First Blood harks back to the glory days of the '60s blues-rock boom – Mike Henderson and the Bluebloods' gritty sound is far from original, but years on the Nashville bar band circuit have honed their skills to a razor-sharp point, and the record is refreshingly raw and direct, distinguished by rock-solid musicianship.

Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick opts for a different approach on Midwest. Four years after the song-like Skala, his sophomore ECM date that has attained "classic" status in European critical circles, he employs notions of history, folk tradition, and dislocation. This album was inspired by Eick's time spent playing the American continent; his tour began on the West Coast. When he entered the rural, upper Midwest and encountered its vast open spaces, he began to feel a sense of "home." He later learned that over the past two centuries of immigration, over a million Norwegians had settled there. After conceiving a "road" album that would begin in Hem, the village of his birth, and traverse the ocean to America, Eick enlisted violinist Gjermund Larsen (a folk musician who has contributed to Christian Wallumrød's ECM recordings), pianist Jon Balke, double bassist Mats Eilertsen, and percussionist Helge Norbakken. The compositions are all lyrical, in typical Eick fashion, but with Larsen they take on a rougher, more earthen quality.

This may be more Move than the casual fan wants, but it's not just another rehashed collection. From the remastered sound to the presence of various outtakes (including lost live tracks), the 30th anniversary triple-disc Movements is as definitive a set as we'll ever have on this band, containing everything except for the Message From the Country album. Disc one consists of the group's early singles plus The Move album and one outtake ("Disturbance"), all sounding really clear and tough, the loudest psychedelic pop music you'll ever hear out of England. Disc two contains the complete Shazam album, as well as alternate stereo or undubbed mixes of such songs as "Cherry Blossom Clinic," "(Here We Go Round) The Lemon Tree," "Fire Brigade," and an Italian-sung version of "Something." The sound is OK, with brilliant delineation on the guitars and basses…

Clifton Chenier was to zydeco what Elvis Presley was to rockabilly, only more so - the genre's founding father and tireless ambassador. Rhino has done an admirable job of collecting the accordionist's important work for this two-disc, 40-track set, harking back to a wonderfully chaotic "Louisiana Stomp" that he waxed in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1954 for J.R. Fullbright's tiny Elko label. Whether you're in the market for one zydeco collection to summarize the entire genre or ready to delve deeply into the legacy of the idiom's pioneer, this is precisely where to begin.

The Kodaly Quartet are fully worthy of the composer's inexhaustible invention and make a splendid bargain recommendation. Their playing brings joyful pleasure in Haydn's inspiration and there is not the slightest suspicion of over-rehearsal or of routine: every bar of the music springs to life spontaneously, and these musicians' insights bring an ideal combination of authority and warmth, emotional balance and structural awareness.

The first DIVOX production with the "Virtuosi delle Muse" is devoted to Vivaldi's opera oeuvre. It presents Vivaldi's opera overtures not only in a form that incorporates the latest findings of Vivaldi research, but also in a new sound interpretation: thanks to a variety of tone colors, a wealth of orchestral articulations, and dynamics that are clear and rich in contrast, these overtures strikingly convey the action and atmosphere of the stage work they precede – whereby they date from a time when the "overture" did not yet exist as an acoustical preview of the operatic plot. The use of original instruments such as the viola d'amore, which was never again used in the context of Vivaldi's operas, is also an innovation in the present-day performance practice of Vivaldi's works.

Johann Christian Bach, the only member of his family to have had any career in the opera house, began writing for the stage in Italy, continued in London and Mannherm and ended in Paris. This work is the last of his operas, written in 1779 to a revision of the libretto by Quinault that Lully had set almost a century before. It was not a success; there were only seven performances and it was never revived. One can, I think, see some of the reasons why it failed to please the French audiences at the time of the Gluck/Piccinni controversies, but there is nevertheless some superlative music here which certainly affects our view of J. C. Bach, whom we tend to regard above all as an elegant, galant composer of courtly, Italianate QG symphonies and chamber music.