The titular "Iconic" nature of the program here is twofold. First, stardom-groomed violinist David Garrett pays tribute to violin icons of the past. Primary among them is Fritz Kreisler, who is represented several times on the program, including by the familiar Schön Rosmarin (which is not among the bonus tracks for those who purchase the deluxe physical edition but is an additional bonus track available to streaming listeners). One of the icons, Itzhak Perlman, even makes a personal appearance in a Shostakovich duet, and other guests include tenor Andrea Bocelli and the single-named flutist Cocomi. What Garrett calls the second thread of his program deals not with performers but with music; what he has put together here is an example of the classic program of encores. He has done his job well, arranging a lot of the music for himself and changing up the sentimental tunes that can sink a project like this if too relentless with more unusual fare (Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair) and upbeat numbers like Dinicu's Hora Staccato and a reminder of his earlier virtuoso ways with Paganini's Moto Perpetuo, Op. 11. The end result is an entertaining example of the venerable all-encore genre, marred only by oddly too-close studio sound from Deutsche Grammophon.© James Manheim /TiVo

Neon-toned and deliciously funky, Foster the People's third studio album, 2017's Sacred Hearts Club, finds the group eschewing its pleasant indie pop sound in favor of an album of lightly experimental, fluorescent-lit, groove-based tracks. Produced by lead singer/songwriter Mark Foster and keyboardist Isom Innis, along with Josh Abraham, Lars Stalfors, and Oligee, the album is the Los Angeles band's biggest departure yet from the amiable, youthful vibe of 2011's Torches. These are kinetic, hip-hop-inflected tracks rife with '80s-style synths, finger-snapping basslines, skittering dance beats, and club-ready, falsetto-tinged hooks. If there's any contemporary touchstone for the band's approach here, the album-ending ballad "III," with its dreamy, pulsing synths and angelic, cloud-light melodic hook, certainly makes the case that Foster have been listening to a lot of M83. As if to announce the new direction, they kick things off with the steamy, new wave-cum-hip-hop jam "Pay the Man," which finds Foster diving headlong into a hip-sway-inducing rap. Similarly, cuts like the stadium-sized anthem "Doing It for the Money" and the sparklingly buoyant "Sit Next to Me," with their icicle guitar hits and bubbly keyboards, bring to mind an inspired mix of '80s Tom Tom Club and Prince, with just enough modern EDM flourishes to keep things from getting too nostalgic. Along those lines, we get the spacy electro-Motown of "Static Space Lover," the buzzy, blacklight-drenched house music anthem "Loyal Like Sid & Nancy," and the sexy, crystalline, digital hip-hop and R&B flow of "Harden the Paint." Ultimately, the beauty of Sacred Hearts Club is that it sounds like a Foster the People album without unnecessarily rehashing the sound that made them famous.© Matt Collar /TiVo

The collection of Baroque, Renaissance, and folk instruments described on the cover of this release from France's Alpha label, one of an ongoing series of Irish music releases, sounds unusual. The violin and the large group of low plucked and bowed strings bespeak a conventional Baroque sonata group, but what of the Irish harp played by Siobhán Armstrong? The rest of the musicians are French and English, and as a whole the album is a kind of fusion: between classical and folk, Continental and Celtic. In fact there is some historical evidence that performances like these took place in Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries; several collections of Irish harp melodies like these were published, while music in the Italian Baroque style, via England, existed at the same time, and it is possible that the two were combined. The tunes, all instrumental despite the vocal-sounding titles of some of them, are of an Irish cast, with mournful modal melodies that don't vary the mood greatly over the album's 18 tracks. Yet the realization is nothing if not varied, with the mysterious sound of Armstrong's early Irish harp weaving its way around the more conventional accompaniment. It's quite lovely, and played at a gathering it's sure to generate questions as to just what in the world is going on. An offbeat and novel sound that is something more than purely speculative.© TiVo

