A repackaging of 1993's Midnight Mover: The Bobby Womack Collection, Anthology – released by Capitol's The Right Stuff subsidiary in 2003 – is an excellent overview (cheapo identikit design aside) that features just about every significant moment of Womack's most productive years. All his biggest hits, including "Lookin' for a Love," "Woman's Gotta Have It," "Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out," "Daylight," and "Across 110th Street" are featured here, along with some album cuts that most casual fans will have no trouble appreciating. Short of picking up all the albums released during this era, you could not do any better.

Since making his debut as a leader with 2001's At Last, Marcus Strickland has established a reputation as a composer of remarkable depth and breadth. On Nihil Novi, his first Blue Note offering, Strickland showcases a new band – trumpeter Keyon Harrold, keyboardists Mitch Henry and Masayuki Hirano, bassist Kyle Miles, and drummer Charles Haynes. His new tunes offer an even greater array of styles, harmonic textures, and dynamics, and reveal his preoccupation with hip-hop beatmaking. (This isn't a jazz/hip-hop fusion record.) Nihil Novi was expertly and empathetically produced by Meshell Ndegeocello, who also guests on bass. Strickland also brings in some old friends and allies, including Robert Glasper, Chris Dave, Pino Palladino, and Chris Bruce.

The 2006 release of The Essential Gloria Estefan satisfied a long unmet need for a career-spanning English-language retrospective, one that includes the singer's popular hits with Miami Sound Machine in the mid-'80s as well as her subsequent solo recordings. For years, Estefan fans had few best-of choices to choose from – the Spanish-language Exitos de Gloria Estefan (1990), the two-volume Greatest Hits series (1992, 2001), and the latter-day Amor y Suerte: Exitos Romanticos collection (2004) – with no alternatives, not even budget-line knockoffs. The long-overdue release of The Essential Gloria Estefan thankfully resolved this gripe, for it includes the highlights from all aspects of Estefan's varied output, spread generously across two jam-packed discs.

Rita Reys was long ago billed as "Europe's First Lady of Jazz." A legend overseas, Reys was one of the top jazz singers in Europe from the mid-'50s to the turn of the millennium. In 1986, Rita recorded the Christmas album Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas with the Pim Jacobs Trio and the Metropole Orchestra conducted by Rogier van Otterloo.

Chet Picks on the Grammys is a compilation recording by American guitarist Chet Atkins. The 13 tracks are all recordings of songs that won Grammy awards from 1967 to 1996. The songs either won a Grammy individually or were included on an album that won.

It may be a PR cliché, but the phrase ‘hotly anticipated album’ was never more apt than when applied to Laurence Jones’s ‘Temptation’. Having made a big splash on the UK blues-rock circuit, he’s taken an impressive new batch of songs and his fiery guitar playing down to Lafayette,Louisiana. He’s teamed up with producer Mike Zito and the Royal Southern Brotherhood rhythm section of drummer Yonrico Scott and bassist Charlie Wooton. The result is one of the best blues-rock albums of the year so far. ‘Temptation’ is that rare thing, a meeting of musical minds with results that surpass expectations. In the words of Mike Zito: ‘Its raw, its real and it happened in one week’. And it is that ‘in the moment’ feel that permeates an album full of drive, passion, crackling electricity and style.

A complete survey of Ravel’s piano music is an especially challenging prospect for any pianist. It is not merely that this sublime music frequently demands exceptional, post-Lisztian virtuosity. Beyond such dexterity is the fact that, as Steven Osborne observes in this recording’s booklet, the composer’s fear of repeating himself ensure that the lessons from one work can rarely be transferred to the next. This is not merely the aesthetic change from the nightmarish imagery of Gaspard de la nuit to the elegant neo-classicism of Le tombeau de Couperin. Ravel essentially re-imagined how to write for the piano with each significant work. Osborne is more than up to the task. The contrasting fireworks of the ‘Toccata’ from Le tombeau and ‘Alborada del gracioso’ (Miroirs) are despatched with relish, the piano exploding with power in the latter after a disarmingly impish opening. The Sonatine has a refined insouciance, while the love bestowed upon each note is clear. Then there are the numerous moments of sustained control, such as the shimmering opening pages of Gaspard. Sometimes changes of spirit occur effortlessly within a piece. Having been a model of clarity in the ‘Prelude’ from Le tombeau, Osborne treats the codetta not as a brisk flourish, but as if this particular vision of the 18th century is dissolving beneath his fingers.

Although this is billed to Wes Montgomery, it is in fact a combination of two early-'60s LPs by the Montgomery Brothers – The Montgomery Brothers and The Montgomery Brothers in Canada – onto one disc. (Also note that it's almost entirely different from the Montgomery Brothers' Milestone double LP that also bears the name Groove Brothers, which mostly features material from their Riverside LP Groove Yard.) With Wes on guitar, Monk on bass, and Buddy on piano (Larance Marable fills out the quartet on drums), The Montgomery Brothers (1960) is a boppish set of five lengthy tracks, divided between both originals (penned by either Wes or Buddy) and standards. "June in January" is a particularly good vehicle for Wes' fluid single-note runs, while "D-Natural Blues" is one of his more enduring and good-natured compositions from the period. Buddy Montgomery, who often played the piano with the Montgomery Brothers, sticks exclusively to vibes on The Montgomery Brothers in Canada, which in addition to Wes and Monk has Paul Humphrey on drums.

