Universal’s 2012 collection Icon is a 19-track overview of the Cranberries’, offering all their biggest hits – “Dreams,” “Linger,” “Zombie,” “Salvation,” “Ode to My Family,” “Ridiculous Thoughts” – and digging into some album tracks, resulting in a good sampler of the band at its peak.

The seminal San Francisco psychedelic band in the heyday of such things, Jefferson Airplane were sassy, political, and generally engaging. The band then morphed into Jefferson Starship, which was a whole other thing, a more polished band aiming at the pop charts. Eventually Jefferson Starship became just Starship, although the sound stayed aimed at the charts. This two-disc set combines the best tracks from all of these incarnations, which is a good thing if one is a fan of all of the approaches here, but not such a good thing if, like many, one prefers one version of the band to the other two.

On his third album, Jackson Browne returned to the themes of his debut record (love, loss, identity, apocalypse) and, amazingly, delved even deeper into them. "For a Dancer," a meditation on death like the first album's "Song for Adam," is a more eloquent eulogy; "Farther On" extends the "moving on" point of "Looking Into You"; "Before the Deluge" is a glimpse beyond the apocalypse evoked on "My Opening Farewell" and the second album's "For Everyman." If Browne had seemed to question everything in his first records, here he even questioned himself. "For me some words come easy, but I know that they don't mean that much," he sang on the opening track, "Late for the Sky," and added in "Farther On," "I'm not sure what I'm trying to say." Yet his seeming uncertainty and self-doubt reflected the size and complexity of the problems he was addressing in these songs, and few had ever explored such territory, much less mapped it so well. "The Late Show," the album's thematic center, doubted but ultimately affirmed the nature of relationships, while by the end, "After the Deluge," if "only a few survived," the human race continued nonetheless. It was a lot to put into a pop music album, but Browne stretched the limits of what could be found in what he called "the beauty in songs," just as Bob Dylan had a decade before.

Modern Art is the prelude recording for Art Farmer prior to his partnership with Benny Golson in the Jazztet, and also foreshadows the classy, tasteful inventiveness that group brought to the modern jazz world two years after this 1958 session. Pianist Bill Evans is in here, just before his pivotal work with Miles Davis on the classic album Kind of Blue, and was the table setter for McCoy Tyner's membership in the Jazztet. Brother Addison Farmer on bass and the great drummer Dave Bailey round out this sterling quintet that specializes in playing music with a subtle approach, which is neither tame nor conservatively lazy. Included on this date is the great Junior Mance tune "Jubilation," perfectly understated in a light gospel, soul-jazz, tuneful melody with both horns wonderfully matched up in balanced unison, side by side.

To Our Children's Children's Children is the fifth album by the Moody Blues, released in November 1969. The album was the first released on the group's newly formed Threshold record label, which was named after the band's previous album from the same year, On the Threshold of a Dream. It was inspired by the 1969 Moon landing. Drummer Graeme Edge remembers, "It was a very exciting time. Man had just gone to the moon and we thought of the album as a sort of time capsule - all our thoughts and feelings about living in such an epoch-making era." Keyboardist Mike Pinder adds, "To me, we were creating a rocket for every person who wants to go to the moon but couldn't, and would get to do so with the earphones on or the stereo turned up, lying on their backs on the carpet." The album was one of those listened to, on cassette tape, by the crew of Apollo 15 in 1971.

Michel Legrand's LaserLight CD boasts quite an all-star band (trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, trombonist Bill Watrous, altoist Bud Shank, Buddy Collette and Hubert Laws on flutes, guitarist John Pisano, bassist Brian Bromberg, drummer Peter Erskine, and the leader/pianist) but is surprisingly (and disappointingly) relaxed. The emphasis is on ballads, Legrand sings two dramatic pieces that are outside of jazz, and none of the solos are all that memorable. Sandoval is overly restrained and, even with some strong moments from Watrous and Laws, this session does not reach the heights one would expect from this cast of musical personalities.

Bill Evans – At the BBC Studios, 1965 is a remarkable never-before-released document capturing the Bill Evans Trio during a pivotal moment in the pianist’s career. Recorded at the BBC Studios in London in 1965, this historic session features Bill Evans (piano) alongside Chuck Israels (bass) and Larry Bunker (drums), offering a revealing portrait of one of jazz’s most influential trios. Transferred from the original BBC tapes and mastered by Matthew Lutthans at The Mastering Lab.

The album functions as a follow-up collection gathering rare maxi-single versions, alternative versions, and modern remixes of his classic synth-pop and Euro-disco hits. It was distributed as a CD compilation, primarily circulating through boutique European dance music outlets and collector platforms like Discogs.

