Practical Music Ltd

The company owned by composer-performers Jan Steele & Janet Sherbourne

List of Practical Music Releases

CDs, vinyl, audio cassettes and downloadable recordings currently available.

Immediately below are recordings that are available to buy now.
We don’t have a shopping cart on this site. To purchase send an email saying what you would like to buy and which country you want it sent to and we will work out a price and email it to you. Then if you want to continue you can pay us via PayPal and we will post the goods to you.

Title
Catalogue No
Year of Issue
Format

Cover Image


Nobody But You
Practical PR01
1981
Vinyl 7” EP (33rpm)
Stacks Image 692
Nobody But You is a vinyl EP of three songs, Nobody But You and Everyday by Janet Sherbourne and Ivory by Jan Steele with lyrics by Dorothy Steele. This has been uploaded to Youtube and to several blogs by fans. You can get the original EP here. This is currently our bestseller!

Slower Than Molasses
Practical PR03
1986
Vinyl 12” LP
Stacks Image 749
Slower Than Molasses is a joint production with pianist and composer Mark Lockett of new English compositions, mostly for voice and piano, but also percussion, gamelan and synthesizer. Works by Janet Sherbourne, Mark Lockett, Howard Skempton (pieces commissioned from him by Janet Sherbourne and Mark Lockett), Michael Parsons and Glyn Bush. This album contains Luna by Michael Parsons - for female voice (Janet Sherbourne) and Javanese gamelan, one of only two extant recordings of the pioneering English Gamelan Orchestra which was active from approximately 1979-83. The other recording is The Victoria Incident/Has Ras which is on the LP Desert Island Dusks (see below). The album was mastered and pressed by Nimbus records, which had the reputation at the time of producing the highest quality vinyl available in the UK, possibly world wide.

Café Olé
Practical PR05
1990
Audio Cassette
Stacks Image 901
Café Olé is a pot-pourri of compositions by Janet Sherbourne and Mark Lockett, the follow-up to PR04 Walks Abroad which is now sold out.

Metalworks - New Gamelan
Practical PR06
1990
CD
Stacks Image 1006
Metalworks - New Gamelan is the first CD by the contemporary gamelan ensemble founded by Mark Lockett and Janet Sherbourne in 1988 and which gave concerts and especially educational workshops up until it was decided to fold the group in 2011. The second CD by Metalworks - Parrot Soup, was released on the KEDA label. Details below.

Parrot Soup
KEDA 25
1994
CD and audio cassette
Stacks Image 1065
Parrot Soup by Metalworks Gamelan is the second and last CD by the contemporary gamelan ensemble founded by Mark Lockett and Janet Sherbourne in 1988 and which gave concerts and especially educational workshops up until it was decided to fold the group in 2011. It was released on Kuljit Bhamra’s specialist label KEDA in their World Series. It isn’t currently listed on their site but you can still buy it from us. Metalworks recorded a third CD which includes a recording of Michael Nyman’s Time’s Up, a work which was commissioned by the English Gamelan Orchestra for their UK Contemporary Music tour in 1982. Because Metalworks was winding down the mixing of this album never transpired, but we still have the recordings and possibly in the future when we have some spare time (almost never!) we will mix this album and release it in a downloadable format.

El Gato
Practical PR07
2011
CD & mp3s from iTunes and CDBaby
Stacks Image 465
El Gato (Que Tiene Hambre) is the first album by Janet Sherbourne’s Cuban style charanga band Cafecito. Well known & lesser known cha cha cha's, boleros, & danzones, jazz standards Cuban style, and three original pieces by Janet, which are very much in the vein of Janet’s other compositions. Their is more info about this album - including track listings, demos etc, on the Cafecito website. The scores of these three pieces can be downloaded free from her personal site.

Strictly Latin
Poke 008
2011
CD (only available to the media industry) & mp3s from iTunes
Stacks Image 533
Strictly Latin is a library (media production music) album of pieces in a variety of Latin styles, including salsa, tango, cha cha cha, bossa nova, merengue, paso doble & samba. Normally production music recordings are only available to the industry. If you are involved in the media industry and you want to license any of these tracks then you need to contact Boost. You can listen to all the tracks on Boost’s website, or you can hear them at your leisure on Spotify, or you can buy the mp3's from iTunes (in all cases look for Janet Sherbourne - Strictly Latin. Some of Janet’s pieces from this album were used in a very successful series of adverts UK TV for Aviva insurance featuring Paul Whitehouse, Addiction Premature and Strictly Spandex.

