The Precious Treasury of The Expanse And Awakened Awareness

Mississippi-born but Texas-based Omar Kent Dykes understands a fundamental fact about the blues. He knows there are only a handful of rhythms and themes in the blues grab bag, and he uses them all over and over again in slightly different guises, which is far from a bad thing. It is the fundamental conservatism of the blues and its limited palette that has kept the form alive long after its colorful offspring (R&B, soul, rock & roll, etc.) flew the roost, taking a large part of the audience with them. But Omar understands all this. He has had a 30-year career playing these rhythms, and he knows how to keep it all simple, direct, and powerful, and how to build new songs out of the fabric of the old songs without destroying their familiarity.

Joe Nosek fell in love with the blues when he was a boy, but it was vintage Chess Records singles and the blues 78s of the 1920s and '30s that captivated him. When the vocalist and harmonica player put together the Cash Box Kings in the early 2000s, he named them after a now defunct magazine that charted the juke box hits of the '40s and patterned their sound on the early blues records that captivated him. The music on Holler and Stomp pays tribute to the country sounds that influenced the blues in the early days of recording with a mix of originals and covers that sound like they're 50 years old. "That's My Gal" is a variation on Slim Harpo's "Scratch My Back," with Paterson's reverb-drenched guitar and Oscar Wilson's sly vocal contributing to the retro feel…

This 1981 recording was the first period-instrument version of Purcell's most famous "semi-opera." This Restoration-era hybrid was a play with a complete (spoken) script plus numerous musical numbers for soloists, chorus, and pit orchestra. The Fairy Queen is based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, although you'd never know it from the music, which has (typically for the genre) no real connection to the plot. (Most of the songs and dances are masques performed for the entertainment of Titania, Oberon, or Hippolytus.) The advantage to this is that Purcell's score can be performed fairly well on its own. The Fairy Queen includes some of Purcell's best-loved comic scenes ("The Drunken Poet" and "Coridon and Mopsa") and songs ("Hark the echoing Air," "Ye gentle spirits," and "Hark how all things in one sound rejoice"–the last sung here by Jennifer Smith, sounding more beautiful than on any recording she's made since).