Organasm Stink Pocket 2012

Eric Bibb's version of the blues is calm, wise, hushed, and elegant, as much or more about redemption as it is about despair, and above all, Bibb sees the blues as narrative, part of the story we all drift through. His best songs, often built on traditional patterns and rhythms, are wise and affirming, and they fall to the brighter and more hopeful side of the blues. There are several such gems on Deeper in the Well, including the opening track, a delightful piece of Louisiana shuffle funk called "Bayou Belle," the string band gospel bounce of "Dig a Little Deeper in the Well," a modal and relentlessly driving "Boll Weevil," "Sittin' in a Hotel Room," which is a wise and hopeful story of contentment, and the final track, a stunningly beautiful banjo version of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'." It all adds up to a beautifully redemptive album, one of Bibb's best.

Funny, we can’t remember so many singers turning up on the Crusaders’ albums, but look a little closer at the liner. For this 1987 compilation—designed, perhaps, to fill the gap between albums by a group that no longer was a full-time act—MCA reached for records by B.B. King, Tina Turner, Joe Sample, and Wilton Felder that various Crusaders played on, as well as the band’s output from Street Life through The Good and Bad Times. B.B. takes the prize for his fabulous, humorously funky, live-in-London turn on “Better Not Look Down”—he plays guitar so sparingly, and every note is right in the pocket—but Joe Cocker comes close, riding on a classic bumpy Crusaders groove on “This Old World’s Too Funky for Me.”

Rebounding from the breakup record of 2008's Flavors of Entanglement, Alanis Morissette is in a sunny mood on Havoc and Bright Lights, her first album in four years and first she's released since leaving her longtime home at Maverick Records…

The Guardian Angel Tour was a concert tour by Canadian-American musician Alanis Morissette. The tour promoted her August 2012 album Havoc and Bright Lights. The tour ran from June to December 2012 and took place in Europe, North America and South America, including the countries of United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Italy, Brazil and Israel…

Funny, we can’t remember so many singers turning up on the Crusaders’ albums, but look a little closer at the liner. For this 1987 compilation—designed, perhaps, to fill the gap between albums by a group that no longer was a full-time act—MCA reached for records by B.B. King, Tina Turner, Joe Sample, and Wilton Felder that various Crusaders played on, as well as the band’s output from Street Life through The Good and Bad Times. B.B. takes the prize for his fabulous, humorously funky, live-in-London turn on “Better Not Look Down”—he plays guitar so sparingly, and every note is right in the pocket—but Joe Cocker comes close, riding on a classic bumpy Crusaders groove on “This Old World’s Too Funky for Me.”

Black Radio, the title of the Robert Glasper Experiment's proper Blue Note debut, is a double signifier. There's the dictionary's definition: "the device in an aircraft that records technical data during a flight, used in case of accident to discover its cause." And there's Angelika Beener's in her liner essay. She defines Black Radio as "representative of the veracity of Black music" which has been "…emulated, envied and countlessly re-imagined by the rest of the world…." With jazz as its backbone, Glasper, drummer Chris Dave, bassist Derrick Hodge, and Casey Benjamin on reeds, winds, and vocoder, cued by the inspiration of black music's illustrious cultural past, try to carve out a creative place for its future…

Original war time U.S. War and Navy Departments first editions. Pocket Guide books for 18 countries. These guidebooks were prepared by the U.S. War and Navy Departments to educate American soldiers stationed overseas during the conflict. It includes points on culture, language (including slang), local history, and the military justification for American presence in the area; in this sense these pocket books are a unique distillation of American wartime policy, composed by the highest decision-makers in government for the soldiers actually setting foot on foreign soil. …