl From Ipanema, Once I Loved, O Grande Amor, No More Blues, Wave and more .With him are on Pianos, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Herbie Hancock,Tom Jobim on guitar,Gal Costa Vocals, Jon Hendricks, Vocals, Shirley Horns vocals Ron Carter on Acoustic bass, Harvey Mason on drums, Alex Acuna on percussion, Joe Henderson on Sax and more.. Almost an hour of full samba music...

The Power Of Three - Michell Petrucianni, Jim Hall and Wayne Shorter -Live at Montreux Jazz Festival, Switzerland

A bit unusual to form a Trio like this. A pianist - Michell Petrucianni, guitarist - Jim Hall and a saxophonist - Wayne Shorter .The power of this trio showed magnificent, skillfull display of performances. They showed superb full texture melody, harmony, counter melodies and complex phrasing. Most of the performances are absolutely joyful to watch. This concert held in Montreux Jazz Festival is an intimate one and is full of challenge improvisation. Most of the performances in this concert are first takes, where this trio let go of their conscious technique and simply let their music flow.

Intelligently a combination of extremely very talented players. Jim Hall's amazing techniques gives a sense of thoughtful preparation and construction. While Michell's playing of the piano brought absolute conviction and Wayne's intricate performances captured the entire audience. Feeling his unique style in delicate, radically different interpretation but easy going tempo rendition. This Trio is truly a Masters dream . The entire concert showed very smooth swinging and distinctive playing. Indeed a masterly taste! Almost 1 hour of hybrid very classy jazz......

FOURPLAY - An Evening with Fourplay - 2 discs

Pianist Bob James is one of a handful of artists that the smooth jazz radio format was created to showcase. Those same sorts of aficionados criticized James when in 1974, after 10 years of playing straight-ahead swing and bop and some avant garde jazz, he made the switch to a plush form of fusion.

He has been accused of selling out, but James insists the opposite was true: He was going in the only direction that didn't look like old ground back then. "I was not happy, even then, playing bebop," he says. "It had already been done and all my heroes did it better than I thought I would be doing it. "Jazz has to keep changing. If it stays the same, it becomes museum music - a reenactment. One of the best and most interesting things about jazz to me is that it always strikes out in different directions." James wanted to eschew the tendency of some artists and fans to cast jazz in amber and protect it from the untutored. "What I liked about earlier forms of jazz was the sense of fun. I wanted to make music that hearkened back to the time when jazz was danced to." James' read on potential listeners was spot-on. He became a hugely successful jazz artist, wracking up numerous gold records.

It was for one of his many solo projects, 1990's "Grand Piano Canyon," that James fatefully recruited the musicians who would come to make up Fourplay: guitarist Lee Ritenour, bassist Nathan East, and drummer Harvey Mason (Larry Carlton replaced Ritenour in the late '90s).

"It was a very magical day," James says. "We all were feeling it. Just because you bring talented people into the studio, doesn't mean you're going to click with them. This was a very special thing. One thing lead to another and we approached an A&R guy at Warner with the idea of forming a group." A supergroup to be precise, comprised of musicians who had all made indelible artistic marks.

Assembling famous musicians for the purpose of collaboration is sometimes like filling a sack with alley cats. But Fourplay sought to eliminate that threat straight off. "From the beginning, we agreed that this would be a group without leaders, a totally democratic outfit. That's why Fourplay has lasted as long as it has, in my opinion. Nobody has the power to pull the group too much one way or another, and everybody has shown the willingness to bend." Largely because of the conservatism of smooth jazz radio, Fourplay bent farther than it ever has for its most recent CD, "Heartfelt". The group flew in the face of prudence and improvised the entire thing in the studio. "We felt like it was the only response we could make," James says. "We needed to make music that was adventurous enough to go beyond the strictures and good enough to cut through and find an audience.

He has projects in the works that would involve a hip-hop DJ and an acoustic trio, respectively. The latter would pay homage to such jazz keyboard legends as Bill Evans and Ahmad Jamal. As James learned after the release of his 1995 acoustic trio recording "Straight Up," there ever exists a danger that he could make himself a man without a country, or a musician without a format. James believes his smooth jazz history caused acoustic jazz programmers to dismiss "Straight Up" out of hand. And smooth jazz programmers, of course, didn't know what to make of it. But James says he can only do what he insists he has always done: be honest with himself. "Once again, you can't please everybody. An artist can't lose sight of his first responsibility: to be faithful to his own vision." This dvd lasted for 2 hours with magnificent display of unbelievable performances.