The Anthem Philatelist

      Ryan Cipriano Pujante Cayabyab is an icon in Philippine music industry and my idol since the Ryan Ryan Musikahan days in the 80's. He is one of the those who inspired me to continue learning and playing the  piano until the present.    I love his piano playing, arrangements, compositional style and the joy which he exudes while he is on his piano. I almost have his complete CDs (more than 20) which i started collecting since the first CDs came out in the 80s, including the instrumentals as rendered by the San Miguel Philharmonic Orchestra and Master Chorale,  Roots to Routes Jazz album, Christmas Albums, A Capella Albums, Commercial CD he made for Dunkin Donut and rare works like his Sacred Music which won the Onassis International Cultural Competition for Original Music Composition for Dance and Spoliarium , an opera on Juan Luna with coloratura soprano and National Artist for Music, Fides Cuyugan Asencio .    I also collected a...

I have been buying and collecting CDs since the 80's until the stores stopped selling them around 2010. This collection started when my Dad came home from the US in 1984 bringing with him one of the first CDs to ever come out of the US market.  It was a CD of Pat Benatar from her Live from Earth Album with the hit song Love is a Battlefield and Yes Owner of the Lonely Heart 90125 album. Thirty years after,  I have collected around 2K CDs with complete Albums and sets (mostly 80's and alternative rock, up to the time when the the CD stores closed)  of The Beatles , Queen , U2 , The Police , The Cure , Madonna , Green Day , Duran Duran , Tears for Fears , Depeche Mode , Stone Temple Pilots , Dishwalla , Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins , and many more.  My two favorite Filipino Artists to collect are Ryan Cayabyab and Eraserheads . I completed the collection through buying the physical CD in stores, here and abroad, and when the stores disappeared- online. Nowadays m...

David Lanz, The Christmas Album - It is little wonder that Lanz's two previous seasonal recording are among the top sellers in the Narada library. His live piano interpretation of familiar songs such as "Silent Night" and "What Child Is This?" as well as not-so-familiar instruments such as "Dreamer's Waltz" are more emotional than all the words used to describe them. Lush won't do it - brilliant would be better. Even Scrooge would have caved in to sentiment after hearing this. New Age - Although new age music in its acoustical incarnation, is sometimes derided as "jazz without benefit of improvisation," that jibe can work to the listener's advantage on Christmas albums. For example when David Lanz expands on seasonal favorites on his holiday best-of, The Christmas Album (Narada), his modestly virtuosic ornamentation reinforces rater than obscures the themes, making his renditions of "Silent Night" and "What Child Is...

I'm a big David Lanz fan, and have 29 of his 31 CD albums. The newest one, Liverpool: Re-imagining the Beatles is already finished and will be available early next year. This is highly anticipated album for me, cuz I'm also an avid Beatles CD collector (I was fortunate enough to have gotten  the complete Beatles collection). Liverpool ...the birthplace of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, and where we begin our musical journey. The sounds of the Mersey harbor can be heard as it introduces the first strains of the opening song. This title track was composed as a tribute, an emotional overture of sorts, imbued with subtle musical phrasing from The Fab Four . From here, we traverse through a decade of Lennon and McCartney songs, arranged and re-imagined through the lens of my own musical voice, which admittedly, has been joyfully shaped and informed by this great and enduring legacy of musical history…a time so explosive and fruitful we may never see anything like it again. I spen...