Automatic Man Legend Todd Cochran Releases “From The Vault: Notes For The Future”

A Narrative Exploration and Foray Into Cochran’s Jazz, Classical, and Electronic Music Palettes Available June 23 via Blue Buddha Productions

Notes for the future are the “imagined sometime in the past” tropes of a storyteller. Freed from every day “isms” of convention and released from the symbolic containment of the vault, the music is an allegorical exploration in futurism. The stream running throughout the musical narrative is a speculative commentary about our human search for meaning, and we’re reminded that as a version of our ancestors’ vision, this quest never ends.

“From The Vault” is structured around a sequence of recurring themes and develops as an unfolding tour of references, hints, and clues. Moving from one perspective to another, we connect with how our planet is perpetually in a state of seeking solutions. Within the soundscape, without words, an underlying language is speaking. Nature evolves for the sum of us, not the few. We are in a continual state of becoming. We are connected. Love is passed along, as is happiness. Nevertheless, expressly for the listener, an implied sense of reasoning encourages us to feel free and let go of all things familiar. And then, “over there” in the distance, we get a passing glimpse of the sacred structure.

Todd Cochran is an American pianist, composer, keyboardist, electronic musician, and conceptual artist. Early in his career he was also professionally known as Bayeté. Cochran started his career as a teenager with saxophonist John Handy. Two years later he joined vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson’s Quartet, and made his jazz recording debut composing and performing on a benchmark album for Hutcherson, “Head On” (Blue Note Records). Cochran’s first solo project “Worlds Around the Sun” became a #1 jazz album. From the mid-1970s forward Todd has experimented with and incorporated synthesizers, electronic and mixed-media concepts in his creative projects while collaborating with a wide range of artists in the genres of jazz, art rock, pop, R&B, and twenty-first-century classical.

Todd released two albums on Prestige Records in 1972 and 1973. He was keyboardist, principal composer and lead singer of Automatic Man from 1976–1978 which also featured drummer Michael Shrieve and guitarist Pat Thrall. He was also a member of Fuse One, a coalition of jazz musicians who released two albums on CTI Records in 1980 and 1981. The shortlist of his collaborations include Peter Gabriel, Joan Armatrading, Maya Angelou and Stewart Copeland.

Track list:

1. PAINTED BY THE SUN
Mountain peaks, sea cliffs, oceans, opaque forests, desert savannas – and human faces colorized by the paintbrush of nature. The entirety of our planet is inhabited by intuitive human beings – all sun worshippers – collectively marking time in communal practices of decoding the mysteries of our existence.

2. IN YOU I SEE ENDLESS MEMORIES
An imagined conversation between the sky and the wind.

3. ISMS PRISMS
Not one thing, but all things… spontaneous change shuttles us through the cycles of life.

4. TRANSPARENCIES
Being transparent is naturally imperfect and intensely human.

5. WE MAKE TWO, TWO MAKE WE
Music is a language of interacting tones and colors through which one is able to experience the other; the abstract and the personal. The notion of two streams of thought merging into a unified idea makes for a wellspring of originality. At once distinctly different, yet in combination, resonating wildly.

6. EYE DREAMING
“Within you, my love, I see endless mystery.”

7. MOON GLOW
This duet of a middle-sized plucked string instrument and Balinese gong expresses energies I’ve experienced in Indonesia, where the nighttime sky sometimes seems so vast there appears to be an aura around the moon.

8. HYMN FOR THE HIDDEN PEOPLE
This is a tonal essay – an homage to the poor, the rebuked, scorned, unseen, and unheard. The music challenges our lack of compassion and moves us to feel the many who toil and struggle in silence, yet stay in the light, with hope and determination.

9. THE SPINNING CIRCLE
There are no simple explanations or a single equation that defines a circle. A circle has no beginning or end, there’s no start, finishing point, or conclusion. Only infinite revolutions rhythmically intertwined.

10. INSEPARABLE
Balance in our lives and the spaces we occupy is a dance of opposites. “Om” and “Amen” are the same thing.

Blue Buddha Productions | Release Date: June 23, 2023

To pre-order: Bandcamp: https://bluebuddha.bandcamp.com/

For more information on Todd Cochran, please visit:
toddcochran.com | Instagram

For more information on Blue Buddha Productions, please email: bluebuddhaproductions@gmail.com

Press inquiries: Glass Onyon PR, PH: 1-828-350-8158, glassonyonpr@gmail.com

Guitar Virtuoso Harvey Valdes’ Novare: J.S. Bach Lute Works on Electric Guitar Breaks New Ground with a Fresh, Ear-Opening Interpretation of Music for the Ages

“Harvey Valdes is a fantastic guitarist” - Andy Summers

Guitar Virtuoso Harvey Valdes’ Novare: J.S. Bach Lute Works on Electric Guitar – to be released by Destiny Records on April 8, 2022 – features sublime scores long performed by the world’s greatest lutenists and classical guitarists, but these pieces sound more timeless than ever in the hands of Valdes on steel-string electric guitar.