Mercy Me is guitarist Ronnie Earl's 28th album, and his 14th for Canada's Stony Plain. Earl is a consummate master of tone -- he has never used an effects pedal. Many blues guitarists are fine soloists, but Earl is more than that: he's a true stylist and improviser who has perhaps more in common with jazz musicians though he remains willfully bound to his vocation as a bluesman. He is backed by longtime band the Broadcasters -- Dave Limina (piano and B-3), Diane Blue (vocals), Forrest Padgett (drums), and Paul Kochanski (electric and upright bass). He enlisted guests for a 12-song set, almost evenly divided between covers and originals. They include pianist Anthony Geraci, saxophonists Mark Earley and Mario Perrett, guitarist Peter Ward, and vocalist Tess Ferraiolo. Earl pays a fingerpopping tribute to Muddy Waters in covering his "Blow Wind Blow." Using B-3 and piano as driving engines, he flies across his Stratocaster strings in full treble tone. Blue swings hard on the lyric. (She is one of the finest blues singers in the game.) He offers a surprise in reading John Coltrane's modal classic "Alabama" with assistance from his sax players. The arrangement is inventive, different, but equally profound. Earl reaches for each note solemnly; his arrangement directly equates the saxophonist's memorial for 1963's 16th Street Baptist Church bombing with the ongoing struggle against virulent, often violent racism. He picks up an acoustic to duet with Ward on "Blues for Ruthie Foster," playing lines that reflect the Delta influence of Robert Johnson and Robert Jr. Lockwood. He reprises the title cut from 1988's "Soul Searching" with horns added to his sparse, tasty, soloing atop Limina's gorgeous B-3. Earl and company deliver a fine version of Dave Mason's "Only You Know and I Know" in tribute to the inimitable Bonnie Bramlett. Blue's throaty contralto is perfectly suited to this R&B gem. "A Prayer for Tomorrow" is a soulful blues that simmers and flows with inventive soloing from Earl and Geraci. The guitarist's nearly 11-minute reading of Percy Mayfield's soul-blues classic "Please Send Me Someone to Love" is a set highlight. He offers the first verse and chorus instrumentally before Blue enters passionately, understating the lyric. "Coal Train Blues" is a straightforward rocking blues with wonderful exchanges between Earl, the piano, and B-3. "The Sun Shines Brightly," co-written by Blue, is a deep, sultry, Delta-inspired gospel blues. She wails and moans atop and around droning, sharp-edged guitar lines as piano and B-3 simmer underneath. The closing cover of Jackie Wilson's "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher" offers a gorgeous lead vocal from Ferraiolo, leaving listeners with a joyful expression of romantic and spiritual love. As a guitarist, Earl's technical facility is well documented. That said, his taste, generosity, and vision as a bandleader and interpreter of classic material is equal to his masterful playing. Mercy Me is both perfectly balanced and intensely honest; it underscores and expands on his stature as one of the world's greatest living bluesmen. © Thom Jurek /TiVo

Back in 2002, producer David Foster oversaw the debut disc of a young jazz/pop singer named Michael Bublé. With his handsome looks and Sinatra-like voice, Bublé quickly saw his star begin to rise and the success of his disc kicked off a mini-revival of old standards and big band singers. Striking while the iron was hot, Foster fed the flame by introducing an even younger female counterpart to Bublé. Reneé Olstead was a 14-year-old actress mostly known for her co-starring role in the CBS television series Still Standing, but while acting has been her day job since childhood, Olstead has also dabbled in music. Unlike Bublé, who was studying classic songs at a young age with his grandfather, Olstead first latched onto traditional country music and at the age of ten and released Stone Country, which found her singing mediocre tunes in a hiccuped, down-home accent. Four years and a 180-degree turn later, Olstead discovers her inner ingénue with the assistance of Svengali Foster and released her major label debut of pop and jazz standards. The results have the same lovely, glossy sheen that Foster tweaked to perfection on Natalie Cole's Unforgettable album, and Olstead's newfound voice is a vast improvement from her faux twang days. With a voice that is reminiscent of Nicole Kidman's singing debut in Moulin Rouge, Olstead sounds more like a young, bubbly starlet than a newly discovered diva. There is no question that she has a pretty voice and is more than capable of performing undemanding standards like "Taking a Chance on Love," however, her voice lacks the depth and experience truly needed to tackle more difficult song like "Summertime" or "Sunday Kind of Love." In taking on Barry Manilow's "Meet Me, Midnight" she dives in with gusto but ends up barely treading water mid-song with a scat section that sounds uncomfortable and forced. Age is certainly a factor in making these songs sound convincing and, for the most part, Foster smartly chose songs that do not reach too far beyond her young years. This helps to make a song like "Someone to Watch Over Me" sound like a sweet, teenage fairy tale. On the other hand, the sensuality of Maria Muldaur's "Midnight at the Oasis" is far too mature for her to grasp at this time. She does much better on the Norah Jones-styled original "A Love That Lasts" as the song's quiet demeanor compliments Olstead's vocals, making her sound comfortable and natural. It is going to take more time and experience for her to sound as convincing on songs like "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby," but Foster has given her a great crash course and that helps to make her debut disc a pleasant listen. Reneé Olstead has a solid foundation from which to work and if she can continue building up from there, she just might have to set aside her acting career for a while.© Aaron Latham /TiVo

