Impulse Buys Abound from UMe

Universal Music Group got off to a great start anthologizing the deep catalogue of Impulse! Records with a four-disc box set from Hip-o Select earlier this year. Today, that catalogue is revisited yet again, in the form of 28 albums from the jazz label’s catalogue collected as two-on-one discs.

The titles are pretty diverse, collecting sets from Duke Ellington, McCoy Tyner, Alice Coltrane, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Milt Jackson and others.

You can order each of the titles on Amazon here and check out the track lists after the jump.

Harrison and Shankar’s “Concert For Bangladesh” Goes Digital

“It was such a unique thing.  Everybody was so moved and touched.  It had a special feeling apart from just a performance.  Overnight everybody knew the name of Bangladesh all over the world.”  So said Ravi Shankar about The Concert For Bangladesh, the 1971 performances he organized with George Harrison at New York’s Madison Square Garden that set the standard for all-star benefits to come.  Monday, August 1, marks the 40^th anniversary of The Concert, and in commemoration, Apple and EMI have introduced the originally Grammy-winning concert album to the digital realm today as an iTunes exclusive.

Produced by Phil Spector, the recording features Harrison, Shankar, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Jim Keltner, Billy Preston, Leon Russell, Ringo Starr, Klaus Voormann, Carl Radle and Tom Evans, Joey Molland and Pete Ham of Badfinger, among others.  The 2005 expanded edition added Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” to the track listing, and the digital edition – available as an iTunes LP – retains this track.  It adds one more bonus track, Harrison’s studio single of “Bangla Desh.” 

In addition, the 1972 documentary film chronicling the concert will stream for 72 hours Saturday through Monday, at iTunes, GeorgeHarrison.com and TheConcertforBanglaDesh.com.  Another special treat available at iTunes is a 50-minute radio special, hosted by Paul Gambaccini, which is also streaming at iTunes’ Concert for Bangladesh page.  Shankar told USA Today, “it was the first of its kind, in raising money for people under such conditions.  Now people do this kind of thing quite often, which is wonderful.”  The original concert raised over $243,000.00 for the people of Bangladesh, ravaged by war, famine and flood.  Sales of the album and subsequent DVDs and CDs have gone to UNICEF and this digital release is no different.  All proceeds, after taxes, benefit The George Harrison Fund for UNICEF. 

Hit the jump for the track listing!

Can’t Get You Out of My Box: Kylie Albums Collected in New U.K. Set

Next up in our continued coverage of today’s new catalogue releases is a new, semi-notable box set from pop star extraordinaire Kylie Minogue.

Though the Australian singer/actress is unfairly known in the U.S. for two songs – a Stock-Aitken-Waterman-produced cover of Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion” that hit No. 3 in 1988 and the slinky club track “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” which hit No. 7 in 2002 – Minogue has rarely stayed away from the upper reaches of the U.K. and Australian charts. In 2010, her most recent album, Aphrodite, topped the British charts, making her the only female act to have a No. 1 album in every decade since the 1980s.

Her five albums for Parlophone in Europe over the past decade saw Kylie truly come into her own as a self-assured solo act with the greatest amount of artistic control she had enjoyed at the time. Now, those albums are collated into one set, Kylie: The Albums 2000-2010. While it offers no extra content (it in fact still offers only the second pressing of Fever, which offered the radio edit of “Come Into My World” instead of the original version), it’s as always a nice, concise way to get all of these albums in one shot if you haven’t previously done so.

Reacquaint yourself with the albums after the jump.

Look Sharp! New Roxette Compilation in Stores Today

As previously noted on Twitter, we’re doing something a bit different with the new catalogue releases this week: rather than do a big New Release Round-Up post, we’re going to do smaller posts highlighting them through the day. Why? Simple: a lot of these releases, taken on their own, are small but of enough interest to not get swept under the rug of a mega-post as such. Plus, there aren’t really a whole heck of a lot of major reissues out this week anyway.

