Eric Reed has recorded close to 30 accomplished leader albums showcasing his virtuosic chops, intellectual clarity, unwavering will to swing, and ability to refract and coalesce a wide range of musical, spiritual, and personal influences into a single stream of consciousness. Perhaps the most personal of them all is For Such a Time as This. It is a powerful and uplifting program framed by the realities of global pandemic anxiety, persistent racism and racial injustice, and an acrimonious, fraught Presidential election season.

With his new international album, Peace In Africa, Senegalese singer and multi-instrumentalist, Cheikh Ibra Fam adds nuance to the broad spectrum African world music’s rich tradition.

Karuna is one of the strongest efforts in Nawang Khechog's discography. It is also the Sanskrit word for compassion, a concept at the very heart of all Tibetan culture. Kitaro produced the disc and graced it with two guest performances on the synth. The rest of the music is acoustic. Khechog performed it all on ancient ethnic instruments from Tibet, Africa, Australia, Japan, and Native America. The nature sounds are field recordings, not samples. That is a lot of background information, and this CD merits such. It is full of spiritual atmospheres that weave across and through each other to form reverent soundscapes. In his time as a monk, Khechog learned how to convey his spirituality in his music. He spent four years as a hermit, and music was his only audible prayer. This deep soulful music is best when experienced alone, in contemplation or meditation. It will appeal to fans of Gregorian and Tibetan chants, Riley Lee, Klaus Wiese, and Karma Moffett.

Toby Keith jumped from Mercury to DreamWorks after his fourth album, Dream Walkin' and How Do You Like Me Now?!, his first effort for his new album, finds the singer/songwriter revived and refreshed, shaking loose some of the sleepiness of his two albums for Mercury. Not that he's given up slower tunes – he still has a keen ear for sensitive love songs and heartbreak sagas, manifesting in both the light, sweet "Heart to Heart (Stelen's Song)" and power ballads like "When Love Fades" – but there is a bit of a showy defiance here, best heard on the hit title track, "Die with Your Boots On" and the rocking "Country Comes to Town."

While virtually unknown in the U.S., pop singer Jennifer Rush achieved superstar status as an expatriate in Europe, selling millions of records and releasing a string of hit singles notable for their booming, dance-rock arrangements and Rush's powerful voice. Born Heidi Stern in New York City, Rush's father was an opera singer and her mother was a pianist. At the age of nine, she moved to Germany with her family, returning in her teens to the States. In 1982, she returned to Germany with her father to pursue a singing career, signing a deal with CBS/Columbia. Changing her name to Jennifer Rush, she released a series of songs that made her a star in Europe, including "Into My Dreams," "Come Give Me Your Hand," "25 Lovers," and "Ring of Ice."

Throughout their career, Rush have always been a band that you could count on to push the boundaries of what rock was capable of, and their discography contains a laundry list of ambitious albums that helped to bring prog to a wider audience. Having said that, Presto is not one of those albums. On this return to a more guitar-oriented sound after the synth period that dominated the '80s, the bandmembers emerge from the electronic fog and try to reorient themselves to once again working with their more traditional setup. While none of the songs here are out-and-out terrible, listening to the album definitely gives you the sense that things just aren't quite clicking, as if the band is just a little bit rusty after stepping away from this kind of songwriting for nearly a decade…

Released as part of Union Square's The Soho Collection, The Golden Years of Frank Sinatra is a triple-disc set of highlights from Sinatra's recordings for Columbia from the '30s and '40s. The set is assembled into three thematic CDs: the first is "Romantic," the second "Swing," the third "The Crooner." It's a good way to organize the material, which does contain a lot of familiar but classic versions of standards, and helps make this a worthwhile budget-priced collection of Sinatra's early years.

One of the outstanding composers of his day, Johann Adolph Hasse was seen as possessing “the same qualities of true genius, taste and judgment” as his librettist Pietro Metastasio. Didone abbandonata represents the once hugely popular 18th-century genre of opera seria, exploring the same tragic story as Purcell’s earlier Dido and Aeneas while expanding the heroine’s conflicts between regal duties, love, and helplessness in the face of desertion.

With this exciting release, Fabio Biondi, the outstanding Europa Galante, and a cast led by stars Véronique Gens and Vivica Genaux strike a decisive blow for Alessandro Scarlatti's obscure Oratorio per la Santissima Trinità. Old-fashioned even in its day, the work is a musicalized instructional debate about the mysteries of the Holy Trinity between the allegorical personae of Faith, Theology, Faithlessness, Time, and Divine Love. If you're asleep already, it's for good reason. The libretto is the definition of dry – boring both for its rhetorical contrivance and its verbosity. But before you run for the nearest exit, know that Scarlatti responded to this uninspired mess of ideological bickering with outstanding music, entertaining from beginning to end. Drawing only on a small ensemble of strings and continuo, he created an improbably diverse-sounding score full of infectious rhythms, appealing vocal melodies, and rich textures.

This was Jimmy's best selling album ever but the title is very misleading in that these are all studio recordings, not live recordings, which means they weren't recorded at Carnegie Hall, but the tracks are in the order he performed them at a Carnegie Hall concert one week prior to recording the first dozen in the studio of this double album. This is actually the first time all of the original master tapes of this album were used as the songs recorded in mono were on all previous issues in rechanneled stereo while the true stereo tracks on this disc have always been in true stereo on every release. Steve Hoffman searched high and low for the first generation tapes of each song on the album in the Vee Jay vaults and as a result, Audio Fidelity has issued the definitive release of the album. Audiophiles and casual blues fans who like quality sound must pick up this issue of Jimmy Reed At Carnegie Hall as it contains most of his biggest hits in the best possible quality sound due to the work of Steve Hoffman.