Onetime rivals for R&B supremacy, the two blues greats hit the road together in the Seventies, where they soon discovered how well their styles complemented one another while bantering with expert comic timing. "Nothing is planned tonight," King announces early in this hour-long set, and whether or not that was true there's a spontaneous but never sloppy spark. It's instructive and exciting to hear King's guitar supporting another vocalist, particularly a master such as Bland.

Homesick for the Road provides a showcase for three fine blues singer/guitarists. The recording is clean and crisp, as is typical of the Telarc label, and the music cooks from start to finish. This disc provides an excellent introduction to each performer, with ample opportunities for each to shine. Debbie Davies brings to mind Bonnie Raitt, with her appealing vocal timbre and bluesy delivery. The youthful Benoit sings with an authority beyond his 31 years, making Screamin' Jay Hawkins' classic "I Put a Spell on You" his own. Kenny Neal has the scruffy, soulful delivery of a man who knows what the blues are all about. His "I've Been Mistreated" sounds like a late '60s slice of Muscle Shoals soul. All three of the co-leaders are excellent guitarists, and the band is solid and tight. Homesick for the Road rolls down the car window for an enticing look at three relatively young performers carrying the blues torch into the future.

Nick Saloman of the Bevis Frond once again invites us to join him in the obscure pleasures of little-known pop, R&B, and jazz instrumental sides of the '60s and '70s with this collection. A number of the selections featured on Return of the Instro-Hipsters are so obscure that even Saloman isn't sure just who is responsible for them (though he offers some educated guesses on the artists behind such names as Sharks, Oliver Bone, and the Masked Phantom), but there are a good share of solid grooves and kicky melodies to be found here from a number of gifted little-knowns. If you went to the movies in the '70s, "Soul Thing" by Tony Newman will sound familiar, while flautist Harold McNair solos over a Dave Brubeck-influenced piano groove on "The Hipster," Jerry Allen demonstrates new uses for game calls on "Fuzzy Duck," Thunder Road's synthesized version of "Peter Gunn" beats Art of Noise's variation on the theme by more than 15 years, "The Brooke Bond Beat" by Cliff Adams may be the most swingin' tea commercial ever, and the Outer Limits serve up some tough, moody rock, appropriately titled "Black Boots".

Blues With a Message isn't just about lost love and the toils of specific lives, the blues (particularly within the folk-blues traditions) spent some time dealing with sociopolitical issues on the side, primarily before the rise of electric blues. Here, Arhoolie has compiled a set of pieces related to a surprisingly large number of issues. Among them: Minstrel shows, the mechanization of cotton farming, and its related exodus to the North, sharecropping, segregation, the Korean War, the influenza epidemic, the New Deal, civil rights movements, Chicago employment opportunities – all are given a song or two here. The music quality is roughly equivalent to many of the folk-blues recordings available, though the "big name" artists are largely absent from this one (Lightnin Hopkins does make an appearance singing about sharecropping, however). The songs are deliberately focused on the issues more than the music, but the music can still carry its soul. This one probably won't be on many highest-sales lists in the blues, but it's both historically important and musically enjoyable.

The sounds of New Orleans have always been in Maria Muldaur's blood and catalog. Dr. John appeared on her first solo album back in 1974 and she arguably hit a career high point on her first full-fledged love letter to the city, 1992's Louisiana Love Call. She returns to the Crescent City for this 2011 release, employing veteran New Orleans keyboardist Dave Torkanowsky as musical director and "facilitator" and returning to the swampy "Bluesiana music" sound that includes heavy doses of gospel and blues along with touches of jazz, soul, and funk. This is a major shift from her past two acoustic jug band releases and plays to her sultry strengths as a vocalist who can convincingly sing any style of music she feels passionate about. Muldaur revisits a few tracks she has previously recorded (an earlier version of "As an Eagle Stirreth in Her Nest" was included on 1976's Sweet Harmony) but with a band that features guitarist Shane Theriot and Subdudes bassist Johnny Allen, they and the rest of the handpicked material boil with fresh enthusiasm.

