Voco

"It's midnight, lights off, clothes off, candles glowing, incense is fading away, don't need no electricity, baby, I'll be your amplifier, 'cause we can boogie in the dark'" - and so pioneer San Francisco disc jockey Voco introduced himself every Saturday night at midnight, while proceeding to expand the musical palette of his stoned audience. KSAN was the first radio station to bring "hippie music" to SF area listeners, a large and devoted following whom the laid-back Armenian DJ introduced to an eclectic mix of blues, funk, and world music, until 6 A.M. rolled around and the tired heads rolled into bed. In 1972 Voco convinced Blue Thumb to release a double concept album based on his radio show, and gathered together some incredible musicians from the Bay area as contributors. Lights Out: San Francisco, subtitled "Voco Presents the Soul of the Bay Area" is an excellent overview of the diverse and exciting San Francisco music scene in the early '70s…

Astrud Gilberto, the winsome naïf whose girlish yet sultry vocals captivated the world on the hit "The Girl from Ipanema," earned her own contract with Verve from its success and recorded throughout the last half of the '60s. Although her material wavered in quality, she was usually paired with excellent arrangers such as Gil Evans, Claus Ogerman, and Antonio Carlos Jobim himself. The Gold compilation is a two-disc set that includes 36 tracks, a good portion of everything she recorded between 1962 and 1969 (plus a pair of tracks from a 1987 comeback album). The first disc is by far the strongest of the two, including her pair of vocals for the Getz/Gilberto album as well as her early masterpieces with Jobim and Gil Evans (plus her bubbly pop album co-billed with organist Walter Wanderley).

Exploring 20th-century repertoire – both acknowledged masterpieces and new discoveries – this 14-CD anthology reflects the diverse aesthetic strands of Pierre Boulez’s programming over the course of his ground-breaking and influential career. These Erato recordings, made between 1966 and 1992, feature composers otherwise absent from Boulez’s discography – Xenakis, Donatoni, Grisey, Dufourt, Ferneyhough, Harvey and Höller – and the first CD release of the interpretation of Stravinsky’s incantatory Les Soucoupes in the version for female voices and four horns.