When talking about Carlos Kleiber's conducting style and recording catalogue, it is easy to over-use superlatives. Perhaps the secrets of his art are best expressed in the cover picture, with the mad elegance of his gestures, which seem to summon up the music through sheer energy, subtlety and a radiant smile: he seems absolutely possessed by inspiration. But listening to this album should do the trick too. Living as a recluse, cancelling three quarters of his concerts, hardly ever recording, it was like a miracle when Carlos Kleiber agreed to set down these two symphonies for Deutsche Grammphon. In 1975, he recorded the 5th Symphony in the generous surroundings of the Vienna Musikverein, with a Philharmonic that hung off his every word and followed his slightest gesture. Under his philosopher's baton, the "5th" became pure, distilled energy, an explosive Pandora's box that gave off sparks and followed the demands of the score precisely. The fateful four notes around which the entire symphony was built were at once the foundation and the capstone of this landmark work, magnificently structured here by Kleiber. Has there ever been such a tempestuous and light-footed Seventh Symphony? One thinks immediately of Nietzsche: "I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance". Recorded the following year, in the same place, this Seventh soars, pirouettes and exults in a pantheist, saving joy, with a lightness that seems to lift the musicians off the floor. "Now am I light, now do I fly; now do I see myself under myself. Now there danceth a God in me.". Thus directed Carlos Kleiber. © François Hudry/Qobuz

While most of the discussions of Frank Zappa have to do with his satirical and off-color lyrics, the fact remains that he was one of the finest and most underappreciated guitarists around. This collection places the spotlight squarely on Zappa's mastery of the guitar. Recorded for the most part in 1979 and 1980 (with a few tracks dating as far back as 1977), Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar is simply a collection of guitar solos. Even though most of the tracks were just edited out of their original song context, they fare well as stand-alone pieces, as Zappa was an ever-inventive player. Take, for example, the three versions of "Shut Up." These tracks were simply the guitar solos from "Inca Roads," but thanks to Zappa's ability for "instant composition," each version has its own complete story to tell, without ever being redundant. Other highlights are the reggae-tinged "Treacherous Cretins" and the beautiful "Pink Napkins." In addition to the electric guitar mangling contained on Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar, there are a couple of rare tracks that feature Zappa on acoustic guitar in a trio with Warren Cuccurullo on acoustic rhythm guitar and Vinnie Colaiuta on drums. In fact, special mention goes to Colaiuta for his polyrhythmic daring all over this album. All bandmembers play great throughout, but Colaiuta's playing is mind blowing. The album closes with another oddity: a gorgeous duet between Zappa on electric bouzouki and Jean-Luc Ponty on baritone violin. This is an album that should be heard by anyone who's into guitar playing. Highly recommended. © Sean Westergaard /TiVo

"[T]he depths plunged on ACTUAL LIFE mirror the complexity of the last year and Gibson has done well to represent those moments with honesty and candour."© TiVo

Recorded in 1970 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in New Jersey under the production auspices of Creed Taylor, the arrangement and conducting skills of Deodato, and the engineering expertise of Van Gelder himself, Antonio Carlos Jobim's Stone Flower is quite simply one of his most quietly stunning works -- and certainly the high point of his time at Columbia. Nearly a decade after the paint peeled from the shine of bossa nova's domination of both pop and jazz charts in the early '60s, Creed Taylor brought Jobim's tender hush of the bossa sound back into the limelight. With a band that included both Jobim and Deodato on guitars (Jobim also plays piano and sings in a couple of spots), Ron Carter on bass, Joao Palma on drums, Airto Moreira and Everaldo Ferreira on percussion, Urbie Green on trombone, Joe Farrell on soprano saxophone, and Hubert Lookofsky laying down a soulful violin solo on the title track, Jobim created his own version of Kind of Blue. The set opens with the low, simmering "Tereza My Love," with its hushed, elongated trombone lines and shifting acoustic guitars floating on the evening breeze. It begins intimately and ends with a closeness that is almost uncomfortably sensual, even for bossa nova. And then there are the slippery piano melodies Jobim lets roll off his fingers against a backdrop of gauzy strings and syncopated rhythms in both "Choro" and "Brazil." The latter is a samba tune with a sprightly tempo brought to the fore by Jobim's sandy, smoky vocal hovering ghost-like about the instrumental shimmer in the mix. Take, for instance, the title track -- with its stuttered, near-imperceptible percussion laid under a Jobim piano melody of such simplicity, it's harmonically deceptive. It isn't until Lookofsky enters for his solo that you realize just how sophisticated and dense both rhythm and the chromatic lyricism are. The album closes with a reprise of "Brazil," restating a theme that has, surprisingly, been touched upon in every track since the original inception, making most of the disc a suite that is a lush, sense-altering meditation, on not only Jobim's music and the portraits it paints, but the sounds employed by Taylor to achieve this effect. Stone Flower is simply brilliant, a velvety, late-night snapshot of Jobim at his peak. [The 2002 reissue adds an alternate take of "Brazil" as a bonus track.]© TiVo