Another installment in Collectables' The Ultimate Christmas Album series, volume four gathers a mix of well-known and offbeat holiday tunes, including Elvis Presley's "Blue Christmas," the Platters' "Winter Wonderland," and Perry Como's "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas." Brook Benton's "You're All I Want for Christmas," Percy Faith's "Christmas Is," and Otis Redding's "Merry Christmas Baby" are some of the collection's soulful highlights, while Santo & Johnny's "Twistin' Bells" and Stan Freberg's "Christmas Dragnet" add some novelty to the festivities. Though it's a somewhat uneven collection, The Ultimate Christmas Album, Vol. 4: WCBS 101.1 has enough interesting and classic moments to make it worthwhile for anyone looking to go beyond the season's basic music.

Michael Nyman's three String Quartets were not conceived as a series, as they owe their origins to three very different sets of circumstances. However when the composer heard them together on the 1991 Argo recording featuring the Balanescu Quartet reissued here, he realized that the works had an unintentional but unmistakable consistency of compositional approach. Each work is built around the principle of conflict - not necessarily conflict between the instruments, as is the traditional view of the quartet medium, but conflict between sets of musical materials that appear to be at odds with each other. In the first, the conflict is between two 'found' musical objects, separated both by their cultural origins and by a distance of around 300 years. The conflict in the second is between Indian and European musical styles, while the third's comes from the process of adapting an earlier choral work into a string quartet, interspersing the original with Romanian folk music fragments.

Headlines is the third album by Australian band Flash and the Pan, released in 1982. The studio project of AC/DC producers and Easybeats songwriters Harry Vanda and George Young. It includes the UK hit single "Waiting for a Train" which reached No. 7 in the charts in June 1983. Digitally remastered in 2012, and reissued with a BONUS tracks!

Of the Three 'Kings' of the blues (BB, Albert and Freddy), Freddy King is perhaps the least well known these days. He enjoyed cross-over success with the white rock audiences of the 70s (hitting with albums for Cotillion, RSO and Shelter and touring extensively - his 'live' LP for German label Crosscut is about the closest thing to heavy metal blues imaginable). Yet his death from hepatitis in 1976 robbed Freddy of the kind of acclaim that the current blues revival has given BB, Albert and John Lee Hooker. There was a time, though, in the mid-'60s when his singles were among the most influential in blues, particularly for British and European audiences. His instrumental singles Hideaway and Drivin' Sideways were issued on Sue and covered by every white blues group that knew what was really happening on the R&B scene.

Tim Simenon's Bomb the Bass pet project pumped some of the best acid house straight into late-'80s dance clubs. Best known stateside for the seminal "Beat Dis," similarly groundbreaking slow-beat club groove, and the Burt Bacharach cover "Say a Little Prayer," Simenon's brand of acid-laced rap and snappy sampling kept sweat flowing coast to coast. Unfortunately, by the time the band's second album appeared in 1991, Bomb the Bass was all but forgotten in the beginnings of the grunge backlash. However, the sonics have continued to percolate, hence the welcome appearance of the U.K. compilation Beat Dis: The Very Best Of, which serves up a healthy hodgepodge of hits and a neat tweak for aging ravers' long-lost brain cells. In no particular order, Beat Dis unravels 1988 through 1991, commencing with the 12" version of "Beat Dis" and ending with the absurdly short "Megamix," while hitting all the important points in between. First-wave favorites include the aforementioned "Say a Little Prayer" and "Shake It," while the 1991 incarnation weighs in mightily with "Dune Buggy Attack" and the British hit "Winter in July".

From Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin to Mahler and Bartok, European classical music has been a source of inspiration to numerous jazz musicians. The 19th Century compositions of the Strauss family are the subject of All That Strauss, which documents a New Year's 2000 concert by the Vienna Art Orchestra–one of Europe's most adventurous big bands. It is quite appropriate that this Strauss tribute concert was performed in Vienna and that the orchestra has Vienna in its name; for many classical greats have lived in Austria's largest city, including Johann and Eduard Strauss. While the Vienna Art Orchestra's love of the Strauss legacy is obvious, the band doesn't treat its compositions like museum pieces. Instead, time-honored compositions like "Donauwalzer," "Albion Polka," "Ein Morgen, ein Mittag, ein Abend in Wien" and "Lagunen Walzer" are given serious jazz makeovers, and arranger Mathias Rüegg sees to it that the orchestra takes a lot of chances with the material.

Rob McConnell & the Boss Brass add plenty of spice to this Christmas jazz CD, not only with superb, fresh charts but a few surprising selections. The rich brass and reeds carry the deliberate rendition of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," which segues into a perky Latin-flavored chart of "I'll Be Home for Christmas." "Away in a Manger" is not the commonly heard melody but one first written in 1887, though the music will likely be familiar, even if one doesn't associate it with the well-known lyrics. The lush setting of "The Christmas Song," which likely set Mel Tormé and Bob Wells for life with royalty checks due to its many recordings, showcases the leader's valve trombone and pianist David Restivo. "My Favorite Things," originally written for The Sound of Music, has gradually been transformed into double duty as a Christmas carol; this swinging interpretation works very well. Johnny Mandel, the composer of many memorable melodies, deserves greater recognition for his gorgeous piece "A Christmas Love Song"; this arrangement deserved to help put it on the jazz map. Rob McConnell & the Boss Brass consistently delivered first-rate music throughout their existence, this holiday CD no exception.