Special Code: Assignment Lost Formula (1966) Pino Mercanti, Lang Jeffries, José Greci, Helga Liné, Adventure

Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton was Eric Clapton's first fully realized album as a blues guitarist – more than that, it was a seminal blues album of the 1960s, perhaps the best British blues album ever cut, and the best LP ever recorded by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Standing midway between Clapton's stint with the Yardbirds and the formation of Cream, this album featured the new guitar hero on a series of stripped-down blues standards, Mayall pieces, and one Mayall/Clapton composition, all of which had him stretching out in the idiom for the first time in the studio. This album was the culmination of a very successful year of playing with John Mayall, a fully realized blues creation, featuring sounds very close to the group's stage performances, and with no compromises.

The Andalusian singer’s debut brushes electronic beats and R&B melodies over a flamenco canvas. It is a masterful meditation on ancestral struggle that looks back to find a way forward.

Creed Taylor matched two of his most famous artists, Wes Montgomery and Jimmy Smith, on this session (Montgomery's last for Verve), and the results are incendiary - a near-ideal meeting of yin and yang. Smith comes at your throat with his big attacks and blues runs while Montgomery responds with rounder, smoother octaves and single notes that still convey much heat. They are an amazing pair, complementing each other, driving each other, using their bop and blues taproots to fuse together a sound. The romping, aggressive big band charts - Oliver Nelson at his best - on "Down by the Riverside" and "Night Train," and the pungently haunting chart for Gary McFarland's "13" (Death March)" still leave plenty of room for the soloists to stretch out. "James and Wes" and "Baby, It's Cold Outside" include drummer Grady Tate and conguero Ray Barretto, with Smith's own feet working the organ pedals…

The title track on José Feliciano’s latest album Behind This Guitar sums up, with uncanny accuracy, the still-unfolding career of this remarkable and singular figure in American musical culture of the last half-century. Puerto Rican by birth, a New Yorker (Spanish Harlem) from his childhood, José Feliciano has been a fact of American musical life since his breakthrough at the height of the Sixties – the golden age of American pop and rock music.

Pino & Wildjamin come from Germany and they are also known as Analogue Silence, Basalt Boys, Ghost Train and Xangadix. Xangadix began as an ambient-trance outfit, with a line-up of Pino Shamlou and Benjamin Wild, but as their sophomore record was released it was evident that they had evolved into something more. Their ethereal and often quite complicated music was unusual for the early Fax label - even Namlook, the label's chief composer, wasn't working at this echelon yet. The music could broadly be referred to as downtempo, but it's got the mandatory electro beats and quite a strong groove throughout.

Pino and Wildjamin align themselves with FAX's direction of veering away from heavy synth based trance to slower more melodic and rather original electronica. Picking up from them last track of Xangadix, the remarkably warm and emotive pieces set The MS-Series apart from the duo's other works as their most essential. "Monochill" and "Voltage Control" are rich examples of how ambient and trance are combined to transcend what either of the two genres are capable of.

Fans of Donaggio's previous De Palma scores will find a lot to admire here. In the many years since his last collaboration with De Palma, Donaggio hasn't lost a step, and his score for PASSION contains all the brooding darkness and sensuality one would want. As a bonus, you get an excellent recording of one of Debussy's finest pieces.

In early 2014, Denmark-based conga player and bandleader Eliel Lazo invented a concept he dubbed "Cuban Nights". The aim was to play and present new and authentic Cuban music on stages, including at the Copenhagen JazzHouse Montmartre. After many successful Cuban nights across the country and Europe with various resident and visiting Cuban musicians, Eliel decided to return to the original line-up. So, here's the dream team back together, including legendary pianist Javier "Caramelo de Cuba" Masso (Jerry Gonzalez, Enrique Morente, Diego El Cigala, Concha Buika), bassist Yasser Pino (The Afrocuban All Stars, The Latin Syndicate , Roberto) Fonseca), drum genius and Grammy winner Raul Pineda (Chucho Valdes, Eric Marienthal, Michel Camilo) and Eliel himself (The Cuban Funkmachine, Michel Camilo, Chucho Valdes, Richard Bona) heat up together. Recorded at the legendary Musigrama recording studio in Madrid.

This deluxe reissue boasts the superlative, punchy mono mix, heretofore unavailable on CD, along with ten bonus tracks - seven of which are previously unissued - thereby doubling the length of the original album. The 36-page booklet examines the Seeds’ early career in unprecedented detail, based on fresh research and interviews with the surviving participants. Keyboard player Daryl Hooper - the true architect of the Seeds sound - opened his files to share a swathe of incredible, rarely seen illustrations.
Of the great garage punk bands of the 1960s, some were louder (the Sonics), some were angrier (the Music Machine), and some were trippier (the 13th Floor Elevators), but few seemed like a bad influence on so many levels as the Seeds…