This album came about through a fortuitous convergence of circumstances. Shelly Manne & His Men were appearing at New York's Village Vanguard, sharing the bill with the Bill Evans Trio. Getting Riverside's permission to let the pianist participate, Creed Taylor set up a session at Rudy Van Gelder's studio with Evans and Manne sharing top billing. Manne's bass player, Monty Budwig, made up the trio.

Rufus Wainwright celebrates the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare s death in typically dramatic fashion by releasing a unique collection of nine sonnets in stunning performances by both actors and vocalists.

After the success of For ever Fortune, early music from Scotland, François Lazarevitch continues his exploration of the Celtic repertories with a new programme devoted to early Irish music. This repertory of old airs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries consists of dances, songs in Gaelic and varied instrumental pieces: they tell tales of wars, of love, of strong drink and tobacco, of children and bards.

Tarkus is the second studio album by the English progressive rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer, released in June 1971 on Island Records. Following their 1970 European tour, the group returned to Advision Studios in January 1971 to prepare material for a new album. The first side is the seven-part "Tarkus", with a collection of shorter tracks on side two.

World-renowned as one of experimental music's most vital and impressionistic composers of the past few decades, William Basinski’s tape loop works have been especially influential, particularly on the historic series, The Disintegration Loops, where distorted, orchestral tape samples burrow deep into the listener's psyche through meditative repetition. On his new album, A Shadow in Time, Basinski plunges deeper than ever for the plaintive, solitary eulogy to David Bowie, aptly titled For David Robert Jones.

Pictures at an Exhibition is a live album by the English progressive rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer, released in November 1971 on Island Records. It is a recording of the band's arrangement of Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky, performed at Newcastle City Hall on 26 March 1971 during their 1971 tours. Emerson wished to arrange the piece after seeing an orchestral performance of it several years before. He bought a copy of the score, and pitched the idea to Lake and Palmer, who agreed to adapt it.

Time Out of Mind is Bob Dylan's 30th studio album and was originally released on September 30, 1997. His first double studio album since Self Portrait in 1970, the album marked Dylan's artistic comback after struggling with his musical identity for many years. Time Out of Mind went on to win three Grammy Awards (Album of the Year, Best Contemporary Folk Album, and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for "Cold Irons Bound") in 1998. The album was certified Gold in the UK and Platinum in the US, and peaked at #10 on the US charts.

Although it features the beautiful recorder of Leslie Penny and the Chieftains' Paddy Maloney playing the uilean pipe, Ommadawn didn't gain Mike Oldfield the success he was looking for. The album was released in the same year as the David Bedford-arranged Orchestral Tubular Bells and nine months after Oldfield picked up a Grammy award for the original Tubular Bells album. The most pleasing attribute of Ommadawn is its incorporation of both African and Irish music in its symphonic rock & roll mainframe.

By the beginning of 1965, Reprise Records had adjusted itself to the commercial success Dean Martin had begun to enjoy in the spring of 1964 with his hit recording of "Everybody Loves Somebody." Dean Martin Hits Again was the label's first album to be constructed entirely by Jimmy Bowen, producer of that hit, and Ernie Freeman, who had arranged and conducted it, and they used the same arranging formula that had worked before, employing a 4/4 beat, piano triplets, female backup vocals, and swooping string effects to the songs here. In attempting to keep up with demand, Reprise had recycled old songs on Martin's last two albums…

Dean Martin's first album for pal Frank Sinatra's Reprise label was ignored at the time of its initial 1962 release, but it's one of his lighthearted best. As you'd imagine from the leering cover shot of Martin in a beret, French Style is a breezy and tongue-in-cheek but ultimately romantic collection of American standards about Paris and actual French favorites such as "La Vie en Rose." It would still be a couple of years until Martin would be a major seller for Reprise, but the material on the album is actually much better than his later MOR hits. Neal Hefti, the excellent big band arranger who helped craft Count Basie's streamlined "atomic" style, handles the lounge-y charts, but they're in a swank lounge style…

Occasionally, records are released which are an instant game changer: albums so profoundly innovative and compelling in their conception, construction and delivery that they are immediately essential. "The Stone House Sessions" is just such a release. And it was recorded live in the studio with no overdubs and completely improvised, with no music written down or rehearsed. The album features two of today's most original, ingenious and decidedly "risk taking" electric guitar proponents, easily among the instrument's most vital new voices: the UK's Mark Wingfield (Jane Chapman; solo artist, and; one half of the long-running guitar duo, with acoustic maestro, Kevin Kastning), and Germany's Markus Reuter (Stick Men; The Crimson ProjeKct; Centrozoon)…