Ronnie Foster's debut album, The Two Headed Freap is a set of contemporary funky soul jazz from the early '70s, which means it sounds closer to the soundtrack of a lost blaxploitation flick than Back at the Chicken Shack, Pt. 2. Foster certainly does display a debt to Jimmy Smith, but his playing is busier than Smith's and a bit wilder. Ironic, then, that his playing is in service to the groove and blends into the mix of wah-wah guitars, funk rhythms, electric bass, harps, and percolating percussion. Everything on The Two Headed Freap is about glitzy groove -- it sounds cinematic, colorful, and funky. It's true that there is little real improvisation here and the songs all have a similar groove, but it's worked well, and the music is ultimately appealing to fans of this genre. Jazz purists -- even soul jazz purists -- will likely find this music a little monotonous and commercial, but fans of early-'70s funk from Sly Stone to Herbie Hancock will find something of interest here.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

222 is the third album from New York rapper Lil Tjay and continues the melodic R&B/drill hybrid of his previous efforts. The album includes "June 22nd," a harrowing account of the 2022 shooting that left Tjay unconscious and hospitalized. Other songs address subjects such as heartache and anxiety, bearing titles like "Scared 2 Be Lonely" and "Stressed." The album's guests include Summer Walker, Jadakiss, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, and Polo G. 222 debuted at number 24 on the Billboard 200.© TiVo Staff /TiVo