We begin with a new compilation from Roxette, the Swedish pop duo who dominated the airwaves in the late ’80s and early ’90s with an assortment of shimmering dance-pop hits. Their four U.S. chart-toppers, “The Look,” “Listen to Your Heart,” “It Must Have Been Love” and “Joyride” are still radio and club staples. (“Listen to Your Heart” enjoyed a new lease on life in 2005, when Belgian club act D.H.T. took their version of it to Billboard‘s Top 10.) Though the set is certainly heavy on those hits from the first five years or so, there are two tracks included from the group’s latest album, this year’s Charm School (which is receiving a digital release in the U.S. alongside this compilation).

The full track list and an Amazon link is after the jump!

The Adventure Begins With Safan’s “Remo Williams” and Mancini’s “Moneychangers”

Raise your hand if you remember the golden age of the television miniseries!  Once upon a time, the miniseries was king:  Rich Man, Poor Man, QB VII, North and South, Roots, The Thorn Birds.  Sprawling novels were translated into multiple evenings of rich, dramatic television, with the small screen taking advantage of a length that even big screen fare couldn’t offer.  One such miniseries was 1976’s The Moneychangers, based on a novel by Arthur Hailey (Hotel, Airport) and scored by the same man who would go on to win an Emmy for The Thorn Birds: Henry Mancini.  The man born Enrico Nicola Mancini was the perfect choice for the miniseries format, well-versed in the grandeur of Hollywood cinema and the necessities of dramatic scoring.  But while Mancini wrote one of his most ambitious scores (at nearly two-and-a-quarter hours’ length!) ever for The Moneychangers, a soundtrack recording was never released.  35 years after the miniseries’ premiere, Intrada is releasing the full Henry Mancini score on a special 1,500-copy limited edition 2-disc set.  But that’s not all!  The label has also announced a reissue of Craig Safan’s soundtrack from the 1985 pulp-inspired adventure film Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins!  That one’s a 1,000-copy limited edition.

Arthur Hailey found unexpected drama in the machinations of a bank in his 1975 novel The Moneychangers.  When a miniseries was shot the following year, a powerhouse cast was assembled.  Kirk Douglas and Christopher Plummer led the ensemble as two executives with very different moral codes.  Douglas is kindly and ethical, while Plummer is avaricious and self-centered.  As they vie for control of the financial institution, those around them are caught in a web of intrigue.  The supporting cast is filled with familiar names and faces, including Anne Baxter (All About Eve), Ralph Bellamy (Rosemary’s Baby), Timothy Bottoms (The Last Picture Show), Hayden Rorke (I Dream of Jeannie), James Shigeta (Flower Drum Song), Lorne Greene (Bonanza) and Robert Loggia, a favorite character actor of director Blake Edwards.  Edwards, in turn, was the most frequent collaborator of Henry Mancini.

The Moneychangers’ director Boris Sagal intended to heighten the drama and the human situations of what could have been a cold story, and Mancini matched his vision musically.  Intrada’s first-ever release of the score is sequenced in four parts, as the film was.  The sweeping, expansive score offers lush romantic themes, suspenseful action cues and customary combo pieces.  The license for release was granted by CBS to Intrada but the release wasn’t made possible until the bass trombonist from the sessions located the original ¼-inch full-track mono safeties of the complete score!  The line-up of players assembled by Mancini was expectedly top-notch, drawing on many of the same key players who had contributed to his best-selling albums over the years.  Players like Ted Nash, Vincent DeRosa, Graham Young, Dick Nash, Bob Bain, Terry Woodson and Shelly Manne all delivered that unique Mancini sound; Mancini, of course, conducted.  As the only piece of music previously available was the re-recorded main theme on the Mancini’s Angels LP, much of The Moneychangers will be a major surprise to even the most dedicated Mancini fans.  (This is, in fact, the perfect complement to Intrada’s first Mancini world premiere of the year, March’s Trail of the Pink Panther.)

There’s more adventure, Remo Williams-style, after the jump!