The Ultimate Christmas Album, Vol. 5 collects more pop and rock holiday tunes, this time venturing further into the '70s and '80s with songs like Paul McCartney & Wings' "Wonderful Christmastime," Hall & Oates' "Jingle Bell Rock," and Barry Manilow's "It's Just Another New Year's Eve." The collection still features traditional pop chestnuts, including Dean Martin's "A Marshmallow World," Johnny Mathis' "The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You)," and Andy Williams' "Sleigh Ride," but this volume's overall feel is more contemporary than classic. Other highlights include Manhattan Transfer's "A Christmas Love Song," the Waitresses' "Christmas Wrapping," the Tokens' "Little Drummer Boy," and the Jackson 5's "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." If The Ultimate Christmas Album, Vol. 5 isn't necessarily the most coherent volume in the series, it's certainly one of the most interesting.

David Unreleased LP & More includes the 12 tracks originally scheduled for release in 1971 as LP Motown 733, plus seven amazing bonus tracks from the album sessions and four mono single mixes. It's the great David Ruffin and Motown's Funk Bothers band, directed by several of the company's best producers including Smokey Robinson, Johnny Bristol, Henry Cosby, Clay McMurray and Ivy Jo Hunter. Ruffin, former lead singer of the Temptations, had started his solo career with a bang, as his 1969 album and single, My Whole World Ended, were smash hits. At age 28, entering his prime, he cut his third album while also recording duet tracks with his brother, Jimmy. David watched as the duet album, Jimmy's solo album and the solo debut from Eddie Kendricks, another former Temptations lead singer, were all released.

Guitarist Johnny Whitehill has been a fixture on the British blues scene since the 1970s, emerging as a star while a member of the Blues Burglars, the band he formed with harpist Paul Lamb in the early '80s. As a guitarist, his inspirations and influences came from the likes of B.B. King, Freddie King, Albert King, T-Bone Walker, Albert Collins, Robert Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller, Lightnin' Hopkins, et al., and, later on, fellow British bluesman Peter Green, among others. He has recorded albums of his own intermittently, amid two decades working mostly with Paul Lamb & the King Snakes – the successor band to the Blues Burglars – and since the opening of the 21st century has toured England with his own group, Johnny Whitehill's Real Deal.

Chicago was one of the most successful bands of the rock era, racking up 21 Billboard Top Ten hits between 1970 and 1990, a period where they survived the departure of key band members while also subtly adapting to changing times. That's not an easy task for any rock band and it's especially difficult for a group like Chicago, a band that placed equal (if not greater) emphasis on horns as guitar. Picking up where Blood, Sweat & Tears left off, Chicago initially specialized in jazz-inflected prog-rock, using the sides of a vinyl record as canvasses for sprawling, adventurous rock. Chicago quickly learned how to channel this expansive sound into concise pop songs, scoring hits in the early 1970s with such punchy tunes as "25 or 6 to 4" and "Beginnings," while also showing facility with sweeter melodies on "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" and "Saturday in the Park."

Bob Marley - The King Of Reggae – Two CDs with the greatest hits of the Bob Marley. songs by Sly & Robbie Gwen Guthrie, Dennis Brown, Ziggy Marley and many more!

With this album, Oldfield began to make an attempt to break down his extended structures into a more commercially acceptable format, with the side-long title track being separated into four sections. Early versions of the album included "Sally," Oldfield's paean to his partner Sally Cooper, while later pressings include "Into Wonderland."

Commercially, Super Trouper, ABBA's seventh album, was another worldwide blockbuster. "The Winner Takes It All," its lead-off single, released several months in advance of the album in most territories, was a smash; for example, it was the group's 14th consecutive Top Five hit in the U.K. and their eighth number one there. The title track was also a British chart-topper (their last), as was the album, their sixth. "Lay All Your Love on Me" made the U.K. Top Ten, and "On and on and On" was released as a single in some countries, hitting the Top Ten in Australia. (Typically, American success was more modest, though the album went gold, and "The Winner Takes It All" was a number one adult contemporary and Top Ten pop hit.) Musically, Super Trouper found ABBA, always trend-conscious, taking account of the passing of disco and returning to the pop/rock sound typical of their early albums…

The acoustic duo's first album in three years doesn't substantially alter the twosome's established game plan. But its well-recorded mix of studio and live tracks - including one with a full yet laid-back band - shows them to be at the top of their form. Combining traditional Delta and Piedmont blues and gospel classics like Robert Johnson's "Last Fair Deal Going Down" (a concert staple that finally makes it to disc), Blind Boy Fuller's salty, suggestive "Something Smells," and Skip James' "Sick Bed Blues" with their similarly styled originals proves they are not stuck in the past, even as they revel in visiting and interpreting it. John Cephas' "The Pimp in the Pink Suit," with its cowboy chorus, could just as well have been written in the '30s. Phil Wiggins shines on "Burn Your Bridges," an instrumental showcase for his lip-shredding harmonica gymnastics that is as compelling as anything from the great Sonny Terry, an obvious influence…

Partly because of its Brazilian collaborators and partly because of "The Girl From Ipanema," Getz/Gilberto is nearly always acknowledged as the Stan Getz bossa nova LP. But Jazz Samba is just as crucial and groundbreaking; after all, it came first, and in fact was the first full-fledged bossa nova album ever recorded by American jazz musicians. And it was just as commercially successful, topping the LP charts and producing its own pop chart hit single in "Desafinado." It was the true beginning of the bossa nova craze, and introduced several standards of the genre (including Ary Barroso's "Bahia" and Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Desafinado" and "Samba de Uma Nota Só" [aka "One Note Samba"]). But above all, Jazz Samba stands on its own artistic merit as a shimmering, graceful collection that's as subtly advanced - in harmony and rhythm - as it is beautiful…

