A year after the delightfully maximal Butcher Brown Presents Triple Trey (featuring Tennishu and R4ND4ZZO BIGB4ND) in 2022, the Richmond, Virginia-based Butcher Brown return with the 17-track Solar Music, a spacious, warm exploration of grooves in jazz, funk, hip-hop, dance music, neo-soul, and various combinations therein assisted by a bevy of guests.Groove is the central focus of everything here. The brief opening interlude "Cozumel" stitches drum loops, samples, chorus vocals, and keyboards together in a blissed-out vamp before the entry of the darker, more dramatic "Espionage." While its two-chord vamp recalls the intro to pop song "Stormy," slamming snares, layered horns, and organ flow across the frame before guest Charlie Hunter delivers a truly Hendrixian guitar solo, elevating the proceedings to dramatic psych. (Keyboardist DJ Harrison and drummer Corey Fonville are also members of Hunter's and Kurt Elling's SuperBlue.) Genres shift in "I Can Say to You," an elegant neo-soul jam sung by guest Vanisha Gould aided by a rap from frontman/saxophonist Marcus Tenney. Rapper Jay Prince surfs the bumping snares and kick drums from Fonville's drum kit in "(MOVE) Ride" as brass and reeds punctuate the beat and rap. "Eye Never Knew" boasts the participation of hip-hop/soul/punk star Pink Siifu (Livingston Lemorie Matthew) and jazz trumpeter Keyon Harrold. While Siifu's reedy, airy delivery whispers in the margins, Harrold's lilting post-bop trumpet solo adds a textured mercurial swing. Not that Butcher Brown need help. Check the bumping bassline funk in "No Way Around It" with Marcus Tenney adding a canny rap and chanted refrain. Saxophone sensation Braxton Cook joins the nocturnal, soul-hop ballad "DYKWYD" (Do You Know What You’re Doing)" adorning Tenney's slippery, emotional rap with classic R&B and a funk-tinged bass; a silvery electric guitar offers considerable evidence of BB's ability to meld genres seamlessly. Immediately following is "Happy Hourrr" (sic) a Latin-cum-bossa-tinged instrumental led by Tenney's swinging tenor and Fonville's hip-hop beats and breaks. The set's finest performance is BB's cover of Roy Ayers' classic "This Side of Sunshine." It retains the elegance and grace of the original and adds a pillowy, sweet, humid touch. The tripping synth lines meet while organ, shuffling drums, and a laid-back syncopated bassline frame a vocal chorus sweetly chanting the refrain as layers of tenor sax and brass float through the backdrop. "It Was Me" layers slamming hip-hop beats inside multi-chromatic jazz charts complete with winding horns and a fiery rap atop an escalating beat that adds Latin funk and samba beats to the mix. Closer "Around for a While" is a fleet, piano-driven number that touches on polished, smooth '80s jazz fusion à la Webster Lewis and Spyro Gyra. Despite its considerable musical achievement -- or perhaps because of it -- Solar Music is easily the most well-rounded offering from Butcher Brown yet. The band offers an aesthetically pleasing collection of songs with exceptional atmospheric vibes in a wide variety of sophisticated musical settings that showcase growth in composition and arrangement with an inspired performance.© Thom Jurek /TiVo

This is an entirely novel treatment of Henry Purcell's music that may appeal greatly to experimentally minded listeners, but those mulling the purchase should be perfectly clear about what they're getting into. "Improvisations on Henry Purcell" is not quite the right subtitle. There are elements of improvisation, it's true, but really these are arrangements of famous Purcell songs and arias, most of them by L'Arpeggiata leader Christina Pluhar. A few of the pieces are performed straight, but most of them are very far from the conventional Purcell sound world, drawing on such diverse genres as rock (the opening 'Twas within a furlong and Strike the viol, both complete with electric guitar), world music, other Baroque styles, various styles of jazz, and even lounge music, applied to the sublime When I am laid in earth, from Dido and Aeneas. Plainly there is a subset of listeners who will be absolutely driven crazy by this release, but just as plainly it gets major points for utter originality. Its strength lies in the fact that it is not simply a jazz or rock version of Purcell but a wholesale rethinking of an antique repertoire for a stylistically diverse modern musical world. Pluhar commands the services of an all-star trio of countertenors including Dominique Visse, Philippe Jaroussky, and Vincenzo Capezzuto, along with soprano Raquel Andueza; the singers generally sound like they're having a great deal of fun, and listeners should check the album out just to hear some hitherto unknown possibilities of the countertenor voice (try Visse's turn in Man is for the woman made). Despite all the craziness, Purcell's tunes are left generally intact, and this is another of the album's strengths. Things go seriously astray only with the bonus track, an inexplicable version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah by Capezzuto, but those hooked on the album's ideas by then will be inclined to accept it as the kind of excess that comes with original projects. The future of early music? Probably not, but who knows?© TiVo