This album is a totem, but one that’s as light as a feather. Before its release in 1963, the composer Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim was already known as one of the architects of bossa-nova, a new style of music which was beginning to gain traction a few years beforehand in Brazil, with (amongst others) musician João Gilberto and the poet Vinícius de Moraes at the forefront. Their work on the soundtrack for the film Orfeu Negro propelled this music to worldwide exposure. But for Jobim, it’s The Composer of Desafinado, Plays that would go on to unfurl a red carpet for him across North America. It’s his first album recorded under his own name, and his first release in the United States. Jobim takes on the classics: The Girl from Ipanema, Agua de Beber, Desafinado, Jazz Samba, Chega de Saudade... all songs which ooze elegance, sensuality and sleepy groove. Tom Jobim is agile on the guitar and the piano, and the arranger Claus Ogerman seems to spin these beautiful layers of silky strings and flutes that float above the rest. Everything is minimal but lush at the same time, sharp but soft, definitely dream-inducing. The album is released on the Verve label, one of the biggest jazz labels of the time. From Stan Getz to Frank Sinatra, American jazz would quickly start to draw its inspiration from Jobim. Bossa is nowadays part of the worldwide musical landscape, even considered as a postcard (that’s Instagram to our younger readers) cliché, but in 1963, it was the creme de la creme of all things jazz. © Stéphane Deschamps/Qobuz

A Qobuz ExclusiveThis particular recording is split into four songs but the set itself bore few separations. A full and immersive listen bears that out—nothing stops, per se, but transitions until the final song. Opener "Meta-Ideations," meanders through several stylistic changes in 19 minutes without a hiccup, showcasing the control Carlos Niño, Surya Botofasina and Adam Rudolph have even in improvisational settings.The highlight of the evening is "It's Nice and Warm, Warm Inside" with a soothing vocal intro from Niño. "We are warming … inside, it's warm and welcoming in here," he whispers. If you've seen any of these musicians perform, they often offer short benedictory introductions to earmark a new song. In this case, the dead of winter made it easy to connect to the audience. Besides a respite from the cold, the trio provided longform moments of clarity and precision, a break from norms and noise in a city that provides far too few of those.The collective history here—Botofasina was raised on Alice Coltrane’s Shanti Anantam Ashram; Niño has impeccable taste in collaborators; Rudolph has pioneered music from different walks of the world—allows for playful movements juxtaposed with extended ambient moments. Their peacefulness resonates to an obviously attentive crowd and, for a moment, it is easy to forget that the set had to end at all. © Jeff Laughlin/Qobuz

A hopelessly misunderstood record in its time by Santana fans -- they were still reeling from the radical direction shift toward jazz on Caravanserai and praying it was an aberration -- it was greeted by Santana devotees with hostility, contrasted with kindness from major-league critics like Robert Palmer. To hear this recording in the context of not only Carlos Santana's development as a guitarist, but as the logical extension of the music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis influencing rock musicians -- McLaughlin, of course, was a former Davis sideman -- this extension makes perfect sense in the post-Sonic Youth, post-rock era. With the exception of Coltrane's "Naima" and McLaughlin's "Meditation," this album consists of merely three extended guitar jams played on the spiritual ecstasy tip -- both men were devotees of guru Shri Chinmoy at the time. The assembled band included members of Santana's band and the Mahavishnu Orchestra in Michael Shrieve, Billy Cobham, Doug Rauch, Armando Peraza, Jan Hammer (playing drums!), and Don Alias. But it is the presence of the revolutionary jazz organist Larry Young -- a colleague of McLaughlin's in Tony Williams' Lifetime band -- that makes the entire project gel. He stands as the great communicator harmonically between the two very different guitarists whose ideas contrasted enough to complement one another in the context of Young's aggressive approach to keep the entire proceeding in the air. In the acknowledgement section of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," which opens the album, Young creates a channel between Santana's riotous, transcendent, melodic runs and McLaughlin's rapid-fire machine-gun riffing. Young' double-handed striated chord voicings offered enough for both men to chew on, leaving free-ranging territory for percussive effects to drive the tracks from underneath. Check "Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord," which was musically inspired by Bobby Womack's "Breezing" and dynamically foreshadowed by Pharoah Sanders' read of it, or the insanely knotty yet intervallically transcendent "The Life Divine," for the manner in which Young's organ actually speaks both languages simultaneously. Young is the person who makes the room for the deep spirituality inherent in these sessions to be grasped for what it is: the interplay of two men who were not merely paying tribute to Coltrane, but trying to take his ideas about going beyond the realm of Western music to communicate with the language of the heart as it united with the cosmos. After three decades, Love Devotion Surrender still sounds completely radical and stunningly, movingly beautiful.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

