This collection of Christmas music done contemporary jazz/fusion style offers traditional hits ("The First Noel," "O Tannenbaum," "White Christmas," "Jingle Bells") to provide the perfect background music for holiday parties. R&B singer Kenny Lattimore provides vocals on "River."
Wanda Van Horn

James Hardway adds some drums that go splat and sliding upright bass to some old public domain recordings the Cleopatra label hands him and the results are fair. Hardway doesn't seem very inspired throughout the album, but he's got studio chops and his remixing is serviceable. Marilyn Monroe's sexy birthday serenade to JFK gets chopped up and a scratching, turntable workout, Billie Holiday goes through a filter, and Dinah Shore gets oddball pings and pongs behind her giddy voice.

Best known as co-founder of the pop-jazz group Windows, Tim Timmermans took his role as a solo artist too seriously on his new agey Higher Octave debut Life as we know it, trying to dominate every track with guitar, keyboard and percussion.

2002's 'NP3' seems to be something of a close of one chapter and the opening of another for Molvaer. Constructed through editing fragments of ideas, sounds and melodies 'NP3' lets more chinks of light through the wall of sound than on his previous albums. The pristine sound has mutated once again, stripped down and lean, the likes of 'Marrow', 'Frozen' and 'Hurry Slowly' are sinewy, virile creatures compared to the brute force of early songs. 'Axis Of Ignorance' turns the W. Bush sound bite "the axis of evil" on its head, NPM giving vent to his feelings post 9/11 of frustration and anger with a biting drum and bass attack of his own. The feeling of cybernetic, biodynamic forms and the streamlined feeling of cyberspace, as referenced in the title itself (the download revolution has not gone unnoticed in jazz circles either) is all part of NPM's continual search for something new yet organic, the fact that he's recently started playing to live art installations is also indicative of his need to interact in real time to events around him, musical or otherwise. Yet Molvaer's sense of the tender and poetic is still with him on the gorgeous piece 'Little Indian', dedicated to his daughter, the slow dub feel taken literally with baby steps. 'Nebulizer' the razor-sharp parting shot that also became the final battery of beats, almost vicious in its intent, the air-raid siren of Molvaer's trumpet sounds as the apocalypse begins, then the calming aftermath, a new dawn with hope springing up to replace despair.

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In 1992 Abou-Khalil released two albums, Nafas, on the ECM label, and Blue Camel, on the label he recorded for previously and subsequently, Enja. He would become Enja's best-selling artist. Of the two releases, Blue Camel garnered more attention, which may be due to the appearances of Wheeler on trumpet and flugelhorn, Swallow on bass, Milton Cardona on congas, Khaiat on frame drums, and Shotham on South Indian drums and percussion. Writing about the album's title track, Kurt Keefner wrote on the Bolero website: "Seductive percussion ushers in Wheeler and Mariano playing in unison a tune that is somewhere between Duke Ellington and the court of Baghdad." The album also features a track titled "Beirut," after Abou-Khalil's boyhood home. The composition begins with a subdued oud solo and climaxes into a cacophony of sound that recalls the civil war that caused Abou-Khalil to leave the city in 1978. In the early 1990s Abou-Khalil fulfilled a commission by Southwest German Radio to compose two pieces that were performed by the Kronos Quartet and recorded by the Belanescu Quartet several years later.

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