The prolific and long-running De-Phazz (also known as DePhazz) is a contemporary lounge project led by Peter "Pit" Baumgartner, a German-Austrian producer who has surrounded himself with a shifting cast of collaborators that includes vocalists Barbara Lahr, Karl Frierson, and Pat Appleton. Beginning with Detunized Gravity (1997), Baumgartner and company have explored various forms of lounge music, much of it balancing samples with live instrumentation, with innumerable cross-sections of vintage jazz and soul, easy listening, and Latin music. By employing the sounds of classic percussion and jazz instruments such as the trumpet and sax, De Phazz successfully create smooth electro-groove music with an unmissable swinging jazz theme. De Phazz is a unique sound that you must check out. This Limited Edition including bonus CD featuring eight additional songs and alternative versions.

The follow-up to 2017's loose and versatile Gathering, Fever Breaks sees the lauded Idaho-bred singer/songwriter teaming up with producer and Americana wunderkind Jason Isbell and delivering a taut ten-track set backed by Isbell and his formidable 400 Unit. Less prone to stylistic detours than previous outings, Fever Breaks is a straight-up band album, with Ritter and company administering some serious muscle on cuts like "Old Black Magic" and "Losing Battles," the latter of which gives off a distinct Crazy Horse vibe. Dylanesque opener "Ground Don't Want Me" takes a similar approach, but retains a modicum of heartland folksiness, bringing it more in line with Ritter's earlier works.

Meredith Davies's great quality is his inspired pacing of a score that can easily stagnate. Davies sets the love-duets in dramatic contrast to the vigorous writing…Elizabeth Harwood and Robert Tear are both excellent as Vreli and Sali, winningly characterful and clearly focused…[Shirley-Quirk] is firm and forthright with an apt hint of the sinister.

The Russian Orthodox music presented here comes from the music for Great Lent, which is a meditation on the meaning of Holy Week. Great Lent or Velikiy Post, is the most important and one of the longest of the four Lenten periods in the year. It opens with a powerfully meditative chant 'Let all mortal flesh keep silent' which is specially sung only once a year along with the Old Testament lamentation 'By the rivers of Babylon'. The music here is, as usual with Orthodox chant, profoundly solemn and deeply meditative - some would say even mystical.

Má Vlast is undoubtedly one of the best known works of Smetana even when knowledge is restricted to the tone poems, 'The Moldau' and 'Bohemia's Woods and Fields'. The work is not of ideal length for a CD, running to just a few minutes over its capacity and necessitating two CDs if played unabridged or unhurried. Of the many versions available perhaps three of the best are Kubelik, Mackerras and Talich.

From the USA came Lift, an enthusiastic and talented progressive ensemble that released their debut album "Caverns of Your Brain" during the second half of the 70s, although their repertoire at the time was older ,as well as more abundant than the one finally container in the original release. What we have here is a combination of vibrating melodic symphonic prog (pre-Howe Yes, Flash), the energy of "Remember the Future"- era Nektar and the eerie ambiances of Floydian inspiration, generally for the softer parts of the material.

There were intermittent soundtrack and score contributions of varying magnitudes, as well as a couple other low-key projects, but The Drift is Scott Walker's proper follow-up to 1995's Tilt, an album that also happened to trail its predecessor by 11 years. If 1984's Climate of Hunter put the MOR in morose, Tilt avoided the road completely and went straight toward the fractured, fraught images inside Walker's nightmares. It was entirely removed from anything that could've been classified as contemporary. The Drift isn't an equally severe leap from Tilt, but it is darker, less arranged, alternately more and less dense, and ultimately more frightening. Maybe it'll make your body temperature drop a few degrees. Working with what Walker has referred to as "blocks of sound," only a few of the album's 68 minutes have any connection to rock music, and many of those minutes are part of a harrowing 9/11 song that also obliquely references "Jailhouse Rock" as Elvis Presley cries out ("I'm the only one left alive!") to his stillborn twin brother. The songs swing from hovering drones to crushing jolts.

This three-CD box set is the most thorough and valuable retrospective of Janis Joplin's career. Besides including all of her most essential recordings with and without Big Brother & the Holding Company, this 49-song package features quite a few enticing rarities; 18 of the tracks were previously unissued. These include a 1962 home recording of the Joplin original "What Good Can Drinkin' Do," which marked the first time her singing was captured on tape; a pair of acoustic blues tunes from 1965 with backup guitar by future Jefferson Airplane star Jorma Kaukonen, an acoustic demo of "Me and Bobby McGee," a 1970 birthday song for John Lennon, and live performances from her appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1969…

Grover Washington blows over some great arrangements from William Eaton - full, but lean too - and with the same sort of slinky groove that always worked best for Grover back at Kudu Records. The sound is tight, but never too slick - that magically soulful approach that always made Grover a real standout from his contemporaries - one of the few cats who could smooth out jazz without ever losing its soul - thanks to lots of well-crafted lead lines on soprano sax!