 

Albums and tracks which are generally non-available

From hereon down the albums/tracks listed are mostly not available. Sometimes they can be bought second hand on ebay, very occasionally a new unopened copy can be found. Certain albums we may consider releasing in a downloadable format in the future. At the moment we don’t know very much about the logistics of doing this - at least - we know how to release them - the big issue is marketing them! If anyone involved in the industry would like to partner up with us to do this we would be very interested in pursuing this. Ideally we would like to licence the recordings to another party because we don’t really want to spend time marketing recordings when we could be composing or practising.

Albanian Summer
Practical PR02
1984
Vinyl 12” LP
Stacks Image 1137
Albanian Summer was our biggest seller. So much so that it sold out a long time ago. There were 1000 copies issued. The album was mastered and pressed by Nimbus records, which had the reputation at the time of producing the highest quality vinyl available in the UK, possibly world wide. The LP features the tour-de-force composition by Dave Smith for saxophone and piano, Jan Steele on alto sax and Janet Sherbourne on piano. It can sometimes be picked up on ebay and vinyl specialist stores at inflated prices.

Desert Island Dusks
Disques du Soliel et de l'Acier (DSA)
1986
Vinyl 12” LP
Stacks Image 1194
Desert Island Dusks is a pot-pourri of pieces by Janet Sherbourne and Jan Steele released on the French record label Disques du Soleil et de l’Acier (DSA) run by Gerard Nguyen from his record shop in Nancy, France. The shop closed down in 2009. The album is no longer available but it can be picked up online for between £15 - 45. Some of the pieces on this LP will be released in newly mastered recordings on the Community Library release Distant Saxophones. Full listing and personnel details can be viewed on Discogs. Until Gerard Nguyen closed his shop it was still listed on his website, so if you can find Gerard anywhere you never know if he has some stored away somewhere. If you do track any new copies down - please let us know!

Walks Abroad
Practical PR04
1987
Audio Cassette
Stacks Image 1339
Walks Abroad is the first pot-pourri album by Janet Sherbourne and Mark Lockett

Jan Steele/John Cage: Voices & Instruments
Obscure No 5
First released 1976
Vinyl 12” LP
Stacks Image 1396
Voices and Instruments was first released on the Obscure label (distributed by Virgin) - in 1976. It features three compositions by Jan Steele - in particular All Day…… which was the first commercial recording to feature the singing of Janet Sherbourne. After 40 years we still get emails from all over the world praising Janet’s singing and the composition. You can only get this LP from collecting websites. A new unopened copy is around £45. These three tracks, which have been uploaded to Youtube and various blogs by fans, are being reissued along with other compositions by Jan and Janet (some never before released) is scheduled to be released on the Community Library label in vinyl, CD and hi quality download formats under the title Distant Saxophones.

pianoFORTE
Unknown Public 03
1993
CD as part of a boxed book and audio download
Stacks Image 1453
pianoFORTE was the third album in the Unknown Public series, an innovative subscription series run by the musician, producer and journalist John L Walters. Jan Steele’s contribution to this album was the theme and variation piece Gamelan Disco, in an ensemble version. A version for soprano saxophone was released on the Bad Alchemy label (see below).

Gamelan Disco
Bad Alchemy Nr 8
1987
Audio Cassette accompanying a magazine
Stacks Image 1510
Gamelan Disco for soprano saxophone and piano was released on an audio cassette which accompanied the German alternative music magazine Bad Alchemy Nr 8.

Silence -
A Quiet Manifestation of the Future
Wacoal Arts Center
36CD-NO20
1993
Boxed CD
Stacks Image 1567
Silence - A Quiet Manifestation of the Future was a boxed compilation CD put together and released by Ryoji Ikeda for the Wacoal Arts Centre in Tokyo. Jan Steele’s contribution was Temporary Farewell, on which he played soprano saxophone and Janet Sherbourne played piano.