Paul Anka, Live At The Montreal Jazz Festival

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Following on from Paul Anka's Gold Selling Top 10 UK Album, Rock Swings, comes the DVD release of Rock Swings – Live At The Montreal Jazz Festival – available from May 1st, 2006 on Globe Records, Universal Music. On the same day Anka, one of music's most successful artists and songwriters, will play his only UK performance at London's Royal Albert Hall. Capturing the singer, songwriter's dynamic performance at the July 2005 Montreal Jazz Festival, the concert shows Anka at his best, interacting with his fans and introducing a new generation to a voice that has thrilled audiences for 5 decades.

This long form music DVD encompasses Anka's greatest hits, personal interpretations of his compositions made famous by other artists, and selections from his Rock Swings album featuring swing-style covers of popular songs by modern hit makers. The 21st most successful recording artist in Billboard history and the only artist in music history to have a top 50 record for 5 decades, Rock Swings takes him to a new dimension and is his most ambitious album to date. As an additional treat, the DVD also boasts over an hour of bonus features; Lonely Boy and Times Of Your Life – both containing archive footage from Anka's vast career, providing an essential insight – plus Live @ The Orange Lounge, a one off early showcase concert for the Rock Swings album, performed for an exclusive MSN internet broadcast in Toronto, Canada during 2005.

Canadian-born Anka, now 64, infuses a lifetime of experience into songs he wrote as a sixteen-year-old wunderkind - leading off the performance with his first hit from 1957, Diana, You Are My Destiny and later thrilling his fans as he invites a woman in the audience up for Put Your Head on My Shoulder. As Anka says in his introduction to another of his famous hits, Times of Your Life, the DVD is about "nostalgia, memories, family and all that good stuff" whether his own personal memories seen in a photo montage of his career and family life, or his stories of friends and colleagues like Bobby Darin, whose Mack the Knife he interprets here, or Sammy Davis Jr., whose request of Anka for his own song, I'm Not Anyone, is sung by the songwriter against clips of Davis performing on a vintage television special, or Frank Sinatra, whose veritable theme song, My Way was an Anka original and is included here with background vocals by Old Blue Eyes himself. Click for hi-res image

Throughout, Paul Anka: Rock Swings - Live in Montréal delivers a connection for the memories of a generation whether the bobby soxers who fell in love at high school dances in an era of innocence, the youngsters coming of age listening to Tom Jones' recording of Anka's She's a Lady, or unexpected arrangements of 1980s hits by Michael Jackson (The Way You Make Me Feel), Spandau Ballet (True) and Eric Clapton (Tears in Heaven).

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