A Naxos must buy.

I urge every fan of modern classical music to buy Samuel Jones's Roundings and Cello Sonata on Naxos. It's part of the American Classics series.

Why, you may be wondering. Well, two reasons. First, the music is actually pretty good. The cello sonata is excellent. Roundings is a modern programmatic work that is actually pretty enjoyable. There is a wonderful passage that sounds as close to a locomotive as an orchestra can get (I do believe the movement is called "Locomotive") and the movement entitled "Oil Well" has some extremely dynamic music in it.

Which leads me to the second reson to buy this disc: it is one of the best recorded CDs I have ever heard. In said "Oil Well" movement there are percussive parts so well recored that they'll make you flinch. No fooling. I even tried it out on my wife. Now the flinching is not the result of bad music, but rather because the recording is so clean that the metal-on-metal sounds near-real. And it's HDCD encoded for all you lucky CDX owners. All that for $6 US.

I took the disc to local stereo dealer to demo and the sales guy even had to note the disc so he could buy it. Here's a demo disc with the the musical goods. Come on, it's only six bucks.