An alter ego (second or different self) is both a close companion to the individual as well as an additional personality. David Orlowsky and David Bergmüller are companions, however, they could hardly be more different. They hail from different musical traditions and the combination of these two instruments have no historical references. When David Orlowsky first discovered a video of David Bergmüller on the internet, he was not aware that he had encountered his musical alter ego. The two met in Berlin and mutually agreed to make music together after just a few shared notes. They became companions, which then became a duo, the duo ultimately becoming an organism. Within this organism, David and David function as opposing and complementary personalities. Together they embark on a journey into unexplored worlds of sound. The clarinet is the voice of bygone times while the lute joins to create polyrhythmic structures allowing both new and old times to flow together in their original compositions. © Warner Classics

"There are some things you just can’t fake. The chemistry of a group is one of those – the sparks of musical energy that fly when certain artists collide. Bjarte Eike’s Barokksolistene is an alchemical miracle of an ensemble… pure musical gold", wrote Gramophone for the album entitled "The Alehouse Sessions". Since the release of these Alehouse Sessions in 2017, and a world wide tour, Bjarte and the boys and girls have been busy on this new album which moves the alehouse project on from dour Puritanism of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, to the hedonistic Restoration of Charles II, and the Glorious Revolution that saw William III and Mary II replace the unpopular James II. The alehouse musical culture developed into playhouses, and music halls, selling tickets and subscriptions. Operas, masques, dance, jesting (the first stand-up comedians maybe?) , all this prepared the way for the first public concert hall to be established. Nights in these places though would still be bawdy – stage fights, cross dressing, elements of pantomime, songs sung to popular tunes of the day, satire – always a good draw, and a good number of rustic clowns, bawdy wenches and fools thrown in for good measure! Think of these back rooms as a very English mix of Shakespeare, commedia dell arte, juggling with music by Purcell, folk tunes, and sea shanties. After the misery of the Commonwealth and Cromwell’s dictatorship, the public were in the mood to party! Playhouse is your invitation to the party – enjoy! © Rubicon

Goodbye is one of, if not the most expansive and diverse collections pianist Bobo Stenson has ever released. This is his first ECM release in five years. Paul Motian takes over the drum chair vacated by Jon Christensen, and his shimmering, deep listening and subtlety add to the excellence and sheer quiet beauty of this recording. Goodbye is more a recording of songs than jazz pieces -- at least in a traditional sense. This trio doesn't swing, they play, they slowly dance through the lyric pieces found here. An excellent example is the opener, a cover of the way over-recorded "Send in the Clowns," by Stephen Sondheim. Stenson's approach to the melody is spacious, pensive, and utterly sympathetic. He removes the melodrama and instead replaces it with empathy and understatement. That he's not a flashy player should not be held against him, but celebrated in an age of pyrotechnic musicianship that often leaves emotion and nuance out of the creative and technical mix. Stenson is an awesome pianist with his choice, haunting, harmonic shades in his performances of Argentinean composer Ariel Ramirez's "Alfonsia," or in Henry Purcell's "Music for a While." This trio plays democratically, as well; there are no imbalances. Anders Jormin's bass work is utterly simpatico with Motian's drumming. His gorgeous arco work on Tony Williams' "There Comes a Time," is one of the few moments where he stands out, but it's not about that at all, it's about the harmony of the trio to interpret and express what can be so easily lost in a song: its heart. Jormin is also the band's arranger on the classical pieces. And he composed four of the set's works (Motian and Stenson contributed one each). The album closes with a spirited read of Ornette Coleman's "Race Face," where the band stretches, and engages jazz lightheartedly, with chops at the ready. Again, it is Stenson's ability to find the soul in Coleman's tune; with its repetitive phrasing gives the band a jump-off point. Motian kicks it into medium-high gear and there's something approaching more conventional notions of swing here, but it's extrapolated, pushed over the edge, into a more spacious and less strident space. Given the wait for this album, one can only say that they disc should have been titled, "Welcome Back; We Missed You."© Thom Jurek /TiVo