Captain Beefheart was known to playfully admonish fans shouting out requests at his shows by saying, "You know I'm gonna do exactly what I want." No one has documented Rickie Lee Jones saying the same thing, but in the course of a recording career that's just entered its fourth decade, she's made it clear that she shares the same philosophy, and she's bravely followed her muse wherever it chooses to go, rather than rehashing the sound and style of Rickie Lee Jones and Pirates, the acclaimed early recordings which made her a star. Jones certainly hasn't lost her love for the blues and jazz flavors that dominated her best-known work, but on 2009's Balm in Gilead (the title is drawn from a traditional spiritual), there's significantly less flash and swagger in her music; instead, these performances speak of an intimacy and warmth that befits the lyrics, which concern themselves with love, family, friendship, and the stuff that makes up everyday lives (something of a switch after the broadsides of The Evening of My Best Day and the spiritual mysteries of The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard). Jones duets with Vic Chesnutt on two numbers, the country-influenced weeper "Remember Me" and a spectral gospel variant, "His Jeweled Floor" (which also features Victoria Williams), and these two gloriously idiosyncratic talents bring out the best in one another, discovering a compelling mystery in their rural inflections that's an ideal match for the material. Ben Harper also lends his talents to this album, and his duet with Jones, "Old Enough," is a blues-infused tale of a busted romance that has a bit of the sass of "Chuck E.'s in Love," but half a lifetime's added depth and subtle detail. Jones opens the set with "Wild Girl," a song written for her daughter, and it's one of the most heartfelt and simply affecting moments on this album, along with "The Moon Is Made of Gold," a sweetly swinging lullaby that was written by her father when she was just a girl. And if songs like "Bonfires," "Eucalyptus Trail," "The Gospel of Carlos, Norman and Smith," and "Bayless St." don't lend themselves to simple categorization, they're all quietly beautiful and filled with a gentle passion that never sounds anything less than fearlessly honest. Rickie Lee Jones sounds less like a Hipster Chick and more like an Earth Mother whose experience has brought her plenty of wisdom on Balm in Gilead, and that's clearly just the way she wants it; Jones' faith in her own creative judgment is well-founded, and this is a work whose modest scale belies its emotional strength.© Mark Deming /TiVo

This album is a totem, but one that’s as light as a feather. Before its release in 1963, the composer Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim was already known as one of the architects of bossa-nova, a new style of music which was beginning to gain traction a few years beforehand in Brazil, with (amongst others) musician João Gilberto and the poet Vinícius de Moraes at the forefront. Their work on the soundtrack for the film Orfeu Negro propelled this music to worldwide exposure. But for Jobim, it’s The Composer of Desafinado, Plays that would go on to unfurl a red carpet for him across North America. It’s his first album recorded under his own name, and his first release in the United States. Jobim takes on the classics: The Girl from Ipanema, Agua de Beber, Desafinado, Jazz Samba, Chega de Saudade... all songs which ooze elegance, sensuality and sleepy groove. Tom Jobim is agile on the guitar and the piano, and the arranger Claus Ogerman seems to spin these beautiful layers of silky strings and flutes that float above the rest. Everything is minimal but lush at the same time, sharp but soft, definitely dream-inducing. The album is released on the Verve label, one of the biggest jazz labels of the time. From Stan Getz to Frank Sinatra, American jazz would quickly start to draw its inspiration from Jobim. Bossa is nowadays part of the worldwide musical landscape, even considered as a postcard (that’s Instagram to our younger readers) cliché, but in 1963, it was the creme de la creme of all things jazz. © Stéphane Deschamps/Qobuz

Though Higher Octave Music has branched out into many different genres in its 15-year existence, the label was launched as a new age venture with numerous meditation-minded releases. B-Tribe's label debut combines this dreamy, floating vibe of relaxation with pleasant melodies and worldbeat touches reminiscent of the label's catalog in that genre. Think John Serrie with a few exotic brushes from Ottmar Liebert. Claus Zundel, the mastermind behind this appealing sound, recorded this effort in Ibiza, Spain, and Miami, and so it's no surprise that many of the tracks incorporate the mystical, exotic flamenco guitar weavings of Paco Fernandez. The "Intro" finds Fernandez noodling as if in search of a theme as a wash of synth mood and spacy energy wafts into the background. "Adagio in G-Minor" is a slow, brooding seduction that begins purely atmospheric but then incorporates a dreamy guitar melody. On "La Guitarra," there is a blend of low and high acoustic guitar lines with a soaring wordless female vocal moving in and out in the background. "Sketches of St. Antoni" features the lazy flügelhorn of Mark Smith, and sounds like a sweet little outtake from a Chris Botti project. The tempo pretty much stays at the meditational pace throughout, sometimes (as on "Sunset in San Carlos") drawing upon combinations of Eastern textures and medieval church flavors. Definitely soothing.© Jonathan Widran /TiVo