Kathy Mattea has always teetered on the Nashville edge with her music. On Roses, her 13th studio album, she pushes the envelope, bringing to the forefront the blending of the Scottish/Irish music found in small doses on her last few albums. "That's All the Lumber You Sent," the first track, screams Celtic, as does the instrumental "Isle of Inishmore." But whatever the musical style, brooding and contemplative lyrics accompany all of the tracks. Mattea's warm alto voice comes across opulently in "The Slender Threads That Bind Us Here" and the Kim Richey remake "I'm Alright." This album isn't the country music of the former Grammy-winner and CMA vocalist of the year, but it wins high marks for creative expression and originality.

One Step at a Time is the second solo studio album from legendary Satus Quo front man Francis Rossi. Francis has long been regarded as one of the finest Rock performers that the UK has ever produced and his songwriting has been duly recognized by the Classic Songwriter Award and the BRIT Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. Released 14 years after his only previous solo album, One Step at a Time is a hugely entertaining set and offers an insight into another facet of Rock's great frontmen. Francis is famous for his dry wit and lyrical dash, and this album offers a chance to get up close and personal. Includes the single, 'Faded Memory'.

The Supremes, the most commercially successful girl group in pop history, were one of the jewels in Motown Records' artist stable. Given wonderful material by Motown's amazing songwriters, the group scored numerous number one pop hits, as did singer Diana Ross when she left the group and went solo, and Motown's bright, modern, and uptown image as a label had a lot to do with way these ladies gracefully and elegantly presented themselves and took over a song. Dozen of those number one hits, both as the Supremes and as Ross solo, are collected here, including the timeless classics "Come See About Me," "You Can't Hurry Love," "You Keep Me Hangin' On," and "Stop! In the Name of Love."

South African expatriate Jonathan Butler isn't really a jazz artist, but his laid-back, slightly jazz-tinged approach to R&B/pop has earned the singer/guitarist/songwriter/producer a lot of supporters in the urban contemporary, adult contemporary, quiet storm, and smooth jazz/NAC markets. Butler has enjoyed a following since the late '70s, although he reached his commercial peak in the late '80s, and he continues to tour and record in the 21st century. Born in Cape Town, South Africa in October 1961, Butler was only a child when he started singing and playing acoustic guitar. Butler, who was the youngest of about 12 children, absorbed a variety of music when he was a kid. He was an admirer of South African stars like singer Miriam Makeba, but he was also hip to the American soul and jazz artists who lived thousands of miles away in the United States.

Since 2004's Player!, blues-centric guitarist/vocalist Nick Curran left his record label, joined up with Kim Wilson's latest incarnation of the Fabulous T-Birds, performed with his own punk-blues combo Deguello, and basically rumbled and tumbled through a number of sundry side projects, all the while eschewing the solo career that led to him taking home the 2004 W.C. Handy Award for Best New Artist Debut. Clearly, this allowed the ever-musically voracious Curran a chance to stretch his chops and imbibe more of the vast array of influences that spark his interests, from '40s jump blues and '50s rock & roll, to '70s punk and '80s hard rock. All of which Curran brings to bear on his fiendishly inspired, 2010 solo comeback Reform School Girl. A fiery, campy, and insanely rockin' album, Reform School Girl sounds like something along the lines of Little Richard backed by the Misfits with Phil Spector recording the proceedings in his garage.

Modernizing the harmony vocal pop of '30s and '40s groups like the Andrews Sisters, London's Puppini Sisters took the name of Marcella Puppini, who founded the act after being inspired by the music in the film The Triplets of Belleville. Puppini, a native of Bologna, Italy, moved to London in 1990 to study fashion and quickly became immersed in the city's music scene. Though she had a career at Vivienne Westwood's design studio, she left to focus on music, and in 2003 earned a music degree at Trinity College of Music. Jazz was her passion, and Puppini spent time as the musical director and orchestra conductor for the Whoopee Club, as well as leading her own quartet.

Johann Mattheson is one of the most frequently quoted writers about music in history. It is not often that in programme notes of discs with German music of the 18th century he is not mentioned. He was a productive writer, wether it be about performance practice or matters of style and taste. And he also was a keen observer of the musical developments in his time. In his writings he didn't hide his aesthetic preferences. Whereas a contemporary like Johann Sebastian Bach made frequent use of counterpoint, Mattheson stated unequivocally that the very foundation of music was melody.

Mozart was still in nappies at the time when Haydn more or less single-handedly invented the string quartet. Nearly half a century later, as he struggled - and failed - to complete his last quartet, Beethoven was already at work on his Eroica Symphony. In the interim, Haydn wrote considerably more quartet masterpieces than Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert put together, raising the medium to a level of sophistication, subtlety and originality that provided a yardstick for all later composers. Mind you, it took him some time to get there: it isn't until the eighth CD of this set that we reach the first of the unequivocally great works, the six quartets which make up Op. 20.

The choral music of Galina Grigorjeva – born in Simferopol in Ukraine in 1962 and based in Tallinn, in Estonia, since 1994 – is deeply rooted in the traditions of the Orthodox Church and in ancient Russian and Slavonic folklore. Although clearly by a contemporary composer, her works have a timeless, even hypnotic, quality that seems to reach back through the ages. She has been working with the Estonian National Male Choir – one of the finest in a country full of choirs – for some years now, and some of the works here were composed or arranged specifically for this recording.

Vocalist/cornet player Al Basile's longtime friend Duke Robillard gets front cover billing, as well he should, as co-producer and guitarist on this impressive outing. The album, Basile's fifth, was even recorded at the guitarist's Pawtucket, RI studio called the Mood Room, hence the album's title. Musically, it's a combination of old-school R&B ("Baby Sister," "Be a Woman"), swamp-tinged rock & roll ("I'm in a Mood"), mid-tempo, Chuck Berry styled groovers ("Coffee and Cadillacs"), grinding blues ("Picked to Click") and even a jump blues throwback to the duo's Roomful of Blues days ("She's on the Mainline"). Robillard keeps the sound full yet stripped down – most of the tracks feature a standard three-piece – bass/drums/guitar setup – which leaves space for Basile's sly vocals and snappy lyrics. Basile, a teacher and fiction author who also has a Master's degree in creative writing, not surprisingly crafts lyrics that are far more imaginative and original than most blues artists'. But they never detract from these melodies that glide along sparked by Robillard's tasty licks.