For over 20 years, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, a multi-media event staged in late 1968 under a circus tent in a north London TV studio, and meant to be shown on the BBC, lay unedited and unseen reportedly because the band was unhappy with its performance. In 1992 director Michael Lindsay-Hogg began editing it, a process that was finally finished in 1996 before the film and soundtrack were released on both CD and DVD. It has now been re-released with a new 4K Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos DVD/Blu-Ray of the film and a soundtrack expanded to 28 tracks, with a new mix in a 192k/24 bit HD restoration. Often dismissed as a goofy, DayGlo relic that reflected the mushy peace and love currents of the moment, this high resolution reissue shows that a serious reassessment of this oddity is long overdue. Because of setups and multiple takes the event dragged on much longer than expected and so the Stones performance was recorded in the wee hours of the morning (Richards has said that the band had to bring in a second audience after wearing out the first). And yet the band's six songs, four coming from the recently released Beggars Banquet, are the electric heart of this collection. In fact it's Jagger, one of the originators of the circus concept, who almost single-handedly carries the day with his energetically deranged performance of "Sympathy for the Devil." Other highlights include a red hot performance by The Who of "A Quick One, While He's Away," (with Keith Moon on fire), Taj Mahal groovin' with guitarist Jesse Ed Davis on "Ain't That A Lot of Love," and John Lennon bantering jabberwocky with Jagger and playing The White Album's"Yer Blues" with Eric Clapton on guitar, Keith Richards on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums. A second take of "Yer Blues" is included among the nine unreleased tracks here along with three more Taj Mahal blues numbers, Mozart from pianist Julius Katchen and a rehearsal take of another Beatles tune, "Revolution." Circus is also notable for being Brian Jones' last official performance with the band; he died in July 1969, the first of too many 27-year old rockers to die young. © Robert Baird / Qobuz

After achieving a reluctant Top Ten hit with a rock version of the traditional Irish pub ballad "Whiskey in the Jar," Thin Lizzy began work on Vagabonds of the Western World -- their third, and ultimately last album for Decca Records. The single's surprise success gave the band bargaining power to demand more money and time to record, resulting in their first sonically satisfying album. The environmentally-conscious R&B of "Mama Nature Said" kicks things off with Eric Bell leading the way on slide guitar. The overblown "The Hero and the Madman" and the tepid "Slow Blues" threaten to derail the proceedings, but all is well again when the band break into their first bona fide classic "The Rocker." Brimming with attitude and dangerous swagger, Lynott sets the tone as drummer Brian Downey explodes into life for the first time on vinyl. Lizzy's Irish heritage permeates the title track, and the beautiful "Little Girl in Bloom" is absolutely flawless, featuring Lynott, the poet, in top form. In many ways, Vagabonds actually rocks harder than Lizzy's next album, the soulful Night Life -- often considered the band's first "important" record. And with the inclusion of four non-LP singles, including the aforementioned "Whiskey in the Jar," this package becomes even more appealing.© Eduardo Rivadavia /TiVo

