What does a shrug sound like? On "Don't Know Why,” the opening track of her debut effort, Norah Jones suggests a few possibilities. The first time she sings the title phrase, she gives it a touch of indifference, the classic tossed-off movie-star shrug. Her tone shifts slightly when she hits the chorus, to convey twinges of sadness; here the casual phrasing could be an attempt to shake off a sharp memory. Later, she shrugs in a way that conveys resignation, possibly regret—she's replaying a scene, trying to understand what happened. Those shrugs and shadings, tools deployed by every jazz vocalist of the 1950s, are inescapable throughout Come Away With Me—in part because everything surrounding Jones' voice is so chill. There's room for her to emote, and room for gently cresting piano and organ chords. Unlike so many of her contemporaries, Jones knows instinctively how much (or how little!) singer the song needs. The secret of this record, which came out when Jones was 22, is its almost defiant approachability: It is calm, and open, and gentle, music for a lazy afternoon in a porch swing. As transfixing covers of Hank Williams' "Cold Cold Heart” and Hoagy Carmichael's "The Nearness of You” make clear, Jones thinks about contours and shadows when she sings; her storytelling depends as much on the scene and the atmosphere as the narrative. And Jones applies the same understatement to the original songs here, which weave together elements of country, pop, jazz and torch balladry in inventive ways. It's one thing to render an old tune with modern cleverness, a skill Jones had honed as a solo pianist/singer before she was discovered. It's quite another to transform an original tune, like Jesse Harris' "Don't Know Why,” into something that sounds ageless and eternal, like a standard. Jones does that, over and over, using just shrugs and implications, rarely raising her voice much above a whisper. © Tom Moon/Qobuz

Audio Vertigo is the tenth studio album from British indie outfit Elbow and follows 2021's Flying Dream 1. Produced by Elbow's Craig Potter and recorded at various studios across the U.K., including their own Blueprint Studios in Salford, the album sees the band opt for a grittier, more garagey feel compared to their previous work, while also expanding their sonic palette.© Rich Wilson /TiVo

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were remarkable craftsmen from the start, as Steely Dan's debut, Can't Buy a Thrill, illustrates. Each song is tightly constructed, with interlocking chords and gracefully interwoven melodies, buoyed by clever, cryptic lyrics. All of these are hallmarks of Steely Dan's signature sound, but what is most remarkable about the record is the way it differs from their later albums. Of course, one of the most notable differences is the presence of vocalist David Palmer, a professional blue-eyed soul vocalist who oversings the handful of tracks where he takes the lead. Palmer's very presence signals the one major flaw with the album -- in an attempt to appeal to a wide audience, Becker and Fagen tempered their wildest impulses with mainstream pop techniques. Consequently, there are very few of the jazz flourishes that came to distinguish their albums -- the breakthrough single, "Do It Again," does work an impressively tight Latin jazz beat, and "Reelin' in the Years" has jazzy guitar solos and harmonies -- and the production is overly polished, conforming to all the conventions of early-'70s radio. Of course, that gives these decidedly twisted songs a subversive edge, but compositionally, these aren't as innovative as their later work. Even so, the best moments ("Dirty Work," "Kings," "Midnight Cruiser," "Turn That Heartbeat Over Again") are wonderful pop songs that subvert traditional conventions and more than foreshadow the paths Steely Dan would later take.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Under a symbolic change in labels (Asylum for Island), Tom Waits is changing style! With this revolutionary masterpiece, the Californian moves away from his bluesy Randy Newman spirit, where Broadway is reignited by the originality of the violin and jazz piano pasodoble. We now see him incorporate a sense of European decadence,welcoming the cabaret spirit of the Brecht/Weill tandem into his music. UFO noises, atypical instruments, crazy vocal production; Swordfishtrombones is a carnival of sounds and atmospheres where the madness is never far (Captain Beefheart sometimes comes to mind). A grand barnum; Uncle Tom dons a costume he never will again. A ramshackle Mr Loyal, with a blues soul and an avant-garde pen, howling like a wolf. A Howlin' Wolf, of course... © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