“Harvey Valdes is a fantastic guitarist – musical to the nth degree and with chops to spare, as anyone knows who has heard the way he handles standards and ballads with astonishing contrapuntal virtuosity. Now, with this new album, the special logic in his playing of Bach is wonderfully revealed.” - ANDY SUMMERS of The Police

Like the art of Shakespeare or Van Gogh, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach has been recognized the world over as universal and timeless – sounding as moving and miraculous now as the day these Baroque scores were written, some three hundred years ago. The lute works that J.S. Bach composed have been recorded by the world’s greatest lutenists and guitarists across the past century, from Segovia to Julian Bream to John Williams to Hopkinson Smith, among a myriad of others. It would take a stroke of something approaching genius to enable us to hear these pieces truly anew. But that is just what Harvey Valdes has accomplished with Novare: J.S. Bach Lute Works on Electric Guitar.

To be released digitally and on CD by Destiny Records on April 8, 2022, the album presents Valdes playing 10 of Bach’s pieces not on the age-old lute or the nylon-string classical guitar but on the modern steel-string electric guitar. The result is ear-opening; the notes are the same ones Bach put to paper in the 18th century, but Valdes performs them with a tone and texture that sounds extraordinarily fresh and of the moment, without ever trying to unduly “modernize” the music. Over the past few years, Valdes has attracted famous fans among iconic guitarists, including Andy Summers of The Police, ECM luminary David Torn and avant-garde notable Elliott Sharp, who says: “With Novare, Harvey brings Bach’s works into the 21st century with a sensuous tone and an articulation that is simultaneously precise and dynamic, even at breakneck tempi. His playing reveals the contrapuntal lines in all their permutational glory.”

But it isn’t just world-renowned guitarists who have been impressed by Novare. Classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein, celebrated for her playing of Bach on the modern grand piano, says: “Harvey Valdes brings an improviser’s sensibility to this music, which is in so many ways the most authentic approach to Bach. There is an understated quality to his interpretations that allows a listener to hear the architecture of the music, and there is a rhythmic malleability that gives breath and presence. The Prelude and Fugue in D-flat stands out in the way that Valdes enjoys the sustained possibilities of the electric guitar. It’s a beautiful new take on old gems.”

Why Bach on electric guitar? Says Harvey, “Why not?! The electric guitar has a capacity for tone, color and dynamics that moves beyond what the acoustic classical guitar can do. There have been some past recordings of electric guitarists who have played Bach or works by Mozart, Beethoven, etc. These often feature the instrument using high gain and distorted sounds with fast virtuosic playing. I respect this approach, but it’s not the one I wanted to take. I was interested in honoring some of the delicate classical guitar approaches and while also taking advantage of the sonic dimensions of the electric guitar.

“For listeners who are guitar players, I want to share with them how it’s possible to play Bach’s lute works on an electric guitar. You can bring a classical guitar approach to the electric guitar that expands the sonic landscape for this historical music and gives it a space to live in the present. As for everyone else, enjoy! I hope it can soothe a listener’s life. Making it certainly brought some peace into my life during a challenging time that has affected us all.”

More about Harvey Valdes

A guitarist of searching, sophisticated musicality, Harvey Valdes can traverse styles from avant- jazz and Middle Eastern/Balkan music to improvised film scores and the compositions of Bach. Harvey has an intrepid curiosity about the guitar’s sonic and expressive range; he is also a trained player of the Arabic oud, as well as the Turkish cümbüş. To date, he has released three albums as a soloist/leader: “Solitude Intones Its Echo” (Destiny, 2019), a set of concise, engaging solo improvisations praised by the likes of Guitar Moderne as “18 lyrical solo performances of compositions that hook you”; “Roundabout” (2015), his solo debut featuring lyrically inventive takes on jazz standards; and “PointCounterPoint” (2015), a bristling, Mahavishnu-meets-math-rock trio album with violinist Sana Nagano and drummer Joe Hertenstein. All About Jazz hailed “Pointcounterpoint” as “cosmic,” while the Free Jazz Collective described Roundabout as “sublimely beautiful.” In April 2022, Destiny Records will present Harvey’s newest album: “Novare: J.S. Bach Lute Works on Electric Guitar.” Underscoring his achievements, Harvey’s venturesome work in the studio and on stage has attracted fans among iconic guitarists, including Andy Summers of The Police, ECM luminary David Torn and avant-garde notable Elliott Sharp.