From the opening four notes of Michael Henderson's hypnotically minimal bass that open the unedited master of "On the Corner," answered a few seconds later by the swirl of color, texture, and above all rhythm, it becomes a immediately apparent that Miles Davis had left the jazz world he helped to invent -- forever. The 19-minute-and-25-second track has never been issued in full until now. It is one of the 31 tracks in The Complete On the Corner Sessions, a six-disc box recorded between 1972 and 1975 that centers on the albums On the Corner, Get Up with It, and the hodgepodge leftovers collection Big Fun. It is also the final of eight boxes in the series of Columbia's studio sessions with Davis from the 1950s through 1975, when he retired from music before his return in the 1980s. Previously issued have been Davis' historic sessions with John Coltrane in the first quintet, the Gil Evans collaborations, the Seven Steps to Heaven recordings, the complete second quintet recordings, and the complete In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and Jack Johnson sessions. There have been a number of live sets as well; the most closely related one to this is the live Cellar Door Sessions 1970, issued in 2005.What makes The Complete On the Corner Sessions the most compelling of these many deluxe box set issues is that the album derived from it remains the most controversial album Davis released. Certainly, there have been many revisionist theories about On the Corner -- since it proved to be so influential -- by a number of critics who reviewed it rather savagely upon its original release. There are many others who still consider it the ultimate sellout by the biggest figure in the music at the time. Certainly Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson had their share of naysayers, but the the music that transpired first on In a Silent Way had its roots in the final second quintet recordings: Water Babies, Miles in the Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro. Bitches Brew took its cue from In a Silent Way and moved it further, creating more rock-like jams based on vamps and motifs rather than chord changes. Jack Johnson took it still further, but the notion of soloing was still a very prevalent thing, as it had been on Bitches Brew. But On the Corner, while related in terms of groove, is a further extension of everything from In a Silent Way on; it is worlds away from any of them -- including the material that produced Live-Evil in 1971. The reason is simple -- everything came down to only two things: rhythm and sound itself. Serious questions were being asked in the making of this music, and where it was going only manifested itself in the travel. How low could you go? How little could you play? How much space was necessary to get the groove to move and what would you fill it with? Davis stripped everything back to endlessly repetitive, circular, and hypnotic rhythm based on the foundation of then 19-year-old bassist Henderson's minimal grooves with an array of percussionists along with a trap kit to shore it up like an impenetrable wall. The use of everything from cowbells and woodblocks to congas and tables enabled the musicians to dig deep into the territory of beat and rhythm. Melody was an accident. Chords changes were nonexistent; soloing contributed to the atmosphere in short bursts and was layered atop caverns of sound by whatever instrument was called up at the time to play. Otherwise they laid out, or played some kind of rhythmic pattern to enhance the atmospheric groove, which was sometimes nearly spiritual, and sometimes downright freaky and spooky. The groups were ever-changing; 27 musicians played in those 16 sessions, and individual tracks would employ groups from five to 12 players. The names of those players are synonymous with the groundbreaking expressions of electric and acoustic creative jazz and funk in the '70s and '80s: Jack DeJohnette, Badal Roy, John McLaughlin, David Liebman, Carlos Garnett, Mtume, Collin Walcott, Pete Cosey, Reggie Lucas, Dominique Gaumont, Bennie Maupin, Sonny Fortune, Khalil Balakrishna, Al Foster, Lonnie Liston Smith, Harold "Ivory" Williams, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Cornell Dupree, Bernard Purdie, Billy Hart, and Don Alias. When producer Teo Macero dropped the heavily edited 52-and-a-half-minute album off at Columbia, the stage was set for the jazz world to be shaken to its core. Macero should be given more credit than as merely "producer." Miles may have run the sessions, but it was Macero who congealed them onto this single LP. It was he who, along with Davis, had been seduced by the electronic tape manipulation techniques of Karlheinz Stockhausen as introduced to them by composer and arranger Paul Buckmaster -- who wrote his own long liner essay in the accompanying booklet based on his memories of those sessions. Critics flipped, realizing that Davis was never coming back to jazz as they knew it. He was not merely tickling a fancy he entertained after coming under the sway of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. Davis was not playing for popularity among a younger generation of fans -- he was going for broke in changing his entire approach to composing and playing music. Those scribes who dismissed On the Corner as pop had obviously never listened to rock, because it sounded nothing like this. On the Corner was further out than any album ever recorded, and in fact the only one in its league was Funkadelic's Maggot Brain -- and even that was more song-structured than this. Everything was up for grabs, and even rock fans didn't know how to dig it; they just did. And yes, on disc six, it is presented as originally issued, bookended by other tracks.Bob Belden does a painstaking job of annotating this set from its inception in 1972 until the last studio date in 1975. He offers not only dates and players, but also disputes findings found in earlier discographies, and notes that in some instances either nothing took place or the tapes have been lost. He also reveals how little Miles himself plays on certain sessions, and as to whether a session was used as an overdub session or a full-on recording date. These six discs contain six and a half hours of music. There are 12 completely unissued cuts, and five others that have never been heard in full until now. An example of how fertile the earliest period was can be found on disc one. That early session from June 1, 1972, netted the four-part variation on a theme that became "On the Corner/New York Girl/Thinkin' One Thing and Doin' Another/Vote for Miles" and a second-take version of "Black Satin." The second date, five days later, yielded "Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X" and "One and One." So what's on the rest? Process. Material that ended up edited or in full on Get Up with It and Big Fun is here unvarnished, except for beautiful sound reproduction: "Ife," "Chieftain," "Red China Blues," "Billy Preston," the screaming guitar craziness of McLaughlin on "The Hen," two takes of "Big Fun/Holly-wuud," "Mr. Foster," "Peace," "Rated X," "He Loved Him Madly," "Turnaround," "U-Turnaround," "Maiysha," "Mtume" (two different takes very different in length and feel), "Minnie," "Hip Skip," "What They Do," etc. Much has been heard before, but plenty of this music hasn't -- the unheard music makes up nearly a third of this set. The roots of the jams heard on In Concert: Live at Philharmonic Hall, Dark Magus, Agharta, and Pangaea are here, as are the moments from all those bootleg live records from over the years. But back to process. While Belden's annotations and Buckmaster's memories are extremely helpful in the case of the former and revealing and personal in the case of the latter, it is Tom Terrell's excellent historic essay that brings the real perspective and offers a way into the sounds themselves. Presented here are ideas that vanish almost as quickly as they occur, and others -- such as on the extended takes of "On the Corner," "Big Fun," "The Hen," and "Billy Preston" -- where they are allowed to develop slowly and purposefully, with no end in sight. The potential of musicians means nothing outside this sound lab. They are all basically asked to surrender their acumen at the door and find a way to play as a unit following something mercurial and uncertain, sometimes even when it bores them. Textures that weave Maupin's bass clarinet with Carlos Garnett's soprano and tenor saxophones sound strange next to Dave Creamer's guitar, but are all brought into line with the rhythmic attack of Hancock's piano and Williams' organ, with Roy and DeJohnette cranking on the lines provided by Henderson. The solo space can be searing with Davis' trumpet splatters or Maupin's low-register modal inquiries, McLaughlin sending splintering shards of guitar up against the tower of pulse, but none of it ever leaves the realm of rhythm for melody or harmonic convergence. The music, though it stops on the tape, could have gone on for hours and even days. This is the actual sound of Miles running down the real voodoo as funk and ambience give way to sonic exploration, and instrumental largesse happens in the beat, not in the solos. It took this long to realize just how big an impact On the Corner has had -- some 35 years later -- on the music that came after it in electric jazz sure, but elsewhere too. Listeners still never grasped it entirely and perhaps still won't. But only now does the possibility even exist to discover not only how this album came about and what Miles was up to, but what else was percolating in that murky underground, in the world of sound, unheard and even unimagined until the moment it made it onto tape with those various groups of players. The bottom line is that the music on the album itself influenced -- either positively or negatively -- every single thing that came after it in jazz, rock, soul, funk, hip-hop, electronic and dance music, ambient music, and even popular world music, directly or indirectly. All of it can be traced to On the Corner. There is a world here waiting to be discovered. This is a fitting end to Columbia's studio projects of Davis, but more than that, it can be argued that if you would only allow yourself one of these box sets, especially of the post-In a Silent Way material, it should be this one, because it will no doubt be listened to most and arguably leave the deepest impression. It will take you there and keep you there for as long as you want to stay.© Thom Jurek /TiVo