Tom Waits wrote a song called "Frank's Wild Years" for his 1983 Swordfishtrombones album, then used the title (minus its apostrophe) for a musical play he wrote with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, and toured with in 1986. The Franks Wild Years album, drawn from the show, is subtitled, "un operachi romantico in two acts," though the songs themselves do not carry the plot. Rather, this is just the third installment in Waits' eccentric series of Island Records albums in which he seems most inspired by German art song and carnival music, presenting songs in spare, stripped-down arrangements consisting of instruments like marimba, baritone horn, and pump organ and singing in a strained voice that has been artificially compressed and distorted. The songs themselves often are conventional romantic vignettes, or would be minus the oddities of instrumentation, arrangement, and performance. For example, "Innocent When You Dream," a song of disappointment in love and friendship, has a winning melody, but it is played in a seesaw arrangement of pump organ, bass, violin, and piano, and Waits sings it like an enraged drunk. (He points out the arbitrary nature of the arrangements by repeating "Straight to the Top," done as a demented rhumba in act one, as a Vegas-style Frank Sinatra swing tune in act two.) The result on record may not be theatrical, exactly, but it certainly is affected. It also has the quality of an inside joke that listeners are not being let in on.© William Ruhlmann /TiVo

After the extensive retrospective of his ACT years, which, in three albums (3 Generations), offered a magnificent overview of his innumerable talents through a series of prestigious collaborations, trombonist, singer, composer, producer, and conductor Nils Landgren returns to the stylistic unity of the supergroup that he’s been a part of since 2019. He’s joined by some of his most loyal companions from the label (Michael Wollny on piano and Wolfgang Haffner on drums, both German, as well as Swedish bassist Lars Danielsson) to record the second volume of their alliance, following 4 Wheel Drive.With an eclectic repertoire that mixes original compositions with covers of pop songs by Paul Simon (“Still Crazy After All These Years,” “The Sound of Silence”), Genesis (“Hold On My Heart”), Sting (“Fields of God”), or even Elton John (“My Song”), the quartet deploys the same sharp attention to detail that they do on their first record. Placing his delightfully fragile voice or the rippling swirls of his trombone within a sophisticated frame of arrangements that are never ostentatious or abstractly deconstructivist, Landgren shows gratitude toward the melodic seduction of these songs, making space for his companions to make subtle digressions (notably, Michael Wollny, often taking the lead with dazzling interventions). Depending on the track, he is able to take the ensemble with him toward a more modernist chamber jazz, or, in the opposite direction toward a pop music that’s at once nostalgic and carefree. © Stéphane Ollivier/Qobuz 

Switzerland’s most famous electronic music group is celebrating its 40th birthday with an XXL retrospective release. These four discs pay tribute to a body of work that has wandered every which way over the last four decades, but has always remained faithful to the dancefloor. The core of this best-of compilation is in the first two discs, which contain all the great classic tunes from Dieter Meier and Boris Blank, including the seminal Oh Yeah, which was released in 1985 and went down in history thanks to a series of teen movies and the Simpsons' beer mascot, Duffman. We also find hits like Bostich, a live version of The Race, Vicious Games, I Love You or the funky/psychedelic Tied Up. The third CD, curated by Boris Blank, foregrounds Yello's "mellow" side, and it highlights some lesser-known tracks such as Capri Calling or Otto di Catania. Finally, the last disc features a dozen remixes, with a hypnotic Carl Craig on Electrified II and Hell DJ in cosmic form on Bostich. © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz

Joni Mitchell's ongoing Archives series has been an overwhelming success and the third volume somehow manages to outdo its predecessors. Where Volume 1 gave a raw, warts-and-all look at a developing talent wrestling with her creative identity and Volume 2 showed that talent operating at an astonishingly high level, Volume 3 documents Mitchell's transition from a truly gifted artist pushing the boundaries of the rock-culture zeitgeist into a mad genius staking her own sonic territories. This set, probably more than any other that has been or will be part of this series, is dynamic and revelatory, like pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz and finding an actual wizard doing real wizardry. While Vol. 3 falls short of giving blow-by-blow documentation of the incredible studio-as-an-instrument work Mitchell did to transform For the Roses, Court and Spark, and—most triumphantly—The Hissing of Summer Lawns from jazz-inflected pop-folk records into towering artistic statements (most of the songs here are presented in either spare embryonic versions or funky, recalibrated live takes, with little middle ground). This volume repeatedly demonstrates Mitchell's unerring gift for songwriting that is singular and superlative, as well as her willingness to build sonic scaffolding for those songs that is as complementary as it is challenging. The results are often just as impactful in their simplest renditions (a live acoustic version of "This Flight Tonight" loses the electric filigree and multi-tracked harmony vocals but still can stop traffic), and there are real revelations in the early and alternate versions of these well-known album tracks. In fact, most of these early versions would have made excellent album tracks. "See You Sometime" especially benefits from a loose, swinging airiness that's replaced with a denser arrangement on For the Roses, a streamlined, acoustic demo of "Raised on Robbery" is missing the full-band energy of the final version, but employs some wild background vocals that give the number an entirely different vibe, and a demo of "Help Me"—just Mitchell and a guitar—is breathtaking in its elegance. Despite the strengths of these more straight-ahead versions, Mitchell was clearly going to be dissatisfied with releasing them in forms that were merely "really good," when—with more work in the studio and the multi-track editing suite—they would be transformed into work that was "truly great."  © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz

