You have to feel for those artists that didn’t get the breaks at Motown. Most that didn’t were every bit as good as those that did. Their lack of success was the result of being some way down a pecking order dominated by acts such as the Temptations, Four Tops and Supremes. Even the second wave of higher profile acts had to battle to be heard above the big noise made by the hits of those groups. With hindsight, the Monitors hardly stood a chance.

The Teachers couples the two funk-tinged albums this legendary tenor saxophonist recorded for Perception: the politically-inspired LP The Teachers from 1970 and Heritage Hum (1971), featuring Eddie Jefferson.

The Soviet-born Israeli cellist Mischa Maisky has a distinctive, arch-Romantic style that carries forward a Russian tradition of intense expressivity. The only cellist to have studied with the Russian giants Mstislav Rostropovich and Gregor Piatigorsky, he has himself become an influential teacher. Maisky was born January 10, 1948, in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Soviet Union. The Latvian form of his name was Miša Maiskis. His older brother Valery was an organist and harpsichordist. Maisky took up the cello at eight and entered the Riga Conservatory, but he chafed under the school's rigid curriculum. In 1965, he moved to the larger city of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and he quickly flourished.