Imagine a hard bop jam session featuring three tenor sax greats: Johnny Griffin, Hank Mobley and John Coltrane. Add Lee Morgan on trumpet and propel them with the rhythm section of Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bas and Art Blakey on drums.

Why imagine it, when that's what's on this double slab of 45rpm 180g RTI mono vinyl originally issued in 1957?

Are there players alive today who can deliver this level of muscular musical energy? I'm not sure but I don't think so!

Does it matter that the rattle and phlegm in Bob Dylan's voice makes it sound as if your midrange driver has blown? No. Hell no. In fact, despite the ragged vocals and 50 years since his debut, this is Dylan's best album in quite some time.

How can Dylan's voice matter now when it didn't all those years ago? It's ironic that some critics complain about the voice now because that's what other critics did back then. They are misguided now as they were then.

Bob Dylan cracks himself up performing some of these songs. Producer Tom Wilson must have gotten it, but recording engineers Roy Halee and Fred Catero might have been ready to stop the tape. After all, this was staid, but still pre-corporate Columbia Records. It was “straight” and at that point Halee was more experienced recording Percy Faith than Bob.

Columbia had never signed anyone like Dylan. Not that anyone else had, either; the closest being signings by Folkways or Vanguard, but those were obscure, record company blips.

Brian Eno's early influences include John Cage, Steve Reich and other minimalists. He was more art than rocker. In 1971 when he joined forces with Bryan Ferry's Roxy Music he was more a knob twiddler than a musician. He worked saxophonist Andy Mackay's VCS3 synthesizer and along with a pair of Revox A77s provided the electronic sounds and "tape treatments" that on the group's first two albums, helped create Roxy Music's unique sound.

The great Mexican-American roots-rocker Alejandro Escovedo is back with yet another great, hard rocking yet deeply thoughtful album, his second with veteran producer Tony Visconti. Visconti goes all the way back to David Bowie's epic The Man Who Sold the World and if you hear echoes of that album on some tracks here, like the haunting background voices on "Sally Was a Cop", the album's most powerful song, it's not a coincidence.