Based in Brooklyn, NY Harvey earned a BFA degree from The New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music. He has worked with artists from Butch Morris, Karl Berger and Rhys Chatham to Daniel Carter, and the Middle Eastern/Balkan ensemble Anistar, among many others. His score for Utopians, which premiered at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, constituted “one of the longest-lasting guitar improvisations since (Neil Young’s score for) Dead Man.” The Valdes composition “Listen” was chosen as an Editor’s Pick by Guitar Player magazine. Harvey has also performed extensively in New York theater. He held the guitar/oud chair as an onstage musician and cast member for the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical The Band’s Visit, having originated the role Off Broadway at The Atlantic Theater before moving with the ensemble for the hit run at Broadway’s Barrymore Theater. He played on the show’s 2019 Grammy Award-winning cast album, and he received a daytime Emmy Award for his broadcast performance with the ensemble, along with participating in the 10 Tony wins as a cast member. Harvey has also worked with renowned downtown theater ensemble The Wooster Group, including its presentation of Cavalli’s 1640 opera “La Didone”; for that production, which toured the U.S. and Europe, he provided a modern interpretation of the Baroque lute, playing electric guitar and guitar synth within an ensemble that also included harpsichord, theorbo and accordion.

Harvey has played on stages from Radio City Music Hall, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and St. Ann’s Warehouse to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Chicago Cultural Center, CalArts’ Redcat Theater in Los Angeles, Scotland’s Royal Lyceum Theatre, the United Nations. Harvey has also featured in broadcast performances for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, The Today Show and WNYC-FM, as well as the 72nd annual Tony Awards. Additional collaborators over the years have included Noël Akchoté, Gerry Hemingway, Lukas Ligeti, Killick Hinds, Jamshied Sharifi, Sean Sonderegger, Henri Scars Struck and Bern Nix. Harvey has recently featured on multiple compilation albums, including the fifth in Elliott Sharp’s anthology series “Never Meta Guitar,” and “Walk My Way,” a five volume 577 Records set featuring 49 guitarists of 32 different nationalities from six continents and virtually every sort of musical background. He also played on Eight Hands, One Mind by the Dom Minasi Guitar Quartet with Briggan Krauss and Hans Tanmen, as well as recorded the duo album Nueva Guitarra with avant-metal guitarist Alvaro Domene.

About the imaginative virtuosity of Valdes, guitarist extraordinaire David Torn says: “When I first heard Harvey, I thought: ‘Well, here’s another badass mother on the scene – wow.’”

Harvey Valdes record release show at Barbes in Brooklyn, NY on April 9th 2022

For more information:
harveyvaldes.net
destinyrecordsmusic.com
instagram.com/harveyvaldes
facebook.com/harveyvaldesmusic

Press inquiries: Glass Onyon PR, PH: 1-828-350-8158 (US), glassonyonpr@gmail.com

Guitarist and Film Music Mastermind Lyle Workman To Release Stunning New Instrumental Album “Uncommon Measures” on Feb. 19, 2021 on Blue Canoe Records

Epic Progressive Rock/Jazz Fusion Collection Features 63-Piece Orchestra recorded Live At Abbey Road Studios

Known both as a first-call sideman/session musician and a top-shelf film composer with credits including “Superbad,” “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” prolific guitarist Lyle Workman will release “Uncommon Measures,” his first solo album in a more than a decade, on February 19, 2021, via Blue Canoe Records. Featuring a 63-piece orchestra recorded live at Abbey Road under the direction of orchestrator extraordinaire John Ashton Thomas (“Black Panther,” “Captain Marvel”), the collection plays like the score to some epic film from an alternate dimension, mixing elements of progressive rock, jazz fusion, and romantic classical music with gleeful abandon.

“This record ties together all the different threads of who I am,” explains Workman. “It was four years in the making due to my film and TV schedule, but it’s really the culmination of a lifetime in music.”

Bursting at the seams with soaring arrangements and virtuosic performances, “Uncommon Measures” showcases not only Workman’s unparalleled musicianship, but also his profound empathy and expansive emotional vocabulary. The songs here are living, breathing entities, constantly growing and evolving in ways both subtle and drastic, and the production is similarly unpredictable, veering from larger-than-life bombast to whispered intimacy and back, sometimes within the very same track. The result is a record as extraordinary as it is unexpected, a captivating, transportive song cycle that manages to scale the dizzying heights of joy and sadness, love and friendship, self-discovery and celebration, all without a single word.

