The Sweatbox (2002)

Cassandra Wilson continues to move down a highly eclectic path on Belly of the Sun, the somewhat belated follow-up to Traveling Miles. While displaying a jazz singer's mastery of melodic nuance and improvisatory phrasing, Wilson draws on a variety of non-jazz idioms – roots music, rock, Delta blues, country, soul – to create a kind of earthy, intelligent pop with obvious crossover appeal. Her core band includes guitarists Marvin Sewell and Kevin Breit, who blend marvelously, Sewell mostly on mellow acoustic and Breit adding atmospheric touches on electric, 12-string, and slide guitars, as well as mandolin, banjo, and even bouzouki.

Rootsier than Robert Cray, more soulful than Jimmie Vaughan, and boasting a gospel background similar to the great Sam Cooke, Joe Louis Walker is a contemporary soul/bluesman who flawlessly and effortlessly mixes his diverse influences. On his first album in three years (and Telarc label debut), Walker proves he's an artist capable of terse, searing guitar solos, as on the R&B "Do You Wanna' Be With Me?"; mid-tempo, jazzy soul such as "Leave that Girl Alone"; or rugged acoustic Delta blues like the appropriate album-closing "Strangers in Our House." Walker - who began his career playing religious music - not surprisingly proves himself a more than adequate soul/gospel vocalist in the Al Green vein on the spiritual "Where Jesus Leads"…

More than 30 years after the death of Jim Morrison, interest in The Doors is as strong as ever. They have been the posthumous subject of both a best-selling biography and a cinema film. 'Maximum Doors' presents the complete and unauthorised audio-biography of this ground-breaking quartet from their earliest days, through their rise to fame and enormous success, to the death of Morrison in Paris and the demise of the band. A perfect addition to every Doors fan's collection.

Journey with The Chieftains to the special places and people of the home counties that formed the band's musical soul. Derek Bell, Kevin Conneff, Martin Fay, Sean Keane, Matt Molloy and Paddy Moloney tell the tales of their earliest memories of Irish music. Their thoughtful and often amusing stories capture the emotion behind the scenes of every performance.

Although Procol Harum owed their career to their initial single, "A Whiter Shade of Pale," they were never really a singles band. Annotator Chris Welch notes that the group was not a one-hit wonder, but it might be called a three-hit wonder by tossing in "Homburg" and "Conquistador" (four, if "Pandora's Box," a U.K. Top 20, is included). For the most part, Procol Harum were known for their LPs, so the idea of organizing a compilation around singles that happen to have been excerpted from those LPs, largely without the band's say-so, in one country or another, is a curious one…

Motörhead have an overabundance of rarities in their vaults, as evidenced by the bonus tracks included on the 2001 Castle reissues of their early releases. Somehow, the group even had more rare tracks lying around, which comprise the 2002 double-disc set Tear Ya Down: The Rarities…

According to the press biography disseminated with advance copies of Gato Barbieri's Peak Records debut, The Shadow of the Cat, he was nearing 70 at the time of this release (previous published accounts would have put him at only 67) and this is the 50th album on which he is either featured or is the leader. One cannot, then, reasonably expect the old cat to have learned new tricks. Nor has his new label required him to; the company, run by contemporary jazz guitarist Russ Freeman, specializes in a melodic, commercial style of jazz. Producer Jason Miles (whose previous clients include Miles Davis and Luther Vandross) seems to have aimed at re-creating the sound of Barbieri's mid-'70s albums for A&M Records…