A White Sport Coat And A Pink Crustacean (1973). While it still lies much closer to Nashville than Key West (like in the boisterous slide guitar solo that lights up "The Great Filling Station Holdup"), Jimmy Buffett's A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean does begin to delineate the blowsy, good-timin' Key West persona that would lead him to summer tour stardom and the adoration of millions of drinking buddies everywhere. "Why Don't We Get Drunk," "Railroad Lady," and "Grapefruit - Juicy Fruit" rightly became crowd pleasers. But Buffett reveals himself a storyteller with the touching sigh of "He Went to Paris," where a slide guitar appears again to lend a subtle gleam to the arrangement, or in the gorgeous, sweetly sad tale of a passed-away poet's unlikely posthumous success…

Though an expectedly eclectic mix of blues, calypso, Caribbean music, and bits of reggae, disco, and other pop forms, Music Fuh Ya (Musica Para Tu) was not one of Mahal's more inspired outings. No one could criticize Mahal for lack of ambition in his efforts to integrate more styles into the folk-blues blend at the core of his music. But the surfeit of instrumentation, particularly the steel drums, were sometimes distractions more than enhancements, resulting in a forced, slick party atmosphere to cuts like "You Got It." Something like a cover of the blues-folk classic "Freight Train" plays much more to Mahal's strengths, but the trimmings of jazzy sax and steel drums aren't necessary when Taj alone could do a more convincing version…

Scott LaFaro left us a very small number of recordings due to his unexpected and untimely death in 1961. He was a genius who developed a revolutionary way of playing the bass. Whether a studio or live recording, they are all worth listening to. This album consists of three ABC "Stars of Jazz" TV programs as well as a very rare rehearsal session at Bob Andrews' Recordville, the record store belonging to Andrews, the famous devotee of the West Coast jazz scene. All are 1958 performances while Scott was with the Victor Feldman group.

A German band formed in 1978 largely of musicians from the Giessen region, Anabis produced three studio albums before disbanding in 1988. The band's music has proven somewhat difficult to classify, with a psychedelic element that has been compared to fellow countrymen Eloy, and a singer (Holger Sann) who has engendered comparisons to the theatrics of Gabriel-era Genesis.

Experimental musician Claire Rousay and visual artist Dani Toral have been in each others’ orbit since young adulthood in San Antonio, but it took a decade for them to find A Softer Focus. Before Rousay had put her compositional gray matter to task for the album’s music, she knew she wanted to work with Toral- being familiar with her past work centering her Mexican heritage. Toral’s vibrant color palette and reinterpretations of comfort in oneself and the natural, vegetative world connected easily with her explorations in communication and intimacy. Historically, Rousay primarily operated in non-melodic experimental music, sculpting compositions from obsessive field recordings, inserting voice-to-text, percussion played via text message sounds, conversations, and daily life…