When Willie Nelson took the unexpected step of releasing Stardust in 1978, many predicted that the album of popular standards would severely derail the outlaw country singer's career. Confounding the critics, the disc became Nelson's best-selling effort, and spawned a whole subgenre of modern singers covering the classics. Nelson revisited the format with 1994's orchestral Healing Hands of Time and to varying degrees on several other records, but it wasn't until 2009's American Classic that the red-headed stranger delivered an album billed as the true follow-up to Stardust. Released on the venerable Blue Note label, the disc features guest appearances by superstar jazz singers Norah Jones and Diana Krall, but the focus is always placed squarely on Nelson's famously idiosyncratic vocals…

Excellent Underrated AOR album from English Songwriter / Musician Adrian Gurvitz, Released in 1979 on JET label.

Museo Rosenbach is an Italian progressive band, best known for their 1973 release Zarathustra, a concept album freely inspired by the controversial works of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’. Unfortunately, at the time of its release, the album was widely disregarded because of the far right-wing views found within the Nietzsche-inspired lyrics. The band suffered for their political ideals, which prevented them from getting the kind of attention they deserved. Museo’s musical palette contained a dash of Banco, ELP and Van Der Graaf Generator. Comparisons to early King Crimson are also inevitable; this is symphonic progressive rock with a rough edge. While the group’s particular brand was less experimental than a lot of Italian prog, their compositions were equally challenging constructions, filled with time changes and eccentricities. Something is always happening.

If blues musicians took up residency in Vegas during the late '50s, it might come out sounding like this. Brown's gleeful run through myriad blues related styles (gospel, R&B, doo wop, New Orleans, early rock & roll) casts a vaudevillian sheen over many of the 16 tracks here, placing the performance squarely in the realm of Louis Jordan's own showy style. The fact Brown had a very brief hour in the sun with his unexpected 1959 hit "Fannie Mae" further indicates his pop approach to blues probably was better suited to the lounges of the chitlin circuit than the main venues of blues and rock & roll. His almost perfunctory versions of war horses like "St. Louis Blues" and "Blueberry Hill" reveal the downside the situation. But he does have his moments, particularly when he plies a hard, Chicago blues groove à la Little Walter on cuts like "Don't Dog Your Woman"; his harmonica sound borrows from both Walter and Sonny Terry…

An artist whose music is at once timeless yet utterly of its time, Gregory Porter solidifies his standing as his generation’s most soulful jazz singer-songwriter with the May 6 release of Take Me to the Alley, the much-anticipated follow-up to his million-selling Grammy-winning 2013 Blue Note debut Liquid Spirit. The album pre-order has launched today along with the release of two singles—“Holding On” and “Don’t Lose Your Steam”.

This, the second release of the highly anticipated Retrospect Ensemble series, features the Easter Oratorio, one of Bach's best-known oratorios and a monumental work, as well as the Ascension Oratorio. Retrospect Ensemble employs large-scale forces for this recording including four-part choir and orchestra (including timpani). This dynamic recording highlights the skill and brilliance of Bach's writing through the inspired story telling of its star soloists and the passion of the Ensemble.

This is a searing art rock monsterpiece dominated by a relentlessly coruscating lead guitar sonic attack as if played by a demonically possessed john mc laughlin, Flux is ex Babe Ruth, ex Motiffe, with lead guitar by john grimaldi before he joined Argent and worked on their prog masterpiece Circus. This LP is taken from a mono mastertape recorded on a BBC Mobile Unit at a live gig in 1973, a shocked Record Mirror journalist witnessed the concert and described it in a published Record Mirror review as ‘a new form of music’. Sound quality is great and this is a band in top form playing exactly what they want, in a zone a bit like King Crimsons Red, but with insane guitar leads that bludgeon the listener to death. The vocalist later joined italian prog rockers Flea On The Honey.

