Stepping into the role of a whirlwind albino electric blues guitar player from Texas with a brilliant slide style and a roaring voice was the very role Johnny Winter was born to fill. He released nearly 30 albums of blues and blues-rock in his 40-plus-year career, and delivered countless memorable concerts as well. His death in the summer of 2014 at the age of 70 left an unfillable void in the international blues community. Step Back is his final studio album, and it follows his 2011 release Roots in paying tribute to his various blues influences, and, like Roots, it is essentially a series of duets with all-star guests, with Eric Clapton, Ben Harper, Billy Gibbons, Joe Perry, Dr. John, Leslie West, Brian Setzer, and Joe Bonnamassa helping out this time around…

Featuring recordings from both Pat Metheny's solo albums and Pat Metheny Group releases, Works is an excellent introduction to the artist who helped make ECM Records a successful "boutique" record label. This collection includes seven excellent recordings originally released in the late '70s and early '80s. Works features Metheny's partner, keyboardist extraordinaire Lyle Mays, on four tracks. Metheny and Mays are truly musical soul mates - rarely do two musicians complement each other as well as they do. "It's for You," penned by the duo, is one of the most moving instrumental compositions ever recorded – Metheny wastes no notes during the soaring guitar solo on this beautiful recording. In fact, every track on Works is stunning.

This Muddy Waters compilation from England is comprised of 20 songs,17 of them dating between 1950 and 1958 and the other three from 1968 and 1972, arranged in no particular order. The selection opens with "Got My Mojo Working" in its original studio version and covers most of the obvious bases, including many of Muddy's best-known originals and his classic renditions of Willie Dixon compositions, but somehow missing out on "I Can't Be Satisfied" and "Rollin' and Tumblin'" in favor of "Garbage Man" from 1972 (a better case can be made for "Can't Get No Grindin'"). It's difficult to say what makes this collection "essential" - one supposes that the producers wanted to emphasize the fact that Muddy was still making important music that late, but given that the notes focus on songs that were later staples of the British Invasion, the choices are odd…

Os Mundi from Berlin became known because of their two LPs on Metronome and Brain. In 1975, when they had almost reached the period of breaking up, their guitarist Udo Arndt was doing a practical training in the studio of a broadcasting station and invited his friends there to make some free-of-charge recordings in order to practice. The recording sessions took place with changing line-ups, together with guest musicians, e. g. from Agitation Free. Some rather softened jazz-rock without vocals was played, which sounds very clean and has now been released for the first time. Additionally there are three other studio recordings on the CD and two RIAS tracks. This 2008 release of 'Sturmflut' (in English, that means Storm Tide) is a collection of the band's unreleased work, recorded between 1973-1975.

Pergamon, originally simply released as Quichotte (1980) with two parts "Quichotte" - Part one and two, is the third live album and fourteenth overall by Tangerine Dream. It consists of two long tracks of partly improvised music. Themes from the album Tangram can be heard throughout the album, as the concert took place during the process of preparing material for that studio album. Edgar Froese and Chris Franke had remixed and edited the music in East Berlin as part of the original deal. The original, untouched evening concert (taken from a radio broadcast) has been fan-released as Tangerine Tree Volume 17: East Berlin 1980 and is considerably different from the official album release. Six years after its initial release, in April 1986, the album was made available to the rest of the world by Virgin both on vinyl and CD. It was now titled Pergamon (after the impressive museum in East Berlin) and featured a completely different cover.

If the name of Henry Charles Litolff is familiar today only through the scherzo of his Concerto symphonique No 4, the absurdity of that ‘one-hit composer’ tag is clearly demonstrated by this release. These are among the finest examples of the piano trio genre still inexplicably absent from the standard repertoire.

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, became famous for two reasons: the bloody double murder of his first wife and her lover, and his passionate and erotic view of profane love. The Madrigals chart the changes in Gesualdos style, and contain some of the most inspired and anguished vocal works in the entire madrigal repertoire, on the themes of love, rejection, death, suffering, joy and sorrow. Brimming with often astonishing and sometimes unpredictable melodic and tonal contrasts to express the agonies and ecstacies of love, Gesualdos Madrigals show him to have been one of the most inventive and eccentric musical minds of his age.