There was a time when the Bartók quartets were the toughest challenge a string quartet could face, and when no one played them as well as the Juilliard Quartet. Yet the foursome’s pathbreaking stereo recording ...

I never loved Zep’s singles (plus they’re overplayed): the Druid strain didn’t interest me, the earlier stuff was better, Plant’s vocal gymnastics got old, and who wants live recordings that amount to greatest hits facsimiles? ...

Romanticism has proved more durable than seemed possible a half-century ago, when the brutal violence and icy pointillism of Pierre Boulez were all the rage and Samuel Barber was considered as passé as ornate Victorian ...

This box celebrates one of the best, and most seriously underrated, musical partnerships of the postmodern era. Both John Carter and Bobby Bradford were Texans who relocated to Los Angeles, and both worked early on ...

Having been compared to everyone from Bessie Smith to Dinah Washington to Diana Krall, Mississippi blues mama Eden Brent summons them all, and more, on her second album, recorded in New Orleans with some local ...

The jazz-pop singer Norah Jones is no stranger to collaboration. Even before the world came to know Jones through her 2002 multi-platinum Grammy- winning debut Come Away with Me, she had turned heads the previous ...

In a deeply satisfying work of self- exploration, Eric Clapton dives into some blues, gospel, pop, and southern-flavored rock ’n’ roll past and present; assembles crack bands on each track that include the likes of ...

When Ella Fitzgerald joined Verve Records in 1955, the 38-year-old singer was best known for a single hit (“A-Tisket, A-Tasket”), her bop-inspired scat singing, and a stack of mostly forgettable recordings. Her manager (and Verve-founder) ...

Neil Young has long had a talent for writing lyrics that are elusive yet compelling. Although many of the lines in “Tell Me Why” from After the Gold Rush elude me, that doesn’t make it ...

Upon its release in 1975, Blood on the Tracks became the target of critics who disparaged the album’s “shoddiness” (Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau) and dismissed it as possessing little more than a “functional” sound (Greil ...

Now 77, Willie Nelson has been part of America’s cultural consciousness for so long it’s hard to remember that this brilliant, braided, pot-smoking iconoclast spent the beginning of his career penning tunes for others, because ...

The 1970s was a golden decade for singer/songwriters, and one of the purest voices to bring this repertoire to life was Linda Ronstadt. Known for her inimitable styling, gutsy power, and in later years her ...

It’s been twenty-five years since country’s first supergroup, the Highwaymen— Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson—joined forces to record. These four giants shared a deep and complicated friendship through the years as ...

Arvo Pärt’s music, both choral and instrumental, often uses religious texts for a starting point. How apt that the 75-year- old composer based his Symphony No. 4, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, on the ...

Veljo Tormis, born in 1930, is one of the best of the many great Estonian choral composers. This disc collects five pieces, the first of which is a half-hour setting of the Seventeenth Canto from ...