For his 1981 eponymous release Fabrizio De André picks off where his last album Rimini had left. Pursuing the fruitful collaboration with Massimo Bubola, with whom De André co-wrote the totality of the material, this album extends the country & western musical and thematic references introduced in Rimini into a full-blown analogy between two oppressed communities, the Native American Indians and the Sardinians. In fact, the record is usually referred to as "Indiano," since its cover features a Frederick Remington painting of a Sioux hunter on a horse. In addition, the key track " "Fiume Sand Creek" depicts the harrowing massacre of his tribe at the hands of the U.S. Cavalry through the eyes of an Indian child. Based on an actual historical event, this song became a De André concert staple…

Jim Hall is no stranger to guitar/bass duets after several memorable outings with the likes of Ron Carter and Red Mitchell, but this series of studio sessions is even more challenging, mixing it up in pairings with Dave Holland, Christian McBride, Charlie Haden, George Mraz, and Scott Colley. Only three of the 13 pieces are standards, including a soft and sparse treatment of "All the Things You Are" with Mraz, a whisper-soft and slowly savored "Don't Explain" with Haden, and a switch to acoustic guitar for a tense "Besame Mucho" with Colley. Hall's skills as a composer are vastly underrated by the jazz audience as a whole, but his fellow players recognize his formidable skills. He makes a relatively rare appearance on a 12-string acoustic guitar in his challenging opener, "End the Beguine," in which he and Holland rise to the demands of this captivating piece…

On this recording, from 1985, multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus takes his listeners on a journey guided mainly by his incredible playing on a guitar that he disgned, custom-built by master luthier Manuel Diaz of Granada, Spain. It is a unique instrument that allows the player to customize the string array to suit his mood and the piece to be performed.
On this outing, Micus fits it with 10 single-course strings for the first half of the album, the title track 'East of the night'. He accompanies his guitar on this piece with two groups of shakuhaci (the Japanese bamboo flute used by Zen monks in meditation), a pair and a group of four. The effect is simply beautiful - the guitar is used as a base for the gentle, soaring melodies carried by the shakuhachi, making the piece a transporting tribute to the dawn (as another reviewer astutely related the title)…

The four-disc box set Dear Mr. Fantasy digs deep into Jim Capaldi’s legacy, providing a thorough overview of the musician best known as Steve Winwood’s sparring partner in Traffic. Appropriately, there is a hefty chunk of Traffic here along with a good sampling of his solo albums, plus a fair number of rarities ranging from his first group the Hellions to the pre-Traffic bands Revolution and Deep Feeling and a previously unreleased collaboration with George Harrison called “Love’s Got a Hold of Me.” It’s a generous set that will satisfy the devoted while providing several surprises to those who have looked no deeper than Traffic but were always curious about what else Capaldi had to offer.

While it isn't Handel's most obscure opera (hum a few bars from Catone, anyone?), Siroe, Re di Persia is definitely on the margins. It's hard to say why exactly, although the unflatteringly edited Metastasio libretto (by Nicola Haym) is surely part of the reason; the character and conflict development of the original are largely missing from the version Handel set. But the music is Handel at his best, and let's face it: from the perspective of a modern listener, plot is not the main draw of opera seria. With that in mind, Harmonia Mundi's complete recording, with Andreas Spering and the Cappella Coloniensis, is an excellent first step toward giving Siroe wider exposure. It's well played, thoughtfully conducted, and it features an excellent trio of leading ladies.

For more than two centuries Naples was a province of Spain, and after this ended in 1707 the remarkable cross-fertilisation of culture between them did not stop. Much of the Italian music featured here has been edited from sources in Spanish collections. The vast bulk of it is devoted to Leonardo Vinci (one of the most celebrated Italian opera composers of the 1720s). Only one short piece tacked onto the end is actually Spanish: a colourful fandango from José de Nebra's zarzuela Vendado es amor,no es ciego (1744) in which three singers mockingly compare the squabbling goddesses of classical antiquity to bickering mothers-in-law.