After a seven-year hiatus, Graham Nash returned to his solo career on Earth & Sky. While much of the material may have originated as an on-again/off-again collaboration with David Crosby (guitar/vocals), by the time the LP hit the racks in 1980 there were only traces of Crosby's input scattered throughout. One primary contribution highlighting the pair is the organic and acoustic "Out on the Island," and is likewise one of the best sides of the effort. In support of Nash is an all-star ensemble centering on the infamous "Mighty Jitters": Russ Kunkel (drums/percussion), Tim Drummond (bass), Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar (guitars), David Lindley (guitar/violin/vocals), and Craig Doerge (keyboards). The opening title cut, "Earth & Sky" has the earmark of a mid-tempo Jackson Browne rocker and boasts a tasty guitar lead from Joe Walsh.

Not long after the 1994 release of Plugged In, Dave Edmunds chose to tune out, slowly winding his way back to his native Wales, where he essentially acted as a hermit. Occasionally, he'd show up on-stage – or on Jools Holland's Later – but his active career essentially ceased, punctuated by the live album A Pile of Rock (a title often recycled in his career) documenting a one-off European show from 1997, plus a 2000-era largely instrumental album called Musical Fantasies. With this in mind, the release of …Again in 2013 is big news: it appears to be his first new album in nearly two decades. This isn't the case. …Again is a curious thing, a 15-track collection that contains no less than nine of the 11 songs on 1994's Plugged In, along with "Return to Sender," his contribution to the Otis Blackwell tribute Brace Yourself (released in 1994, but recorded in 1991), plus five new songs. It's not quite enough to be considered a full-fledged comeback but it's slightly more than tossed-off bonus tracks, too, as these new contributions spin the Plugged In material in a slightly different direction.

Looking at the cover, which shows Michael and none of his four brothers, one wouldn’t get the idea that this three-disc set is two-thirds Jackson 5 material. While Michael obviously features prominently in the Jackson 5 songs on The Motown Years, he gets one disc to himself. Altogether, this box collects all the essential J5 and Michael singles and more, including 'ABC', 'Never Can Say Goodbye', 'I Found That Girl', 'I Am Love', 'The Love You Save', 'Ben', 'Rockin’ Robin', and 'I Wanna Be Where You Are'. Released in the U.K., it retails for the price of a single disc and is a convenient way to scoop up a large quantity of high-quality ‘70s pop-soul.

This 45-song, two-disc collection is subtitled "two decades of killer fretwork", and never was a set so aptly described. Chess Records was the home to seemingly every hot guitar player in the Chicago area, and many of them make their appearance here. Besides the usual label guitar hotshots (Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, Lowell Fulson, Earl Hooker, Otis Rush, Robert Nighthawk, Little Milton), space is given to sideman work from legends like Hubert Sumlin and Robert Jr. Lockwood and great one-offs by lesser-known artists like Jody Williams, Danny Overbea, Eddie Burns, Joe Hill Louis, Morris Pejoe, Lafayette Thomas and others. It seems as if everyone recorded for Chess at one time or another, also explaining the inclusion of tracks by John Lee Hooker, Albert King, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Lonnie Brooks, Hound Dog Taylor and Elmore James. If electric blues guitar's your thing, then look no further than this fine two-disc compilation.

This is the first of two CDs issued by Concord Jazz compiling some of the best tracks from Emily Remler's sessions for that label. Cut short at a far too early age by a heart condition while touring in Australia, Remler had all the talent necessary to carve herself a niche in the jazz world as a premier jazz guitar interpreter and performer. Retrospective, Vol. 1 is probably the superior of the two volumes, as it includes, among other gems, an enticing unaccompanied rendition of "Afro Blue." Remler had the ability to be expressively warm with a romantic ballad, as on "In a Sentimental Mood," but she excelled on tunes that allowed her to bring out her hard bop credentials, especially in the company of similarly tough-minded rhythm sections. She displays those credentials on several tracks, such as "Hot House" and "Daahoud," where she is joined by the inestimable Hank Jones on piano and Marvin "Smitty" Smith on drums. "Del Sasser" is the sole representative from that intriguing album she made with trumpet player John D'earth.

This is the 14th studio album released in 1982. Following the 1980 release of their previous album, "Conquest," four members, including Ken Hensley, left the band, which had been inactive. This album marks the return of the reformed Uriah Heep, led by the sole remaining member, Mick Box. While the musical style has changed, this album embodies a style that foreshadows what would later be known as melodic hard rock, and is a highly acclaimed masterpiece. This release features a paper sleeve, SHM-CD format, a 2026 remaster, and six bonus tracks!

Without Brian Eno, Roxy Music immediately became less experimental, yet they remained adventurous, as Stranded illustrates. Under the direction of Bryan Ferry, Roxy moved toward relatively straightforward territory, adding greater layers of piano and heavy guitars. Even without the washes of Eno's synthesizers, Roxy's music remains unsettling on occasion, yet in this new incarnation, they favor more measured material, whether it's the reflective "A Song for Europe" or the shifting textures of "Psalm." Even the rockers, such as the surging "Street Life" and the segmented "Mother of Pearl," are distinguished by subtle songwriting that emphasizes both Ferry's tortured glamour and Roxy's increasingly impressive grasp of sonic detail.