Borrowing heavily from Marc Bolan's glam rock and the future shock of A Clockwork Orange, David Bowie reached back to the heavy rock of The Man Who Sold the World for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Constructed as a loose concept album about an androgynous alien rock star named Ziggy Stardust, the story falls apart quickly, yet Bowie's fractured, paranoid lyrics are evocative of a decadent, decaying future, and the music echoes an apocalyptic, nuclear dread. Fleshing out the off-kilter metallic mix with fatter guitars, genuine pop songs, string sections, keyboards, and a cinematic flourish, Ziggy Stardust is a glitzy array of riffs, hooks, melodrama, and style and the logical culmination of glam. Mick Ronson plays with a maverick flair that invigorates rockers like "Suffragette City," "Moonage Daydream," and "Hang Onto Yourself," while "Lady Stardust," "Five Years," and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" have a grand sense of staged drama previously unheard of in rock & roll. And that self-conscious sense of theater is part of the reason why Ziggy Stardust sounds so foreign. Bowie succeeds not in spite of his pretensions but because of them, and Ziggy Stardust -- familiar in structure, but alien in performance -- is the first time his vision and execution met in such a grand, sweeping fashion.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Empty Sky was followed by Elton John, a more focused and realized record that deservedly became his first hit. John and Bernie Taupin's songwriting had become more immediate and successful; in particular, John's music had become sharper and more diverse, rescuing Taupin's frequently nebulous lyrics. "Take Me to the Pilot" might not make much sense lyrically, but John had the good sense to ground its willfully cryptic words with a catchy blues-based melody. Next to the increased sense of songcraft, the most noticeable change on Elton John is the addition of Paul Buckmaster's grandiose string arrangements. Buckmaster's orchestrations are never subtle, but they never overwhelm the vocalist, nor do they make the songs schmaltzy. Instead, they fit the ambitions of John and Taupin, as the instant standard "Your Song" illustrates. Even with the strings and choirs that dominate the sound of the album, John manages to rock out on a fair share of the record. Though there are a couple of underdeveloped songs, Elton John remains one of his best records.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

After two EPs, Playground in 2017 and Lonely City in 2019, which revealed her to fans and propelled her into the small, hybrid, and blended world of young British jazz, the saxophonist, singer, flautist, keyboardist and above all songwriter, producer and arranger, Laura Misch, has released her debut album under the label One Little Independent Record, and it is as ambitious as it is seductive. Conceived in close collaboration with the electronic music producer William Arcane, Sample the Sky, in a series of original free-flowing songs, develops an immersive sonic realm, that is at once funereal, melancholic, and insidiously unsettling, and highlights the angelic yet sensual voice of the singer. Mixing strings layered on synthesizers, skilfully deconstructed grooves, ethereal saxophone loops, Maria Osuchowska’s dreamy harp and Tomas Kaspar’s guitar, the music builds dreamlike, highly sensory landscapes on the fringes of ambient and alternative pop, serving a backdrop of intimate and subtly activist poetic discourse that invites a form of connection and reconciliation with our environment. The birth certificate of a new major voice in the British scene! © Stéphane Ollivier/Qobuz

