REHEARSAL BROADCAST FOR BOWIE S 50th BIRTHDAY BASH His other milestone birthdays had passed privately, but for his 50th Bowie threw himself a celebration at Madison Square Garden; it was simulcast via pay-per-view television. As a consolation prize to Britain, Bowie, Gail Ann Dorsey and Reeves Gabrels cut ten songs during rehearsals to be played on a Radio One special to air on the same day. Bowie opened with Little Wonder dug into Hearts Filthy Lesson . Some guests were a subtle nod at Tin Machine s influences: Frank Black, who came on to sing Scary Monsters and Fashion and Sonic Youth, who bloodied up I m Afraid of Americans . Dave Grohl added munitions to Seven Years in Tibet and Hallo Spaceboy . Robert Smith, the most inspired guest choice, sang The Last Thing You Should Do and an oddly heartening Quicksand (Smith had lobbied to sing Young Americans ). Billy Corgan helped close out the show like a kid who d won a contest. For some fans, this immersion in the present tense was disappointing. The biographer David Buckley made a case for the prosecution: Playing live with Iggy Pop for the first time in 20 years. Playing live with Robert Fripp and Brian Eno for the first time ever. Bringing on Nile Rodgers for Let s Dance. The only person who d been invited that night who actually hailed from Bowie s past, who had been Bowie s influence, was Lou Reed. At the end of the show, Bowie made a concession: he came out alone with his 12-string acoustic guitar and sang Space Oddity . I don t know where I m going from here, he said. But I promise I won t bore you. Then he was off for another year of tours and TV spots. He d dodged the snare, at least this time.

Windows is a live album by Jon Lord and the German conductor and composer Eberhard Schoener. The music and the record are primarily credited to Lord. It was taped at a concert in Munich, (West) Germany on 1 June 1974 and the music is a mix between progressive rock and orchestral late romantic/modernist styles. The piece on the first side, "Continuo on B-A-C-H" is a loose attempt to build on the unfinished triple fugue that closed Johann Sebastian Bach's "Art of the Fugue". The second side of the LP is a three-part composition called "Window". In the liner notes of the LP album Lord makes a comparison between the rhapsodic structure here and the renga tradition of chain composition of poetry in medieval Japan. The music of the middle section was lifted from Lord's earlier crossover effort Gemini Suite (1971).

Classic Blue is the fourth solo studio album by The Moody Blues member Justin Hayward. Classic Blue was released in 1989 by Trax Records (later re-released on Castle Music Records in 1994), and features Mike Batt, who also produced the album, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The album includes cover versions of many hit songs, such as The Beatles' "Blackbird", and Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." It also includes a re-recorded version of "Forever Autumn," a song from Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, in which Hayward originally sang lead vocals.

One of the most successful of all the progressive rock bands to come out of the UK, Yes is featured here in their 1974-1976 incarnation, with Patrick Moraz on keyboards during Rick Wakeman’s "sabbatical." It was 1974 and the band was at its commercial peak with albums like Fragile and Close To The Edge dominating the charts in the UK, in Europe and in the USA. As with their contemporaries ELP and King Crimson, Yes had taken the musicality of prog-rock and brought it to the masses. In retrospect, the prog movement of the '70s was the fore-runner to the popular "jam band" movement of the late-'90s and early-'00s. • Vocalist Jon Anderson is in fine form and was probably at the peak of his vocal prowess when this performance was recorded for the King Biscuit Flower Hour in December 1974, at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Hartford Connecticut. • This line-up of the band, which featured original members Anderson and bassist Chris Squire, as well as guitarist Steve Howe, drummer Alan White, and keyboardist Moraz remained intact until Wakeman returned to replace Moraz in 1976. • The Close To The Edge-era line-up later reformed in the late-'90s and has toured on-and-off since then, until the premature death of Chris Squire in May 2015.

Cut during the fall of 1972, Electric Light Orchestra II was where Jeff Lynne started rebuilding the sound of Electric Light Orchestra following the departure of Roy Wood from the original lineup. It was as personal an effort as Lynne had ever made in music, showcasing his work as singer, songwriter, guitarist, sometime synthesizer player, and producer, and it is more focused than its predecessor but also retains some of the earlier album's lean textures. Lynne, drummer Bev Bevan, bassist Mike D'Albuquerque, and keyboardist Richard Tandy comprise the core of the band, with two cellists and a violinist sawing away around them.

A New World Record is the sixth studio album by Electric Light Orchestra (ELO). It was released in October 1976 on United Artists Records in the U.S., and on 19 November 1976 on Jet Records in the United Kingdom. A New World Record marked ELO's shift towards shorter pop songs, a trend which would continue across their career. Their second album to be recorded at Musicland Studios in Munich, the LP proved to be the band's breakthrough in the UK; after their previous three studio recordings failed to chart in their home market, A New World Record became their first top ten album in the UK. It became a global success and reached multi-platinum status in the US and UK, The album sold five million units worldwide within its first year of release.

Tracks taken from his albums 'Bay Of Kings' and 'Genesis Revisited' with members of King Crimson, Yes, Asia and The Zombies assisting. There is nothing older than two pieces from '83 acoustic guitar album Bay of Kings (except 'Horizons' from it appeared originally in Foxtrot, and 'Steppes' from Tokyo Tapes live album in Defector '80). Each song is served with liner notes and thus clearing the 'Genesis' concept also in tracks that at first seem to have nothing to do with it. Two instrumental tracks from '99 Darktown? As well or better could have been some (new versions perhaps) from earliest solo albums that are closer in style to Genesis. But this kind of limited compiling principle suits well. The sense of compilation is almost absent if you haven't heard all the source albums. It's principally just an extended version of "Watcher of the Skies - Genesis Revisited" (96) and it works as that.

