Sailor is the second studio album by American rock group The Steve Miller Band, released in October 1968 by Capitol Records. Like The Steve Miller Band's previous album, Children of the Future, Sailor was produced by Glyn Johns. Unlike its predecessor which was recorded in London, England, Sailor was recorded in Los Angeles, California. It was the last Steve Miller Band album to feature contributions by original members Boz Scaggs and Jim Peterman. Scaggs went on to a successful solo career. The album features a psychedelic blues rock sound.

If Wilson Pickett could cover the Archies and Al Green could interpret the Bee Gees, why shouldn't Charles Bradley put his spin on Black Sabbath? Bradley's deep, soulful reading of Black Sabbath's "Changes" (from 1972's Vol. 4) became something of a viral sensation when it first surfaced on a Record Store Day single in 2013. Now it's become the title track and cornerstone of Bradley's third album, and in this context it doesn't sound like a novelty, but like the striking, deeply felt performance it truly is. As on his two previous albums, Bradley is one of the most authentic-sounding artists in the 2010s retro-soul sweepstakes on Changes. The production by Thomas Brenneck is straightforward but naturalistically effective, and puts Bradley's rough but passionate vocals in engaging relief with the accompanists. (Most of the album features the Menahan Street Band backing Bradley, though the Budos Band does the honors on two cuts.) Most of the songs on Changes are new, but they sound like they could have been prize Atlantic or Stax rarities from the mid-'60s, and the performances honor the sound and the emotional power of classic soul.

Like many of his German and Austrian contemporaries, Bohemian-born composer Heinrich von Biber was strongly influenced by the Italian school of violin composition that included Biagio Marini (1587-1665) and Marco Uccellini (1603-1680). A noted virtuoso himself, Biber and his teacher Johann Heinrich Schmelzer (1621-1680) were two of the most important figures of the late seventeenth-century Viennese violin style. Biber's keen understanding of the technical and expressive possibilities of the instrument is evident in his innovative use of pizzicato (plucking of the string with the finger), double and triple stops (more than one note played at once creating "chords"), col legno (stick of the bow on the string), sul ponticello (played close to the bridge), and, especially, scordatura (intentional "mistuning" of the strings). Scordatura allowed the performer to play chords in particular keys more easily, extended the range of notes, and provided more open strings in order to negotiate the difficulty of polyphonic writing for a single instrument. Biber's imaginative and original use of these techniques or special effects brought violin virtuosity to an entirely new level of musical expression in the Baroque period. It can be argued that J. S. Bach's masterful Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, written in 1720, are direct descendants of Biber's grounding breaking Mystery or Rosary Sonatas, composed nearly a quarter of a century earlier.

Digitally remastered and expanded edition of this album from the Rock singer, songwriter and guitarist. First album Children of the Future was produced by Glyn Johns at Olympic Studios in London, and released in April 1968. The five-man line-up featured Steve Miller on guitar and vocals, Boz Scaggs on guitar and vocals, Lonnie Turner on bass, Tim Davis on drums and Jim Peterman on keyboards. The original side one of the album features a suite of linked psychedelic songs, while side two starts with two Boz Scaggs originals before culminating in a selection of blues cover versions. The bonus track is the non-album single side 'Sittin' in Circles'. The booklet of this Special Digipak Edition contains all the lyrics, a brand new booklet note by San Francisco journalist Joel Selvin, based on 2012 interviews with Steve Miller himself, and photos from Steve's own collection.

Until 1999's Free Soul (Capitol) and 2001's exhaustive but more excellent overall Petals (The Right Stuff) came along, Capitol Gold offered the best summation of this true original's horribly undervalued solo career. As with Free Soul, Capitol Gold leaves a significant gap by excluding the best moments from Minnie Riperton's debut (Come to My Garden), an album that was released on GTR. This issue would be rectified by The Right Stuff, a subsidiary of Capitol, for Petals. Still, Capitol Gold makes for a fine substitute introduction to Riperton; it includes all of her significant singles and a good survey of album tracks that didn't receive the notice they deserved when they were originally released.

In the last 30 years, the relationship between the leading Czech string quartets and Janáček two String Quartets has evolved markedly. The best Czech performers have always produced fine recordings of these extraordinary works, but more recent generations of players have pursued a different level of engagement. While performances such as that of the Talich Quartet (2005) show remarkable insight, recordings by other quartets, such as the Haas and ≤kampa, grapple with the passion and drama, occasionally even sadism in these turbulent works. The Pražák Quartet has an international reputation in Czech repertoire, in particular for their Dvořák their new recording of Janáček’s Quartets shares many of their fellow ensembles’ keen engagement with the composer’s language.

The Style Council's albums were always weighed down by their far-reaching musical ambitions, which meant that their ideas were usually best heard on their singles. And while this period of Paul Weller's career has been criticized heavily, he wrote several excellent songs during the Style Council, most of which are featured on the fine compilation The Singular Adventures of the Style Council. Not all of the 16 songs are first-rate, as it begins to lose steam toward the end of the band's life, but "My Ever Changing Moods," "You're the Best Thing," "Long Hot Summer," "Shout to the Top!," "A Solid Bond in Your Heart," "Money Go Round," "Walls Come Tumbling Down," and "Speak Like a Child" are terrific, and make the collection worthwhile for fans of the Jam and Weller's solo career, as well as fans of New Romantic new wave and jazzy sophisti-pop.

