Best His

Count Basie was among the most important bandleaders of the swing era. With the exception of a brief period in the early '50s, he led a big band from 1935 until his death almost 50 years later, and the band continued to perform after he died…

Homer thinks maybe they should stop at his Uncle Butch's saloon for a drink before they get home. "You're home now, kid," the older man Al tells him. Three military veterans have just returned to their hometown of Boone City, somewhere in the Midwest, and each in his own way is dreading his approaching reunion. Al's dialogue brings down the curtain on the apprehensive first act of William Wyler's "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946). Seen more than six decades later, it feels surprisingly modern: lean, direct, honest about issues that Hollywood then studiously avoided. After the war years of patriotism and heroism in the movies, this was a sobering look at the problems veterans faced when they returned home.

Equal parts blue-eyed soul shouter and wild-eyed poet-sorcerer, Van Morrison is among popular music's true innovators, a restless seeker whose incantatory vocals and alchemical fusion of R&B, jazz, blues, and Celtic folk produced perhaps the most spiritually transcendent body of work in the rock & roll canon…