First and foremost, punters should be aware: Heritage of the Blues: Ridin' High Live is not a new live album by California bluesman Joe Louis Walker. This is a single-disc compilation from the two Live at Slim's dates in November of 1990 that were previously issued on Hightone. These sides have been remastered, and three unreleased tracks have been thrown in to the mix: "Alligator," "Prove Your Love," and "Personal Baby." That said, this is a very tight, completely rollicking set that showcases Walker at a turning point in his career when he was just becoming known on a national scale. His playing is fiery, raw, and stinging. His singing is full of emotion and good-natured blues grace, and his band kicks ass. The three new tracks do beg the question as to why they were left off the initial two albums, and revisiting "Don't Mess Up a Good Thing" with Texas blues and R&B goddess Angela Strehli still sends chills down the spine…

With Billion Dollar Babies, Alice Cooper refined the raw grit of their earlier work in favor of a slightly more polished sound (courtesy of super-producer Bob Ezrin), resulting in a mega-hit album that reached the top of the U.S. album charts. Song for song, Billion Dollar Babies is probably the original Alice Cooper group's finest and strongest. Such tracks as "Hello Hooray," the lethal stomp of the title track, the defiant "Elected" (a rewrite of an earlier song, "Reflected"), and the poison-laced pop candy of "No More Mr. Nice Guy" remain among Cooper's greatest achievements. Also included are a pair of perennial concert standards – the disturbing necrophilia ditty "I Love the Dead" and the chilling macabre of "Sick Things" – as well as such strong, lesser-known selections as "Raped and Freezin'," "Unfinished Sweet," and perhaps Cooper's most overlooked gem, "Generation Landslide."

Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue is an album by Terri Lyne Carrington. It won the 2013 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album.
Drummer and bandleader Terri Lyne Carrington won a Grammy in 2012 for her genre-blurring Mosaic Project, which blended the voices and instruments of an all-female cast in a series of bold musical statements. Here Carrington turns her sights toward revisioning a legendary meeting of jazz minds on the recording of 1963's Money Jungle by Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. Accompanied by pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Christian McBride, and a host of guests, Carrington not only reinterprets that album, she adds to its discourse with two of her own compositions and another by Clayton…

Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow is the first studio album by British rock band Rainbow, released in 1975. During studio sessions in Tampa Bay, Florida on 12 December 1974, Blackmore originally planned to record the solo single "Black Sheep of the Family"- a cover of a track by the band Quatermass from 1970 - and the newly composed "Sixteenth Century Greensleeves", which was to be the B-side. Other musicians involved included singer/lyricist Ronnie James Dio and drummer Gary Driscoll of blues rock band Elf, and cellist Hugh McDowell of ELO. Satisfied with the two tracks, Blackmore decided to extend the sessions to a full album.

The Lindsays offer strong, eloquent versions of the three Op. 55 quartets. Their playing is full of vigour yet alive to the nuances and felicities of a composer near the height of his powers – perhaps already there in the splendidly volatile F minor Quartet. The Kodály Quartet on Naxos provide an assured rival performance at bargain price, but the Lindsays’ attractive blend of exuberance and poise gives them the edge.

The Bernardino de Ribera whose works are recorded here, all but one for the first time, is all but unknown; he is not to be confused with the Spanish-Mexican composer Bernardino de Ribera Sahagún. He was active in the city of Toledo, Spain, a generation before Tomás Luis de Victoria, whom he taught and influenced. His obscurity is due to vandalism rather than to any issue of musical quality: the splendid manuscript that forms the main source for his music was cut up by someone who wanted the illuminations, and on the reverse of those were many sections of Ribera's works.

Les deux compositeurs choisis, l’un anglais, l’autre allemand, nés tous les deux la même année 1685, sont assurément les représentants majeurs du patrimoine musical baroque. Les œuvres présentes sur ce disque ont toutes été composées à des moments particuliers de leur vie, en marge de leurs commandes habituelles destinés souvent à des personnages de haut rang, et se distinguent par la constante recherche de nouvelles inspirations et styles de composition.

UK compilation from the artsy Prog rockers featuring performances drawn from the '70s, which is seen as a key time in the development of the band that, 35 years on, still commands respect and interest. and have a large and dedicated fan base. The first 30 minutes features the classic line-up including Daevid Allen, Steve Hillage Pierre Moerlen and Didier Malherbe. The remaining five tracks on the album come from various sources and are all previously unreleased tracks.

The great irony with this release is that it was perhaps the most innovative and interesting on the Shrapnel label, yet received little attention until years later. Yngwie Malmsteen's influence on young guitarists produced an endless supply of technically competent, but largely uninspired, effigies. Mark Varney signed the German guitarist/composer Bernd Steidl, who had been studying at the Guitar Institute of Technology (GIT) in California, after hearing a demo tape. Released without much press or fanfare, the recording was only mildly successful within the guitar-shred community. Perhaps the reason for this was that the core American audience, primarily young, heavy metal-influenced guitar students, were not ready for the level of sophistication presented in this acoustic format.

The Muppets have sung with so many people over the years, from Elton John to Tony Bennett, yet it has always seemed like their performances with John Denver were somehow the perfect match. Christmas Together is a delightful–what else?–sing-along collection of Christmas favorites as performed by Denver and the Muppets ensemble. While the usual suspects have more than their say here–Kermit, Miss Piggy–the standout piece is "Twelve Days of Christmas." What could be better than a Muppet a day? Denver leads the critters through a tender "Silent Night," which comes couched in a medley that closes with a rousing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas." "Deck the Halls" is equally raucous–about as raucous as Muppets can get. Listen for the subtle lyric adaptations and the witty exchanges between Denver and his minstrels. Definitely not just for kids.

Like its two predecessors, the eighth volume of our complete recording of Bach's cantatas is devoted to the first annual cyle of Leipzig cantatas of 1723/24. In planning and implementing this cycle, Bach took upon himself a burden of work far in excess of anything he had earlier assumed — to say nothing of the creative and artistic challenges involved. Whereas his Weimar cantatas of 1714-16 had been written at regular monthly intervals, he now had four times as much work on his hands. In the circumstances, it is entirely understandable that, whenever possible, he fell back on existing works, especially those written in Weimar, although pieces composed were no less liable to be pillaged. These self-borrowings notwithstanding, the main emphasis none the less lay on the composition of new works, and the first cycle of cantatas that Bach wrote for Leipzig is notable for the number of new pieces that it contains.

One of the most acclaimed musicians of his era, Toscanini was a conductor of the "old school" - aristocratic, perfectionistic and something of an autocrat on the podium. After a brief flurry of interest in Fascism in the 1910s, he rapidly became disillusioned with the movement and indeed became a personal rival of Mussolini, repeatedly antagonising him through acts of artistic defiance such as refusals to open concerts with the Fascist anthem Giovinezza.

Before and After Science is the fifth studio album by British musician Brian Eno. Unlike Eno's previous albums which were written and recorded quickly, the album took over two years to complete. Several guest musicians from the United Kingdom and Germany helped with the album, including members of Roxy Music, Free, Fairport Convention, Can and Cluster. Over one-hundred tracks were written with only ten making the album's final cut. The musical styles of the album range from energetic and jagged to the later tracks which are more languid and pastoral.