By all means a phenomenal pop album that hit number nine on the black albums chart and crossed over to penetrate the pop charts at number 32, Nightclubbing saw Grace Jones working once again with Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, and the remainder of the Compass Point team. Nightclubbing also continues Jones' tradition of picking excellent songs to reinterpret. This time out, the Police's "Demolition Man," Bill Withers' "Use Me," and Iggy Pop's "Nightclubbing" receive radical reinterpretations; "Nightclubbing" is glacial in both tempo and lack of warmth, while both "Use Me" and "Demolition Man" fit perfectly into Jones' lyrical scheme. Speaking of a lyrical scheme, "Pull Up to the Bumper" (number five black singles, number two club play) is so riddled with naughty double entendres – or is it just about parallel parking? – that it renders Musique's "In the Bush" as daring as Paul Anka's "Puppy Love." Drive it in between what, Grace? It's not just lyrics that make the song stick out; jingling spirals of rhythm guitar and a simplistic, squelching, mid-tempo rhythm make the song effective, even without considering Jones' presence.

This album is certain to be placed in the MJQ section of any shop that carries it. In reality though, only four of the cuts here feature the permanent, stand-alone, 1952-vintage Modern Jazz Quartet; the other eight having been done in the summer and fall of 1951, when they were still known as the Milt Jackson Quartet, with Jackson providing all of the original material. The differences are so subtle as to be indistinguishable – Milt Jackson and John Lewis are on every cut, while Al Johns subs for Kenny Clarke on drums, and Ray Brown precedes Percy Heath on four of the tracks. Clarke's drumming is more impressive in its quiet way, but Ray Brown's bass work is simpler and more forceful.

Violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Steven Isserlis are joined by two acclaimed musical forces - pianist Jeremy Denk and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, of which Bell is Music Director – in a landmark joint recording, For the Love of Brahms (Sony Classical). Available September 30, 2016, the new album is a unique project that features works of Brahms and Schumann that Bell calls “music about love and friendship.” Bell, Isserlis and Denk unite here in Brahms’s first published chamber work, the Piano Trio in B Major, Op. 8 in its rarely performed original 1854 version. Isserlis also joins Bell – as violin soloist and director – and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields in Brahms’s last orchestral work, the celebrated Double Concerto (for Violin and Cello) in A Minor, Op. 102. Bell, Isserlis and members of the Academy also offer the first recording of an unusual coupling: the slow movement of Schumann’s rarely heard Violin Concerto, in a version for string orchestra made by Benjamin Britten, who also added a short coda.

Guts is a retrospective compilation album by John Cale, released by Island Records in February 1977. It is perhaps most notable for including the songs "Leaving It Up To You", which was deleted from Helen of Troy, and the previously unreleased "Mary Lou". It was compiled by Howard Thompson.

Between dozens of recordings made from 1937 to 1950, legendary French gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt waxed one, maybe two titles of solo guitar per year. Often it was less than that. Sometimes he made them at the request of the producers, who surely heard him warming up and decided to capture on records some of that magic atmosphere. Then Django took his instrument and performed whatever was on his mind: in occasions fully developed solo compositions; another times, instantly made up improvisations. This outstanding CD comprises them all for the first time in chronological order, including some very rare tracks and a recently discovered solo from a radio program as a bonus track.

Although they generally aren't thought of as being as innovative as their contemporaries the Beatles, the Rolling Stones or the Who, the Kinks, thanks to Ray Davies' ever evolving songwriting and brother Dave Davies' power chording, fuzzed-out guitar sound, may well have influenced the actual sound of later bands more than any of those groups. This fine single disc collection brings together the Kinks' Pye Records singles from the 1960s, and includes the power chord shot heard around the world, "You Really Got Me," as well as its close siblings "All Day and All of the Night," "Tired of Waiting for You" and "Til the End of the Day," and later and relatively more sophisticated hits like "Waterloo Sunset" and "Lola." The end result is a solid chronological survey of the Kinks' most commercial and influential period.

Alarm Will Sound's recording of Steve Reich's monumental orchestral/choral works The Desert Music and Tehillim, released on the Cantaloupe label in 2002, greatly benefits from the group's close connections with the composer: the ensemble's conductor, Alan Pierson, and several of the performers studied at the Eastman School with Brad Lubman, a conductor frequently enlisted by Reich. Also, Pierson's arrangements, which reconcile the chamber and orchestral versions that exist for both works, were prepared in close consultation with the composer; thus, this may well be the definitive recording of these pieces. Brilliantly sonorous in their climaxes – the burst of light near the end of Desert Music, the "Alleluias" that close Tehillim – the players also articulate Reich's intricate canonic textures with nimble precision.