Formed in 1971 by old schoolmates Dane Stevens and Cedric Sharpley, along with local bass player Neil Brewer, Druid spent years playing clubs as a trio before winning a competition by Melody Maker for the best unsigned band. At this point they added Andrew McCrorie-Shand, a recent London College of Music graduate. The Melody Maker prize included new instruments and a recording contract, and their debut album appeared in July 1975 among envious whispers by rival bands and music publications. The band had a difficult time shaking the charge of hype, and they were also charged in some quarters as being Yes soundalikes – Starcastle in the U.S. was later to be tarred with the same brush.

This is the album where Jeff Lynne finally found the sound he'd wanted since co-founding Electric Light Orchestra three years earlier. Up to this point, most of the group's music had been self-contained – Lynne, Richard Tandy, et al., providing whatever was needed, vocally or instrumentally, even if it meant overdubbing their work layer upon layer. Lynne saw the limitations of this process, however, and opted for the presence of an orchestra – it was only 30 pieces, but the result was a much richer musical palette than the group had ever had to work with, and their most ambitious and successful record up to that time.

Alone in the Universe isn't the first Jeff Lynne album of the 21st century, nor is it the first Electric Light Orchestra of the 21st century. That honor belongs to Zoom, a 2001 comeback that faded quickly into history books, its lack of success blamed in some quarters on Lynne's reluctance to tour. If Jeff didn't want to hit the road, his old bandmate Bev Bevan had no problem constituting a lineup and touring under the name ELO Part II, whose presence somewhat explains why Alone in the Universe is credited to the somewhat convoluted Jeff Lynne's ELO – a truncation of the band's full name that also assigns credit where it's due, as most listeners associate this majestic post-Abbey Road pop with Lynne alone.

Alan Parsons was 19 years old when he landed a job at the world famous Abbey Road Studios, an important first step on his journey to becoming a world class engineer, producer and artist. Following his beginnings with George Martin and The Beatles, his contribution to Pink Floyd's classic 'The Dark Side Of The Moon' earned him worldwide attention. As a producer he had many hits with Pilot, John Miles, Ambrosia and Al Stewart. Together with his manager and creative partner at the time, Eric Woolfson, he developed the Alan Parsons Project. Following their debut album "Tales Of Mystery And Imagination" (1976), they released a series of hit albums; namely "I Robot" (1977), "Pyramid" (1978), "The Turn of a Friendly Card" (1980), "Eye in the Sky" (1982), "Ammonia Avenue" (1984), "Vulture Culture" (1985), "Stereotomy" (1986) and "Gaudi" (1987).

Electric Light Orchestra's 2012 concert album Live brings together tracks Jeff Lynne and his band recorded for a PBS special at CBS Television City in 2001. This is the ensemble that toured in support of ELO's 2001 studio album, Zoom, and appeared on VH1 Storytellers. Lynne has always been an avowed studio rat, more comfortable crafting his rock productions behind a soundboard than playing them in front of a live audience. This is partly the reason that the Lynne-helmed version of ELO stopped touring after 1981's Time. Subsequently, there haven't been very many proper ELO concert albums. Which is not to say that the band doesn't sound fantastic here, because it does. Lynne is a musical perfectionist who never fails to deliver on the grand, orchestral rock aesthetic he crafted on so many classic albums. All of which makes this 2001 collection a welcome addition to ELO's discography.

One of the seminal documents of the progressive rock era, a record that made its way into the collections of millions of high-school kids who never heard of Modest Mussorgsky and knew nothing of Russia's Nationalist "Five." It does some violence to Mussorgsky, but Pictures at an Exhibition is also the most energetic and well-realized live release in Emerson, Lake & Palmer's catalog, and it makes a fairly compelling case for adapting classical pieces in this way. At the time, it introduced "classical rock" to millions of listeners, including the classical community, most of whose members regarded this record as something akin to an armed assault. The early-'70s live sound is a little crude by today's standards, but the tightness of the playing (Carl Palmer is especially good) makes up for any sonic inadequacies. Keith Emerson is the dominant musical personality here, but Greg Lake and Palmer get the spotlight enough to prevent it from being a pure keyboard showcase.

PROVIDENCE were formed in 1985. For some years around their foundation they had changed the members or produced some demo tapes but they could not appear upon major scene in those days. In 1989 they saw the light with solidifying their members and recording their debut album 'And I'll Recite An Old Myth' (released in the following year), in that Madoka TSUKADA (keyboards) composed all songs. This album has got renowned also with the collaboration of Christian Beya (ex-Atoll). After replacing some members in 1991, PROVIDENCE had got more active on stage or production. In 1996 they released their second work 'There Once Was A Night Of Choko-Muro The Paradise'. PROVIDENCE had gigged in Japan actively until 2002 but sadly been disbanded without any notice.

As far as Progressive rock is concerned, most of the criticisms heard during the last thirty years insist on the show-off virtuoso side of it, with a lack of emotions, sort of a technical window for musicians with incredible egos. This was actually one of the major arguments of the punk wave during the second half of the Seventies that had set as a goal (If they ever had one) to get rid of the "Dinosaurs" that YES, GENESIS, EMERSON, LAKE & PALMER and others had become. It would be completely dishonest to deny this superficial and over simplifying reasoning a small hint of truth, but SEBASTIAN HARDIE could be a good example of the contrary. At about the same time, four anonymous people from down under tried to show that our favourite style can go very well with a lyrical, melodical and accessible music. Recorded in 1975, "Four Moments" is like a whole, if not conceptual, at least musical.