At Tatiana Lisovskaya

“He’s at the highest level of our music—you can’t get any higher than him.” So says Wynton Marsalis of the legendary saxophonist, composer, and band leader Wayne Shorter. With a legendary career spanning over 60 years, the 11-time GRAMMY award winner (including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy) has released countless classic records and amassed a canon of lyrical, introspective music that stands up to the greatest jazz composers. In 2015, the formidable 81-year-old joined the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis onstage for three unforgettable nights; the result is The Music of Wayne Shorter, out Jan. 31 on CD and digital formats.

The fifth studio long-player from the Gothenburg-based Swedish melodic death metal veterans, At War with Reality is also the first outing from the group since 1995's Slaughter of the Soul, a record that for all intents and purposes was to be their last. After reuniting in 2008 for a series of reunion shows, the band brushed off rumors of a potential return to the studio, but by 2012, frontman Tomas Lindberg began hinting at the possibility of new material. Released just two years later, the resulting Century Media-issued At War with Reality is a largely story-driven album built around the concepts of magical realism.

With their third album, 1994's highly accomplished Terminal Spirit Disease, Sweden's At the Gates raised their creative stakes beyond most everyone's original expectations, and proved that what had once been a pretty standard and uninventive death metal combo was slowly becoming a true contender in the scene. Right from the get-go, highlights like "The Swarm," "Forever Blind," and the title track venture into melodic territory like never before. Yet they never waver from the band's predetermined path of virulent aggression, and, best of all, keep it all short and sweet for maximum effect. And with extreme (or nonextreme, as it were) experiments like the all-acoustic and cello-laced "And the World Returned," At the Gates showed a willingness to diversify that would soon prove their mettle…

Iiro Rantala takes us through a kaleidoscope of different sound worlds, bringing a virtuoso sense of flow, melodic richness, drama and wide-screen technicolor emotion: "Veneziana" is an enlivening and highly distinctive portrait of a city. One might call it programme music, but it is of a kind that only Iiro Rantala can write…where the listener, as in the winding streets of Venice, will find a new surprise behind every musical corner.

Blue Engine Records proudly releases Freedom, Justice, and Hope, the live recording of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s multidisciplinary concert that contextualizes jazz within Black Americans’ pursuit of equality. Featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis in creative collaboration with social justice activist and founder of The Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson, the recording features new arrangements of some of the most important protest songs in jazz history and new works by featured guest artists Endea Owens and Josh Evans.

At the Drive-In have plans for a worldwide reissue of their 1996 debut Acrobatic Tenement and 2000’s Relationship of Command, the band’s final album before breaking-up in 2001. Of course, Australia already received its reissues last year, with the new edition of Relationship of Command featuring songs from their 2001 triple j Live at the Wireless. For the rest of the world, both albums will be rereleased on CD, digital and vinyl with a limited run of colour vinyl for Relationship of Command to be issued for Record Store Day on 20th April, 2013.

On August 21, 1976, Lynyrd Skynyrd took the stage at Knebworth Park in England as part of a daylong festival. With Ronnie Van Zant on vocals and the Rossington/Collins/Gaines triple guitar attack, Lynyrd Skynyrd delivered an electric performance in front of a crowd estimated between 150,000 and 200,000, which has gone down as one of the band's greatest performances.