Known for his mariachi-inspired easy listening sound, trumpeter Herb Alpert is one of the most successful instrumental performers in pop history. He is also one of the entertainment industry's canniest businessmen, having co-founded A&M Records – a label that ranks among the most prosperous artist-owned companies ever established – with partner Jerry Moss. Collection includes: The Lonely Bull (1962); South Of The Border (1964); Whipped Cream & Other Delights (1965); !!Going Places!! (1965); What Now My Love (1966); S.R.O (1966); The Beat Of The Brass (1968); Rise (1979); Fandango (1982); Bullish (1984); Keep Your Eye On Me (1987); Classics, Volume 1 (1987); Steppin' Out (Featuring Lani Hall) (2013); In The Mood (2014); Come Fly With Me (2015).

Give Jim Belushi and Dan Aykroyd credit for at least one thing: the subtitle of "Big Men - Big Music" to their 2003 album, Have Love Will Travel, is pretty fun, and partially accurate. The two comedians-cum-retro-bluesmen are indeed big men, and they at the very least have a big band: the back cover features no less than 12 musicians, including the duo, begging the question of just how much does the Have Love Will Travel Revue actually pull in per gig. That's a question better settled by accountants and auditors, of course, but a lot of musicians does mean that the music at the very least sounds busy, even if it doesn't necessarily sound big. But that's really no change from Aykroyd's previous musical excursion, the Blues Brothers, who always utilized a big band to make faithful music.

Journeyman blues icon vocalist/guitarist/violinist Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown delivers another solid mix of electric Texas blues, country, and swing on Timeless. At this point in his career, Brown essentially represents all that is "roots" music, which is another way of saying he has nothing to prove and the listener has everything to gain. To these ends, Brown's impassioned wail fills the sky on the slow blues "For Now So Long," he reworks "Unchained Melody" into an atmospheric John Coltrane-inspired piece, and he delivers a funny yet compelling Sun Ra-esque spoken word intro on "The Drifter." Featuring a full complement of horns and a rhythm section, Timeless showcases all that makes Brown a living national treasure.

Soul singer Barbara Massey and jazz guitarist Ernie Calabria paired up for this rare 1971 album. With Calabria having worked with Nina Simone and Harry Belafonte, among others, and Massey having sung backup for artists including Jimi Hendrix, Cat Stevens, and Herbie Hancock, the pairing was an inspired one and resulted in this superb soul-jazz outing. Massey has a dry yet passionate and evocative vocal quality that often brings to mind Grace Slick. Fittingly, the duo takes on Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love," turning the Summer of Love anthem into a steamy and hypnotic soul-funk jam. Elsewhere, the duo touches upon such varying styles as folk, Latin, and psychedelic rock with cuts like "For You" and "Do You Know?," bringing to mind such similarly inclined acts as the Free Design and Bill Withers. Anyone who has even a passing interest in this kind of '70s cross-genre aesthetic will certainly want to seek out Prelude To…

From their beginnings as an attempt at bold jazz-rock fusion in 1967 through a run as a high-powered R&B/soul-rock singles act with singer David Clayton-Thomas two years later, Blood, Sweat & Tears were always a kind of fascinating experiment, and a commercially successful one at that. The first album from the Clayton-Thomas-fronted band appeared in 1969, spawned four high chart hits, won a Grammy as Album of the Year, and went on to sell some three million units. The next two albums, Blood, Sweat & Tears 3 and 4, generated a few more hits, but the band was gradually running out of creative steam by this point, and when Clayton-Thomas left the group after the fourth album, well, that was the end of the line commercially for Blood, Sweat & Tears. A jazzier, but definitely not as commercial, version of Blood, Sweat & Tears showed up for two of the albums collected in this set, 1972's New Blood and 1973's No Sweat, with the third album here, 1976's More Than Ever, featuring the return of David Clayton-Thomas to the fold.