Live at the Hollywood Bowl was one of a brace of official live Doors recordings that began circulating around in the 1980s, and had the distinction of being captured on film as well…

When it comes to a new album by Robin Trower, some things never change. The guitar work will be breathtaking. The songwriting will be heartfelt and fearless. The vocal will siphon the soul. True to form, from the opening swoop of electric guitar, Something's About To Change is a thrilling encapsulation of everything fans love about the celebrated bandleader. And yet, as the title implies, this album finds Trower twisting his talent into bold new shapes. Released on Robin's 70th birthday, Something's About To Change announces a world-class musician at the top of his game. With his own V12 record label allowing Trower to bypass the spirit-sapping protocol of the modern industry, it's no wonder this new album sounds so vital.

The sad fact about box sets is that there's always a fan out there who thinks they could have compiled a better one. An even sadder fact is that they're often correct, and the very notion of anthologizing Van Der Graaf Generator was a fraught one for that very reason. More, perhaps, than any other band of the early-'70s prog era, VDGG polarized their fans as much as the band's blatantly inhospitable sound outraged outsiders. They cut just eight studio albums, and all eight possess a wholly different character, all the more so since the band actually broke up midway through the sequence…

Eric Sardinas is an American blues-rock slide guitarist born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He is noted for his use of the electric resonator guitar and his live performances. He sometimes sets his guitar alight on stage and during shows. In 2000 in Sydney, Sardinas suffered third degree burns to his left wrist. Sardinas began to play the guitar at age six and leaned toward vintage recordings by such Delta bluesmen as Charlie Patton, Bukka White, Big Bill Broonzy, Elmore James, and Muddy Waters. Although he was left-handed, he eventually started to play right-handed. In 2002, he featured on the Bo Diddley tribute album Hey Bo Diddley - A Tribute!, performing the song "Ride On Josephine". He signed to Steve Vai's Favored Nations record label and was the opening act for Vai's The Real Illusions Tour 2005 around the world. In 2008, Sardinas released Eric Sardinas and Big Motor on Steve Vai's Favored Nations record label in the U.S.

Vast, deep and emotional are apt descriptions of the single-movement, 53-minute-long Symphony No. 2 by Christopher Tyler Nickel. The award-winning Canadian composer elaborates, “One can think of this music as consisting of mirrors between ideas that equally disturb yet entice. Each side of the reflection is in itself conceivably valid, but when facing each other friction and dissonance are created. The exquisitely alluring and the grotesque exist simultaneously. Perhaps another way to understand the symphony is as a meditation on the state of cognitive dissonance.” The entrepreneurial Clyde Mitchell conducts the Seattle-based Northwest Sinfonia on this world-premiere recording.

This new recording for Signum Records includes silvery vibraphone with live looping, a quasi rock n roll documentary exploring censorship and a musical picture of the subtle shifts in our changing Seasons.

Piano-Drums Duos are the preferred playing arrangement of pianist Irène Schweizer. Her mastery of duets with important drummers of contemporary jazz are documented on numerous Intakt CDs. Han Bennink, Pierre Favre, Louis Moholo, Günter Baby Sommer, Andrew Cyrille and Joey Baron among them. The Chicago drummer Hamid Drake, born in 1955, and Irène Schweizer, born in 1941, have performed together on numerous occasions both in Europe and Chicago. Together they have appeared on the Intakt CD "Irène Schweizer-Fred Anderson-Hamid Drake". At the 40th anniversary festival "Kontrontationen in Nickelsdorf" (Austria), Schweizer and Drake were the highlight of the event. A celebration of the moment and a declaration of love to South African songs along with their thrilling energy and rhythmic lightness produced a firework of improvisation. A parade of successful interplay. The CD Celebration is released on the occasion of Irène Schweizer's 80th birthday (2. Juni), accompanied by a catalogue of the pianist's works on Intakt Records.

For many years Evan Parker, one of the greatest post-Coltrane saxophonists, has played a monthly gig at the London club The Vortex. These gigs in part illustrate Evan’s close ties with the fragile ecosystem of clubs that support the jazz world; the small venues that allow an intimate and powerful connection between the artist and audience that is at the heart of jazz creativity. Evan called these events his ‘jazz’ gigs, the knowing hyphenation an indication of the problematic use of the J word, an acceptance of the Vortex as a ‘jazz’ club, and a nod to his origins in jazz history. I took a friend there one time and it seemed to me that the trio’s performance (Evan, John Edwards and the great and sadly departed Tony Marsh) came close to seeing Coltrane or Ayler playing at the 5 Spot or one of the other legendary New York venues.

On the two volumes of The Decline of Country and Western Civilization—one from German label City Slang and the other from the band’s American label, Merge—Lambchop gather a gaggle of rarities and oddities, tracks from label samplers and early attempts at songs that would later find homes on What Another Man Spills, Nixon, or Is a Woman. Technically, most are the A- and B-sides from six years of seven-inch singles, but they have the feel of songs stacked for years in the garage behind two decades of National Geographics or lost behind the bedroom bureau, gathering dust with someone’s wallet-size school portrait.