Ramsey Lewis staked his claim to fame with The In Crowd, an instrumental version of Dobie Gray's Top 40 hit. He also was one of the first soul jazz icons of the mid-'60s, based on the strength of the sales of this recording, done over three days during a club date at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington, D.C. What is not readily acknowledged over the years is that bassist Eldee Young is really the star of the show. He's the one who gets the crowd revved up with his vocalizing in tandem with the notes he is playing. It's on his Ray Charles-like take on "Tennessee Waltz" and a similar treatment of Gale Garnett's minor pop hit "You Been Talkin' 'Bout Me Baby" that gets the patrons off. Of course the quintessential hip shakin' introductory title track gets the groove in motion, but it's Young that lights the fuse…

King Crimson opened 1970 scarcely in existence as a band, having lost two key members (Ian McDonald and Michael Giles), with a third (Greg Lake) about to leave. Their second album - largely composed of Robert Fripp's songwriting and material salvaged from their stage repertory ("Pictures of a City" and "The Devil's Triangle") - is actually better produced and better sounding than their first. Surprisingly, Fripp's guitar is not the dominant instrument here: The Mellotron, taken over by Fripp after McDonald's departure - and played even better than before - still remains the band's signature. The record doesn't tread enough new ground to precisely rival In the Court of the Crimson King. Fripp, however, has made an impressive show of transmuting material that worked on stage ("Mars" aka "The Devil's Triangle") into viable studio creations, and "Cadence and Cascade" may be the prettiest song the group ever cut…

Ida Haendel’s sinewy and athletic reading of the often under-rated Britten combines toughness with a cumulative dramatic impetus which is hard to resist. Berglund and the Bournemouth players respond with a terse and argumentative vigour, suitably balanced between resignation and defiant rhetoric, especially in the closing Passacaglia. The Walton Concerto, also dating from 1938-9, is played with an apposite blend of inscrutable panache, as in the irrepressibly brilliant central movement, and elsewhere, a sensuous, if occasionally over-indulgent languor. Rare lapses in the finale can be safely overlooked, in a performance of eloquence and undisputed stature.

Already an obscure record when it was initially released in 1980, Harald Grosskopf's Synthesist has become something of a cult item, the kind of album that inspires devotion in aficionados of early electronica and German music. Grosskopf himself has kept steadily busy as a solo musician and session drummer since the late '60s, being associated with early lineups of the Scorpions and Wallenstein and working with Lilli Berlin and Cosmic Jokers, among many others. But despite his long underground career, his debut solo Synthesist may ultimately stand as his defining work and as a key representation of the path of electronic music.

John Baldwin was a lay clerk at St George’s Chapel, Windsor in 1575 and became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1598. The so-called ‘Baldwin Partbooks’, held at Christ Church, Oxford, were his creation – a very personal collection, representing his individual tastes and interests from a wealth of English and Continental polyphony and consort music.
As in their previous collaboration, an exploration of the similarly conceived partbooks of Robert Dow, the Marian Consort and Rose Consort of Viols have kept faith with Baldwin’s own intentions, bringing to light some of the rarer gems preserved by this great advocate and music-lover and providing the listener with ‘such sweete musicke: as dothe much delite yeelde’.

The Naxos recordings by the Kodály Quartet are outstanding in every way and would. The performances are superbly shaped, naturally paced and alive; the playing is cultivated, yet it has depth of feeling too, and the group readily communicate their pleasure in this wonderful music. …The digital recording has vivid presence and just the right amount of ambience: the effect is entirely natural.

The final offering from the magical collaboration between Al Green and producer Willie Mitchell, Have a Good Time found the dynamic duo in the midst of a creative crossroads. Green had just purchased a church and was looking to pour his energies into his congregation and his newly appointed title of Reverend. While the message and tones of religion aren't as obvious on Have a Good Time as they were on Full of Fire, they still do make appearances here and there. But it wasn't just a change in Green's life that made Have a Good Time so distinct from the earlier classics; it was also the changing shift in cultural tastes (thanks in no small part to the emergence of disco to the forefront of America's collective dance consciousness)…