“Lyle Workman is a completely accomplished and inspired guitarist, musician and composer,” says Steve Vai. “He has a wicked command of the instrument and is perhaps one of three players I know of that can wield exotic orchestral compositions with either a screaming or whispering guitar. ‘Uncommon Measures’ is the masterful evidence of this.”

A California native, Workman’s musical journey began in the mid-1980s, when he joined the Sacramento-based band Bourgeois Tagg. The group landed a deal with Island Records and gained international acclaim for their hit single “I Don’t Mind At All,” a Workman co-write that helped earn performances on the Tonight Show, Top Of The Pops, American Bandstand, and their European equivalents. The band proved to be a launching pad for Workman, who soon began picking up gigs in the studio and on the road with the likes of Sting, Beck, Frank Black, Jellyfish, Todd Rundgren, Norah Jones, Bryan Adams, and jazz icon Tony Williams, who included Workman’s “Machu Picchu” on his final album, “Wilderness,” with Stanley Clarke and Herbie Hancock. Workman’s skills as a sideman turned out to make him ideally suited for the world of film and television, as well, and work writing commercial jingles soon gave way to jobs composing for indie films, which opened the door to major studio releases and a connection with Judd Apatow, who began hiring Workman to score many of his projects. To date, Workman has composed music for films that have generated over a billion dollars at the box office worldwide.

PURCHASING LINK:
https://www.bluecanoerecords.com/uncommon_measures.html

SOCIAL MEDIA:
https://www.facebook.com/lyleworkman.musician
https://www.instagram.com/lyle.workman/
https://www.youtube.com/c/lyleworkmanofficial
https://twitter.com/lyle_workman

Press inquiries: Glass Onyon PR, Billy James, PH: 1-828-350-8158 (US), glassonyonpr@gmail.com

RICK WAKEMAN, JEFF WAYNE, KEVIN PEEK “Beyond the Planets” Limited Edition 180 Gram Clear Vinyl Personally SIGNED by Rick Wakeman Now Available For Pre-order!

London - Now available for pre-order RICK WAKEMAN, JEFF WAYNE, KEVIN PEEK “Beyond the Planets” Limited Edition of 100, Hand Numbered, 180 Gram Clear Vinyl personally SIGNED by Rick Wakeman!

Have you even wondered what would happen if the king of progressive rock keyboards teamed up with the bloke who wrote “The War Of The Worlds” rock opera and the guitarist with the late lamented Classical Rock group Sky? Well, you need wonder no longer! A reviewer on the Prog Archives writes: “Beyond the planets” is essentially the performance of Holst's “The planets” in a rock context. Wayne's contribution is limited to the composition of an Overture for the album. As this ends, some brief narration by Patrick Allen is heard. Allen does a great impression of Richard Burton, which when combined with Wayne's distinctive sound, immediately creates echoes of “War of the Worlds.” Allen returns a couple of times during the album to link tracks together with further brief narration. The familiar introduction to “Mars” (as used by Rainbow on “Eyes of the World” among many others) then takes over, and we launch into a full rendition of “The Planets suite.” The music is performed dramatically and faithfully throughout, with Peek using various guitar sounds according to the mood of the piece.

This is a strict edition of 100 units, all hand numbered, pressed on 180 gram clear vinyl and personally SIGNED by Rick Wakeman released by The Strictly Limited Edition Vinyl Company.

Estimated delivery date : July 2019



TRACKLIST
FACE A
1. Waves / The Journey composed by Jeff Wayne
2. Mars (The Bringer of War)
3. Venus (The Bringer of Peace)
4. Mercury (The Winged Messenger)

FACE B
1. Jupiter (The Bringer of Jollity)
2. Circles / Saturn (The Bringer of Old Age)
3. Uranus (The Magician)
4. Neptune (The Mystic) / The Heavens Reply / Beyond (The Finale written by Rick Wakeman)

To pre-order: https://www.diggersfactory.com/vinyl/226769/rick-wakeman-jeff-wayne-kevin-peek-beyond-the-planets

THE STRICTLY LIMITED EDITION VINYL COMPANY UNITED KINGDOM
The strictly limited edition vinyl company. produce strictly limited edition of 100 units per title 180gram, colour vinyl pressings of long lost classic albums and previously unreleased on vinyl

Press inquiries: Glass Onyon PR, PH: 828-350-8158 (US), glassonyonpr@gmail.com