Raw to the Bone is the 13th album by rock band Wishbone Ash. Like its predecessor, Twin Barrels Burning, it is one of the band's heaviest records, capitalising on the popular new wave of British heavy metal that Wishbone Ash had helped influence. It is the only Wishbone Ash album to feature Mervyn Spence on bass and vocals. It is also the last album with guitarist/vocalist Laurie Wisefield, who ended his eleven-year stint with Wishbone Ash after the release of this album.

This album, cut live at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall in July of 1970, was the first Strawbs album to be released in the United States. It didn't do much in the U.S., but it did chart in England, and the original concert also got Rick Wakeman his first front-page coverage in the British music press, owing to his bravura performance on the solo piano spot, "Temperament for a Mind." The group is trying really hard here to make the jump from folk to folk-rock. They still play a lot of acoustic music, and some of it is surprisingly diverse, but this is a fairly successful album bridging the gap between the acoustic Strawbs combo of their first incarnation and the harder, more strident folk-rock stylings that followed on From the Witchwood, with hints of progressive leanings.

When producer Norman Granz decided to let Charlie Parker record standards with a full string section (featuring Mitch Miller on oboe!), the purists cried sellout, but nothing could be further from the truth. There's a real sense of involvement from Bird on these sides, which collect up all the master takes and also include some live tracks from Carnegie Hall that - judging from the sometimes uneasy murmurings of the crowd - amply illustrate just how weirdly this mixture of bop lines against "legit" arrangements was perceived. The music on this collection is lush, poetic, romantic as hell, and the perfect antidote to a surfeit of jazz records featuring undisciplined blowing. There's a lot of jazz, but there's only one Bird.

The Muffins are Canterbury influenced quartet formed in Washington D.C. in the year of 1973 by Dave Newhouse (keyboards, reeds), Billy Swan (bass) and Michael Zenterner (guitar, violin). Their sound is strongly influenced by the Jazz-Rock tendencies of Soft Machine, the improvisational techniques of Henry Cow and the quirky song structures of Hatfield and the North and The Mothers of Invention.
The new group remains nameless until one day, while the trio are discussing upon potential names, a friend of there's enters the house and shouts "The muffins are hear!" and conveying a tray of blueberry muffins, thus the band is born! A number of drummers are recruited off and on during the next few months…

"Biophilia" is the seventh studio album from the unique artist from Iceland and the first since 2007's "Volta." The themes of the songs have a certain "sci-fi" feel to them, her early performances of the new material were described as "meditation on the relationship between music, nature and technology." The sound is a retreat from the daring if uneven "Volta" and is probably closest to the "Vespertine" sound, with the occasional hint of "Medulla". This album would be closest to Vespertine as a basic description, with the wintry electronic sound replaced by a more serene, slightly warmer sound. Beats are toned down just a bit. Bjork's penchant for wildness and sometimes harsh sounds is toned down even more in favor of the natural beauty of her singing voice. Here she relaxes her vocal eccentricities perhaps more than ever, relying on the natural ability of her "normal" voice.

Crawling Up A Hill is a fascinating document of a genre that, though relatively short-lived, would have a seismic influence on the subsequent development of rock music.

Explore Sir Neville Marriner's beautiful Bach renditions, from instrumental to secular and sacred vocal music, featuring Janet Baker, Andrei Gavrilov, Barbara Hendricks or William Bennett.

Tonton Macoute were a short-lived British Jazz-Rock band, previously known as Windmill. Tonton Macoute were bizarrely named after the paramilitary death squad created by "Papa Doc" Duvalier in Haiti in 1959. Their one and only self-titled album released in 1971 contained seven tracks, and featured an album cover that was just as bizarre as their name. This stunningly-powerful one-off album represents a timeless Jazz-Rock masterpiece that sounds just as good today as it ever did.

Hearts on Fire is Baker Gurvitz Army's third and last studio album, released in 1976. Baker Gurvitz Army were an English rock group. Their self-titled debut album featured a blend of hard rock laced with Ginger Baker's jazz- and Afrobeat-influenced drumming. The lengthy "Mad Jack" was that album's outstanding track, and the album hit the US Billboard 200 chart, and peaked at number 22 in the UK Albums Chart. The two following albums contained similar material, although neither charted in the UK nor the US.

If Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians is simply described in terms of its materials and organization – 11 chords followed by 11 pieces built on those chords – then it might seem utterly dry and monotonous. The actual music, though, is far from lackluster. When this recording was released in 1978, the impact on the new music scene was immediate and overwhelming. Anyone who saw potential in minimalism and had hoped for a major breakthrough piece found it here. The beauty of its pulsing added-note harmonies and the sustained power and precision of the performance were the music's salient features; and instead of the sterile, electronic sound usually associated with minimalism, the music's warm resonance was a welcome change. Yet repeated listening brought out a subtle and important shift in Reich's conception: the patterns were no longer static repetitions moving in and out of phase with each other, but were now flexible units that grew organically and changed incrementally over the course of the work.

The U.S. release of Melvin Taylor's two early-'80s LPs by Evidence a decade later was a shock introduction to a blues guitarist who seemingly blazed out of nowhere – outside of Rosa's Lounge in Chicago, that is. "Blazed" is the right word, too, because Taylor is a total maximalist who unleashes torrents of notes to fill up every space. But he's so convincing a player that the concept of "blues guitar hero" might get a good name again, even with fans dead-tired of excess who never thought they'd think things like, "Man, can Melvin Taylor play the ever-loving (add the expletive superlative of your choice) out of the guitar" again. Taylor's first real-time release, Melvin Taylor & the Slack Band, is a pretty straightforward affair – basic trio with minimal overdubs, servicable vocals in an Albert King mode, and a mix of originals and very classic covers. The opening "Texas Flood" lets him rip on a slow blues, constantly changing up his playing with wah-wah blitzes as the real ace in his sonic hole.