Borrowing heavily from Marc Bolan's glam rock and the future shock of A Clockwork Orange, David Bowie reached back to the heavy rock of The Man Who Sold the World for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Constructed as a loose concept album about an androgynous alien rock star named Ziggy Stardust, the story falls apart quickly, yet Bowie's fractured, paranoid lyrics are evocative of a decadent, decaying future, and the music echoes an apocalyptic, nuclear dread. Fleshing out the off-kilter metallic mix with fatter guitars, genuine pop songs, string sections, keyboards, and a cinematic flourish, Ziggy Stardust is a glitzy array of riffs, hooks, melodrama, and style and the logical culmination of glam. Mick Ronson plays with a maverick flair that invigorates rockers like "Suffragette City," "Moonage Daydream," and "Hang Onto Yourself," while "Lady Stardust," "Five Years," and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" have a grand sense of staged drama previously unheard of in rock & roll. And that self-conscious sense of theater is part of the reason why Ziggy Stardust sounds so foreign. Bowie succeeds not in spite of his pretensions but because of them, and Ziggy Stardust -- familiar in structure, but alien in performance -- is the first time his vision and execution met in such a grand, sweeping fashion.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Lake Geneva is not Lake Pontchartrain, and Montreux is certainly not New Orleans. But regularly, during the famous Montreux jazz festival, the two cities fall into step in a swaying dance. Especially when Dr. John is on stage, who has made it up there at least seven times, in 1986, 1993, 1995, 2004, 2007, 2011 and 2012. Why has Dr. John played so many times in Montreux? In part because he was a huge figure with constant high quality performances, as good in his last decade (he died in 2019) as in his previous ones. But also because the public never tired of him. Dr. John always emanated good vibes, with music like a course of vitamin therapy.This compilation of his Montreux concerts begins with four tracks recorded in 1986. Dr. John is alone at the piano, and in great shape. Caribbean-style boogie-woogie escapes from under his nimble wanders, cool and elegant, typical of New Orleans (and partly invented by Professor Longhair, to whom Dr. John pays tribute). On the other pieces played in the group, which includes a brass and rhythm section, he showcases radiant funk and indulgent jazz, the secrets to which he has always held close to his chest. All of Dr. John’s and New Orleans classics are there, from Let the Good Times Roll, Big Chief and Right Place, Wrong Time. Everyone who has seen Dr. John on stage, in Montreux or elsewhere, will find that this compilation offers the same energy of his concerts. What’s more, it won’t fail to bring a smile to your face. © Stéphane Deschamps/Qobuz

Use Your Illusion II is more serious and ambitious than I, but it's also considerably more pretentious. Featuring no less than four songs that run over six minutes, II is heavy on epics, whether it's the charging funk metal of "Locomotive," the antiwar "Civil War," or the multipart "Estranged." As if an attempt to balance the grandiose epics, the record is loaded with an extraordinary amount of filler. "14 Years" may have a lean, Stonesy rhythm, and Duff McKagan's Johnny Thunders homage, "So Fine," may be entertaining, but there's no forgiving the ridiculous "Get in the Ring," where Axl Rose threatens rock journalists by name because they gave him bad reviews; the misinterpretation of Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"; another version of "Don't Cry"; and the bizarre closer, "My World," which probably captures Rose's instability as effectively as the tortured poetry of his epics. That said, there are numerous strengths to Use Your Illusion II; a couple of songs have a nervy energy, and for all their pretensions, the overblown epics are effective, though strangely enough, they reveal notorious homophobe Rose's aspirations of being a cross between Elton John and Freddie Mercury. But the pompous production and poor pacing make the album tiring for anyone who isn't a dedicated listener.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Fans of Slowhand will be delighted to learn that the documentary written and produced by Stephen "Scooter" Weintraub and broadcast on American television in 1995 (which includes an interview carried out by Martin Scorsese in which Eric Clapton professes his love for the blues and the great artists of the genre) has been rereleased, along with its soundtrack Nothing But The Blues. Here, we see the British guitarist take to the stage at the Fillmore in San Francisco during the autumn of 1994. He performs his 12th studio album From the Cradle, a pure blues masterpiece that he released in September that same year, following the success of Unplugged (1992). As is often the case with Eric Clapton, the live version differs greatly from the version recorded at Olympic Studios in London, though this was also recorded live. This album also includes a number of unreleased tracks: Blues All Day Long by Jimmy Rogers and Malted Milk by Robert Johnson, as well as the blues classics Every Day I Have The Blues and Forty-Four. The audio tracks from the live performances from the 8th and 9th of November 1994 were previously leaked without permission, so this album is a much more official digital release. Plus, it’s in high definition! © Charlotte Saintoin/Qobuz