The Positivity Kit Lisa Currie

Complete Collection is a six-disc, U.K.-only set celebrating the breadth and depth of Lisa Stansfield's extensive and impressive career. It includes her five studio albums – Affection; Real Love; So Natural; Lisa Stansfield; and Face Up – as well as an exclusive sixth disc, with recordings from a 1992 Wembley date, club mixes (including a great Massive Attack version of "Live Together"), B-sides, and three songs from Stansfield's Blue Zone days. Not enough? Each studio album is augmented with at least two bonus tracks. Complete Collection is definitely the most comprehensive Lisa Stansfield retrospective; it borders on overkill. But since it's only available in the U.K. – and is also quite pricey – the single-disc Biography is perfectly acceptable for the casual Stansfield fan.

I Get A Kick: Cole Porter Reimagined presents adventurous new takes on 10 classic tunes written by Cole Porter for stage and screen, performed by jazz singer and award-winning poet Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) on her sixth record and first for Jazzed Media. This distinctive homage appeals to fans of vocal music, jazz, and the Great American Songbook, as well as anyone seeking a lush and witty background to a cozy night at home or a sophisticated gathering. It was co-produced and engineered by James Gardiner, who boasts two Grammy nominations and 42 gold and platinum records, and features internationally known, Bay Area-based jazz players Mike Zilber, John Santos, Ben Flint, Frank Martin, Fred Randolph, Troy Lampkins, Jeff Marrs, Alan Hall, and Paul Van Wageningen.

Duality is at once sacred and playful. It is both dark and light, organic and refined, masculine and feminine. Dead Can Dance's Lisa Gerrard partners with Pieter Bourke, formerly of Aussie band Eden, to create this compositional dance of partnership that is classical, ancient, and thoroughly modern. Gerrard's voice is multitracked at times, conjuring a cathedral choir and the droning chants of monks. Drums and synth snake from desert to brilliant stormy sky to shaking earth and the bodies that inhabit those spaces. There are lush multiple layers of strings, bagpipe drone, and, quite literally, the laughter of children. The vocals sans "real" words and multicultural instrumentation will be familiar to Dead Can Dance listeners. Yet there is something more exclusive, more womblike about the music of Bourke and Gerrard; rather than two distinct bodies making music, like mother and in utero child sharing blood and breath, they are mutually dependent.

This “short diary (of loss)”, as drummer Sebastian Rochford calls it, is offered as “a sonic memory, created with love, out of need for comfort.” It is dedicated to Rochford’s father, Aberdeen poet Gerard Rochford, 1932-2019, and to his family. Seb, one of ten siblings, wrote most of the music shortly after Gerard’s death and delivers it here, in performances of deep feeling and hymn-like clarity, together with pianist Kit Downes. The final wistful piece, “Even Now I Think Of Her” was composed by Gerard Rochford. Sebastian explains: “It’s a tune my dad had sung into his phone and sent me. I forwarded this to Kit. He listened, and then we started.”

Richard Thompson is the sort of artist destined to be a cherished cult item rather than a bona fide star, which at the dawn of the 21th century puts him in an uncomfortable place in the music industry – being able to reliably sell 100,000 copies of an album makes you too small for a major label, no matter how long they've kept you on the roster. In 2000, after a dozen years with Capitol Records, Thompson's contract was not renewed, and 2003's The Old Kit Bag found him recording for an independent for the first time since 1985. Creatively, this actually turns out to be a good thing; after the periodically excessive and self-conscious production Mitchell Froom imposed on nearly all of Thompson's releases for Capitol, 1999's Mock Tudor (produced by Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf) found Thompson going for a more lean and live sound, and with John Chelew at the controls, Thompson follows suit on The Old Kit Bag. Cut in a straightforward and stripped-down manner, with just bassist Danny Thompson, drummer Michael Jerome, and harmony vocalist Judith Owen along for company, The Old Kit Bag captures Thompson in spare but sympathetic circumstances; the performances are strong and confident, without a note or gesture wasted, and Thompson's interplay with his rhythm section is nothing short of superb.