Fast y

Years before unleashing their critically acclaimed Earthshaker album in 1981, San Francisco's Y&T had enjoyed a brief, semi-covert existence in the mid-'70s, when they still went by their original name, the pre-shortening Yesterday & Today. Signed to the tiny London label, the quartet recorded two albums during this phase, the first of which was this eponymous 1976 debut…

Through more than 100 appearances on The Grand Ole Opry, Elizabeth Cook built strong ties to the audience most likely to respond to her debut album. Her voice throughout Hey Y'all begs comparison to classic country divas such as Loretta Lynn and especially Dolly Parton, to whom Cook pays good-humored tribute on "Dolly." …

This disc from the Bogotá, Colombia-based ensemble Música Ficta jumps on the fast-moving bandwagon carrying Baroque music from Latin America. It is billed, with unnecessary specificity, as covering "Feast and Devotion in High Peru of the seventeenth century," but like other releases in this general repertoire it ranges widely, including music from other Latin American countries and from Spain itself, and covering music of several centuries. The subtitle is a bit misleading but not seriously annoying, for all this music traveled quite a bit in its time, and all the lands that are individual countries today were simply part of New Spain.