E Street is an all-star affair led by percussionist Pete Escovedo, the father of drummer/percussionist Sheila E., who also guests on E Street along with several Escovedo siblings, saxophonists John Handy, Gerald Albright and Mel Martin, and pianist/vibraphonist Buddy Montgomery.
E Street seems to expend a great deal of energy going in a lot of different directions - wide-open freeways of Latin rock, lit up with horns and sparkling with guitar, piano, trumpet and of course percussion solos; rolling, soft cha-cha ballads; and new yet familiar byways with covers of Earth Wind & Fire's "Fantasy" and Stevie Wonder's "Another Star" - but it never seems to actually GET anywhere. The only breaks in the placid scenery come from the appropriately titled fiesta jam "Like a Volcano" and the surprisingly stirring, hymn-with-vocals "Lord Remember Me," which closes this set.

An album which fuses the melodic sensibilities common of the RPI movement with a wild lust for invention, and variously tempers its rage with gentle beds of flute, piano and strings and focuses it into dissonant nightmare-scapes. The result is an accomplished record which oscillates between the avant-garde and almost pastoral, traditional folk songwriting and hardly approaches rock - if the drum track was removed only trace elements of rock would remain. Although this record is justifiably listed under avant-garde - and is bookended by somewhat freeform and contrary excursions - there's enough neo-classical and lushly folky frills to please the symphonic fans too.

This group of musicians (feat. David Sylvian, Harold Budd, Roger Eno, David Torn, Steve Jansen, Richard Barbieri) are some of the finest that were working in the 80s and 90s "alternative" music scene that was more focused on musical and sound explorations. "Marco Polo" is very listenable, creating a musical voyage that suggests destinations without overt musical cues (like a Japanese flute or Buddhists chanting to make it sound Asian). Very subtle, the music often unfolds gracefully, introducing elements of dischord like sax as contrast.

Harpsichordist Martha Cook here records Bach's Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080 (The Art of the Fugue), with a specific interpretive framework in mind. The work, Cook believes, was devotional and intimate in intent; it is, she writes, a "musical prayer," and it embodies the parables and exhortation found in the biblical Book of Luke, 14:27-35. Interested readers are invited to consult the booklet for more details. Making the supposition work involves discarding the version of the work published after Bach's death by C.P.E. Bach and others, and it also involves some of the numerology that so often seems to crop up in connection with Bach's larger works. There's some justification in earlier German music for regarding Bach's instrumental music in this programmatic way; Bach would have known the Biblische Historien keyboard sonatas of 1700 by one of his key predecessors, Johann Kuhnau. But what's missing is any evidence of why Bach, by the end of his life a revered figure, might have wanted to embed secret messages in Die Kunst der Fuge. The unalloyed good news is that you can disregard the stated method of interpretation and listen to the performance in the abstract. It's very powerful.