Samsara Blues Experiment are a Berlin based band, founded in Summer 2007 by leadguitarist/singer Christian Peters. They went through several changes in the first period but are in constant line-up since September 2008 featuring Hans Eiselt (guitar), drummer Thomas Vedder and Richard Behrens (bass). As the band name implies three elemental aspects are to notice - the blues as the fundament where it all comes from, the inclusion of spiritual influences accompanied by Indian/raga music and the experimental approach to mix up varied elements in a convincing manner.
The band's songs are dominated by a playful dual guitar work as well as a passionate blend of heavy psych, stoner and space rock. This is provided with several nuances and transitions in between - quite retro styled, jamming, even sometimes worked out with a repetitive hypnotic touch in the tradition of krautrock…

This live album was recorded at OMD's show at the Liverpool Empire on 4th November, the hometown show on the 40th Anniversary Greatest Hits tour.
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark are one of the earliest, most commercially successful, and enduring synth pop groups. Inspired most by the advancements of Kraftwerk and striving at one point "to be ABBA and Stockhausen," they've continually drawn from early electronic music as they've alternately disregarded, mutated, or embraced the conventions of the three-minute pop song. Outside their native England, OMD are known primarily for "Maid of Orleans" and the Pretty in Pink soundtrack smash "If You Leave," yet they scored 18 additional charting U.K. singles in the '80s alone…

Orange Mountain Music presents AFRICA SINGS, a probing celebration into African music, through classical music and jazz, through legacy and tradition. The recital begins with Angélique Kidjo singing Bella Bellow's Senye, segueing into the premiere recording of Philip Glass's orchestral song-cycle Three Ifé Songs, composed for Kidjo in 2014. The focus goes then to American music with Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige in Maurice Peress orchestral arrangement, before shifting to Europe and Alexander Zemlinsky's Symphonic Songs sung by Martin Achrainer which set, in translation into German, the poems of the great Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Frank Horne. Kidjo joins the venerable Bruckner Orchester Linz and conductor Dennis Russell Davies who cruise through the Ellington before digging deep into the Zemlinsky with baritone Martin Achrainer in tour-de-force performances from beginning to end.

Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey, founder members of Pulp and DJs/record collectors/music lovers extraordinaire have said they will only ever do one mix album. Well, here it is. Meticulously researched and compiled, it's an amazing journey through power pop, expansive soundtracks, blues, alternative cover versions, junk shop breaks and genuinely unexpected musical nuggets. It's a genuine treat to listen to and, a rarity these days, a great introduction to some amazing, underexposed and obscure artistes and tracks.

Cynics might point out the reality that greatest-hits packages on artists who have left a label are a ploy to milk the consumer, but the consumers care more about a solid package full of their favorite songs from the artist. The new Acoustic Alchemy (with Miles Gilderdale replacing the late founding guitarist, Nick Webb, as Greg Carmichael's partner) is riding high on Higher Octave Music, but the material on this collection – part of a new GRP collection series – will always be, to the true Acoustic Alchemy fan, the real deal. AA's post-Webb sound is fancy and feisty, extremely soulful, and very attractive. Yet, there's something more intimate about the way Carmichael and Webb interacted; theirs was a union of true musical soul mates. This wonderful 16-track collection from their GRP and earlier MCA "Master Series" projects was chosen and sequenced by their manager, Stewart Coxhead, and he smartly picks all the crowd favorites: "Mr. Chow," "Catalina Kiss," "Same Road, Same Reason," and more. The range from pop to Latin to reggae is fun to experience again. There's obviously a poignancy to all this because of Webb's 1998 death, but it's more important to celebrate the legacy. As syndicated radio host and Catalina Island Jazz Trax festival promoter Art Good says simply in his liner notes, "These are good songs." More importantly, they speak of an innocent time, the early days of smooth jazz when even the gentlest of these could become radio hits. ~ Jonathan Widran

THE BOSWELL SISTERS The Boswell Sisters inauspiciously launched their recording career in New Orleans, their hometown, on March 22, 1925, but their first release, I’m Gonna Cry and Nights When I’m Lonely didn’t shake any rafters. Early local appearances featured Connie, the eldest, on cello, Helvetia (“Vet”) on violin, and Martha at the piano, but the city’s jazz environment made Connie and Vet switch to saxophone and banjo, respectively. At first, the singing was almost incidental, but it became their ticket to national attention five years later when they moved to New York and became a fixture on radio shows. The Boswell Sisters were notable for their tight harmony as well as their unique ability to modulate pitch and give familiar songs a new melodic twist. They were the cutting edge that inspired future groups, including The Andrews Sisters, who began their own career by emulating them, even down to their Southern accent. The exuberant sisters recorded a string of hits in the 1930s, sometimes teaming up with fellow vocalists, such as Bing Crosby and The Mills Brothers. Instrumental accompaniments are by some of the day’s most popular musicians and bands, including The Dorsey Brothers, Don Redman, Red Nichols, and Benny Goodman. Considering their popularity and impact, the sisters had a relatively brief run, disbanding in 1936 when Martha and Vel married outside of the music industry and decided to give priority to family life. Connie, however, continued and enjoyed a successful solo career. This boxed set contains the entire Boswell Sisters output of commercially released recordings—a remarkable set of performances that paved the way for the vocal trio genre.