Purcell would seem like a natural fit for Andrea Scholl's voice, but this album of songs, arias, and orchestral selections from Purcell's semi-operas and incidental music is the counter tenor's first foray into recording this repertoire, and it's a fabulous success. This is a recording that takes a while to establish its momentum, but it grows in stature as it progresses. The first few tracks are very fine, but by the time Scholl has finished "What power art thou," (the "Cold Song" from King Arthur), the first of many tracks where one might have to repress the urge to hit replay to experience its wonder again immediately, the music and the performance have cast a net of enchantment that doesn't let up. A few other selections that may elicit a similarly intense response include "One Charming Night," from The Fairy Queen, "Music for a While," from Oedipus, and "Dido's Lament." Seeing this last on the tracklist might reasonably cause a skeptical response, because there are so many superb recordings by sopranos and mezzo-sopranos, and the idea of a counter tenor singing a role that is virtually always, if not always, sung by a woman in the theater seems odd. Scholl's broadly paced and deeply felt singing is fully persuasive, though, and makes it possible to hear the solo not only as a woman's grief at love lost, but as a more universal expression of profound, dignified sorrow. Stefano Montanari conducts Accademia Bizantina in a performance every bit as invested in probing the depths of the music as Scholl's. The violence the orchestra evokes in the "Cold Song" is genuinely startling, fierce enough to make one concerned about the string instruments' withstanding such a battering; it's hugely effective. Scholl is joined on two tracks by counter tenor Christophe Dumaux, with whom he blends beautifully. Their duet, "O dive custos," has a gorgeous Monteverdian lyricism and immediacy. Decca's sound is wonderfully clean, warm, and present.© TiVo

Loss Hope Love is the sixth album from British rock outfit the Feeling. Produced by the band itself, the set sees the group delivering a collection of anthemic and emotional rock cuts.© Rich Wilson /TiVo

Vocalist Jane Monheit delivers a sophisticated and romantic set of standards on her 2010 effort Home. Once again showcasing Monheit's sparkling virtuosic singing, Home also features the backing talents of the singer's longtime associates pianist Michael Kanan, bassist Neal Miner, and drummer Rick Montalbano. Also featured are guitarist Frank Vignola, trumpeter Joe Magnarelli, violinist Mark O'Connor, and others. Although Monheit takes the spotlight on such American popular songbook tunes as "A Shine on Your Shoes,'' "This Is Always," and "I'll Be Around," she also allows for several exceptional duets, including "Tonight You Belong to Me" with singer/guitarist John Pizzarelli and "It's Only Smoke" with singer Peter Eldridge. Home is an urbane, immaculately produced effort that should appeal to Monheit's longtime fans.© Matt Collar /TiVo

Recorded live in France in 1982 but not released on CD in the U.S. until 1990, Heart Still Beating isn't quite in a class with Roxy Music's first live album, Viva, but nonetheless gives us a lot to be excited about. Lead singer Bryan Ferry and guitarist Phil Manzanera sound quite inspired much of the time, and Manzanera delivers some excellent solos. Longtime Roxy devotees will want to savor engaging versions of "Out of the Blue" and "Both Ends Burning" (both of which were heard on Viva), as well as such favorites as "Dance Away," "Avalon" and the clever "Love Is the Drug." Roxy comes closer to a mainstream rock sound on enjoyable interpretations of Neil Young's "Like a Hurricane" and John Lennon's "Jealous Guy," but even then, the distinctive band's quirky art-rock tendencies remain.© Alex Henderson /TiVo

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Revolver are a band from France with a serious jones for mid-period Beatles, as you might have inferred from their choice of band name. It's hard to imagine why anyone would list the Fab Four as a major influence at this point in pop history. While these guys clearly have a gift for charming melodies, the chance of any young band matching the energy, creativity, and exuberance of the Beatles is close to nil. That said, there are a few cuts here that do capture that mid-'60s Brit-pop flavor without falling too flat. The cello-dominated track "Leave Me Alone" has a vague resemblance to "Can't By Me Love" and sports some glorious harmonies. "Balulalow" echoes the sound of Rubber Soul with its jaunty rhythm and piano fills that suggest the guitar of George Harrison. "Luke, Mike & John" has a bouncy McCartney-ish melody, the lilt of a country tune, more lush harmony singing, and another Harrison solo, this time on guitar. They stretch a bit on the lazily titled swing tune "Untitled No. 1"; "Do You Have a Gun?," which sounds a bit like the Zombies gone acoustic, although the vocals lack the unique quality of Colin Blunstone; and "Get Around Town," a swing tune with a vaudevillian feel and a lyric that suggests the Brecht/Weill standard "Alabama Song." Most of the lyrics here are fairly derivative and awkward, too. Perhaps because English isn't their first language, they often seem to be an afterthought, although they manage to avoid the obvious clichés that often plagued ABBA.© j. poet /TiVo