This psychedelic noise-rock band from Japan is  definitely not for everyone but if your tastes run towards free-jazz when you think of jazz and you find the opening of Axis: Bold As Love structurally symphonic, you will surely dig Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso  U.F.O. and this album in particular, which definitely has a Hendrix vibe, right down to the cover art that has lettering like Are You Experience and some scantily clad gals like the UK Track edition of Electric Ladyland  that Jimi hated. 

Kitsch fans alert! This obscure 1960 oddity by composer/arranger Bob Thompson consists of a dozen short, lushly orchestrated impressions of various forms of transportation, each introduced with a stereo high-fidelity sound effect recording of a train, ocean liner, motor scooter, sports car, Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, or what have you.

Sadly, during the early '60s Muddy Waters and other Chicago blues masters were better known to white English youth than to their American counterparts. Mick and Keith weren't alone in their fandom. Search YouTube and you'll find an amazing Howlin' Wolf performance before an adoring audience of well-scrubbed English white kids that was probably never repeated in America where blues was dubbed "race music" and relegated  to the ghettos.

More mysterious and less of a head-bobber than the pop fave The Sidewinder, Search For The New Land is the one to have if you’re going to have but one Lee Morgan Blue Note (too bad, though if you’re only going to have one).

Joni Mitchell’s move to jazz on this 1974 game changer upset her hippie contingent, who wished she’d remained a “lady of the canyon,” and it didn’t exactly thrill fans who considered themselves jazz aficionados either—not with the likes of “jazz-lite” guys like Tom Scott, Joe Sample, Wilton Felder and Larry Carlton involved.

Like Elton and Leon, Duke and Coleman were long-time mutual admirers but somehow had never worked together until late in their careers. This session, long in the making, took place on August 28^th 1962 and was released the next February.

Ellington brought with him to Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio his rhythm section of Aaron Bell on bass and Sam Woodyard on drums plus a small group of big-banders: Ray Nance on cornet and violin, Lawrence Brown on trombone and Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney on saxophones.

It’s difficult to believe this November 18^th, 1993 Sony Music Studios performance is almost seventeen years old. Though it aired on MTV a month later, it wasn’t issued on vinyl or CD until November 1^st, 1994, six months after Kurt Cobain’s suicide.

While the timing helped propel the album up the charts, its  enduring popularity is due in large part to Cobain’s eclectic and well-timed programming and of course to the rare chance to hear the group perform in an intimate live venue. 

Clearly, releasing this as a double 180g vinyl set  was an act of musical idealism and not because someone at Mobile Fidelity thought vinyl fans and audiophiles were clamoring for it.

Pilgrimage is tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker’s final recording, issued after his untimely passing in 2007 at the age of 57 from myelodysplastic syndrome—a rare form of Leukemia.

Clearly, releasing this as a double 180g vinyl set  was an act of musical idealism and not because someone at Mobile Fidelity thought vinyl fans and audiophiles were clamoring for it.

Rock ‘n’ roll historians invariably trace the roots of the now-expansive, constantly morphing music to a Mississippi bluesman named Robert Johnson, a 1930s guitarist who ostensibly made a deal with the devil – trading his mortal soul for stellar talent - one night at a rural intersection (a “crossroads”). Johnson’s canon of songs, bolstered by his pioneer legacy and dark mythology, is embraced universally as being instrumental to the very structure of rock ‘n’ roll.