Imperfect C++

With his extensive artistic biography, Michael Formanek is one of the most outstanding figures in American jazz – As a composer, as a bassist in ensembles, and as a soloist. Although the bass often plays in the background, bassists write jazz history. So does Michael Formanek, who makes an impressive solo statement with Imperfect Measures (24 years after his first solo album).

Like many big-budget albums of the last years of the 2000s, Mariah Carey's Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel faced shifting release dates, all as the final product was tweaked in light of disappointing reactions to early singles, particularly the Eminem-baiting "Obsessed." Unlike many of those big-budget albums, including several made by Mariah herself, Memoirs isn't the product of a stable of producers and collaborators; it is almost entirely the work of The-Dream and Tricky Stewart, the team best known for their tracks for Rihanna. Certainly, there are echoes of "Umbrella" to be heard on Memoirs, just as there are elements of the gauzy "Touch My Body," The-Dream and Tricky Stewart's previous single for Mariah, although working with mainly one set of producers does give Memoirs a cohesion that can sometimes lapse into sameness, but not in an unpleasant fashion.

The Best of Tindersticks '92-'21 maps the band's 30-year journey across a peerless 20-track chronology. "Each step a story," as Staples said on "How He Entered." And every song a fresh twist in a winding tale. It is the sound of an uncommonly ambitious band always seeking new ways to connect with their songs, rediscovering themselves as a unit at every turn so that everything familiar about their music sounds fresh again. Always, of course, by nobody's measure but their own.

Hootie & The Blowfish have announced the release of Imperfect Circle, their first new studio album in nearly 15 years, which will be released by Snakefarm Records in the UK on 1 November.

In a world starved of roars of applause, hollers from excitable concertgoers and the warm, worn acoustics of venerated music venues, Margo Price has shared a relic of times gone by with her new live album, Perfectly Imperfect at The Ryman.