Rocks Sarah Gavron

Duke Ellington Songbook Vol. 1 (1980). Sarah Vaughan interprets ten Duke Ellington-associated songs on the first of two sets. Vaughan is accompanied by a variety of jazz all-stars, including trumpeter Waymon Reed, trombonist J.J. Johnson, and the tenors of Frank Foster, Frank Wess, and Zoot Sims. Bill Byers contributed the arrangements for the larger band performances. The emphasis is on ballads, with the highlights including "I'm Just a Lucky So and So," "I Didn't Know About You," "All Too Soon," and "Lush Life." Vaughan's voice is in typically wondrous form throughout…

You can anticipate objections to Sarah Jarosz's sophomore effort from a couple of different directions: those who saw her as someone who would make old-time country music attractive to the Twitter generation may feel that she's abandoned her sacred duty; others may suspect her of suffering from Elvis Costello Syndrome (which causes spoon-bendingly talented musicians to get tired of doing what their talents have made easy for them and to begin pushing the boundaries of their gifts, with sometimes embarrassing results). Neither objection would be correct.

All six of the albums Hanoi Rocks made in their original incarnation – Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes, Hanoi Rocks, Oriental Beat, Self Destruction Blues, Back to the Mystery City, Two Steps from the Move, and All Those Wasted Years – are packaged together, one album to one CD, in this straightforward six-CD set. There are no extras, just the albums as they were originally released, though there's a 12-page booklet with a solid history of the band and numerous (if small) reproductions of sleeves from their original releases. It's too much at once even for many fans, but for the more dedicated of that lot, it's a handy encapsulation of their primary recorded work. Hearing all of it does make it clear that, although they're often classified as a heavy metal band, they might be more accurately pegged as a hard rock band with substantial traces of glam and pop (and even some bar band blues-rock) along with the metal.

Hanoi Rocks was a Finnish rock band formed in 1979. They were the first Finnish band to chart in the UK and they were also popular in Japan. The band broke up in June 1985 after the drummer Nicholas "Razzle" Dingley had died in a car accident during their first US tour in December 1984. Original vocalist Michael Monroe and guitarist Andy McCoy reunited in 2001 with a new line-up of Hanoi Rocks until 2009. Although musically closer to traditional rock n' roll and punk, Hanoi Rocks have been cited as a major influence in the glam metal genre for bands such as Guns N' Roses, Skid Row and Poison…

Hanoi Rocks resolutely break no bounds on the band's third studio effort, Self Destruction Blues, but then again, anyone expecting that was in the wrong place; those expecting obvious nods to the likes of Ziggy-era Bowie, Mott the Hoople, and the like, though, would be in heaven…