Copperhead Copperhead {acadia+sony Aca 8005} (1973)

Head Hunters was a pivotal point in Herbie Hancock's career, bringing him into the vanguard of jazz fusion. Hancock had pushed avant-garde boundaries on his own albums and with Miles Davis, but he had never devoted himself to the groove as he did on Head Hunters. Drawing heavily from Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, and James Brown, Hancock developed deeply funky, even gritty, rhythms over which he soloed on electric synthesizers, bringing the instrument to the forefront in jazz. It had all of the sensibilities of jazz, particularly in the way it wound off into long improvisations, but its rhythms were firmly planted in funk, soul, and R&B, giving it a mass appeal that made it the biggest-selling jazz album of all time (a record which was later broken)…

Genesis proved that they could rock on Foxtrot but on its follow-up Selling England by the Pound they didn't follow this route, they returned to the English eccentricity of their first records, which wasn't so much a retreat as a consolidation of powers. For even if this eight-track album has no one song that hits as hard as "Watcher of the Skies," Genesis hasn't sacrificed the newfound immediacy of Foxtrot: they've married it to their eccentricity, finding ways to infuse it into the delicate whimsy that's been their calling card since the beginning. This, combined with many overt literary allusions - the Tolkeinisms of the title of "The Battle of Epping Forest" only being the most apparent - gives this album a storybook quality. It plays as a collection of short stories, fables, and fairy tales, and it is also a rock record, which naturally makes it quite extraordinary as a collection, but also as a set of individual songs…

The Soft Machine were many things to many people, but to most, the real Soft Machine ceased to exist when founder Robert Wyatt left to work on his conspicuously titled Matching Mole project. This departure is generally credited to the Soft Machine's creative advance away from prog rock and toward jazz fusion. Three years and three records after Wyatt's departure, this creative motion was in full sail, and the release of Six cemented the band in their distant station beyond the gravity of anything that resembled rock and its spacious, cutting-edge sonics and more symmetrical rhythms. The jazz era that began on Fourth and continued through the '70s mutates slightly on Six, from the free improvisational structures used frequently on prior releases into a somewhat more constrained fusion design…

Although Artaud was officially billed as the third Pescado Rabioso album, the Argentinean group had actually broken up by the time it was recorded. It's essentially a solo effort by singer-guitarist-songwriter Luis Alberto Spinetta, with contributions from his brother, drummer Carlos Gustavo Spinetta, bassist Emilio Del Guercio, and drummer Rodolfo García, the latter two of whom had played with Spinetta back in the pre-Pescado Rabioso band Almendra. If it's something of a progressive/psychedelic record, it has more to do with the juxtaposition of late-'60s and early-'70s styles on display than it has to do with the music itself. On various different tracks, Spinetta offers accomplished, sentimental acoustic-based folk-rock balladry ("Todas las Hojas Son del Viento"); languid jazzy San Francisco-styled mild psych…

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) was a German musician and composer; and the second of five sons of Johann Sebastian Bach and his frist wife, Maria Barbara Bach. He is considered to be one of the founders of the Classical style, composing in the Rococo and Classical periods.