Rock Open 2006

In 1978, a small christian folk rock band in Edinburgh released a farewell album to celebrate six years of making music together. The album was made on a shoestring budget and only 500 copies were pressed. The musicians went their separate ways.
Thirty years later, the record has become a collectors item. A CD version is available on Amazon and it has been described as one of the best folk rock albums of the seventies…

A teacher and his students open up new worlds for one another in this urban drama inspired by a true story. Pierre Dulaine (Antonio Banderas) is a prize-winning ballroom dancer and instructor from Manhattan who volunteers his services to a high school in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the Bronx. Principal Augustine James (Alfre Woodard) in turn gives Dulaine a tough assignment – a detention class with some of the biggest troublemakers on campus. When the kids learn that Dulaine intends to teach them how to dance in the classic style, they're incredulous at best and dismissive at worst – until Dulaine demonstrates his moves for the class. While Dulaine's charges – including Rock (Rob Brown), LaRhette (Yaya DaCosta), Ramos (Dante Basco), Eddie (Marcus T. Paulk), and Sasha (Jenna Dewan) – respect his talent, they have their own way of dancing, and as they mix hip-hop moves with ballroom discipline, they create an exciting new style.

"Greatest Hits" is a compilation album by the American rock band Journey, originally released in 1988 by Columbia Records. It is the band's best-selling career disc, spending 330 weeks on the Billboard 200 album chart. Additionally, as of late 2014, it has logged nearly 1,000 weeks on Billboard's Catalog albums chart. As of December 2008, it was reported to have been the sixth highest certified 'greatest hits' package in the United States according to the RIAA, behind only similar collections by The Eagles, Billy Joel, Elton John, and The Beatles' red and blue compilations.

Pinnacle's second CD is a quantum leap above the first. This is melodic Progressive Rock having musical hooks and natural sounding time changes. In 1997, guitarist/synth player Karl Eisenhart and drummer Greg Jones met in an East Pennsylvania coffee house where Karl was playing an acoustic gig. After clicking personally and musically, they began playing together and performing, first as Dread Pirate Roberts and then Landslide. By 2002 they draft bassist/multi instrumentalist Bill Fox and the trio begin covering progressive staples by Tull, Rush, Yes as well as the Police.

After the departure of founder Daevid Allen the group Gong went through a rapid series of personnel changes with drummer/percussionist Pierre Moerlen becoming the de facto leader. The music evolved away from the psychedelic sound of the Allen-led era into jazz/rock fusion. By the time Expresso II (1978) was recorded Moerlen had assembled an almost entirely different group with a very different sound. With the completion of Gong's contract with Virgin Records the group name was changed to Pierre Moerlen's Gong to differentiate it from the other Gong offshoots and the original band.

This is, perhaps, the one. Derek Trucks has been on an aesthetic quest for something since he began his own recording career in 1997 – apart from his membership in the Allman Brothers Band. Each record has gone further into establishing Trucks not only as a slide guitar wizard (that happened when he was still in his teens), but also as a serious songwriter, fine arranger, and bandleader. The Derek Trucks Band, as evidenced by the release of 2003's Soul Serenade, is a unit – a band – whose core has been together for eight years. They create an atmosphere, a sound, a musical sense of place and community.

On Mighty Rearranger, the core of the band Robert Plant showcased on 2002's Dreamland - and named the Strange Sensation - is a full-blown expanded lineup that shares the bill with him. Guitarists Justin Adams and Skin Tyson, drummer Clive Deamer, keyboardist John Baggot, and bassist Billy Fuller help Plant give listeners his most musically satisfying and diverse recording since, well, Led Zeppelin's Physical Grafitti. The reference is not a mere platitude to Plant's pedigree. The songs, production, and sequencing of the album overtly incorporates those sounds as well as those of Eastern modalism, Malian folk, guitar rock, R&B, and others, for inspiration - and why shouldn't they? Mighty Rearranger opens with "Another Tribe," a sociopolitical ballad that touches upon the textural string backdrops from Zep's "Kashmir" and is fueled by Moroccan bendir drums…

The Mars Volta are continual contenders for the mantle of most experimental high-profile rock group, along with System of a Down, an artist they've toured with but who usually sell 20 times more records. Mars Volta aren't as popular, not because their riffs are less memorable or innovative but because their cycle of musical buildup and release, although similarly jarring, can last at least 20 minutes instead of System's two. (It's the difference between having a background in acid rock and having one in thrash.) While the early reports on third album Amputechture commented that the duo of Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez had learned a few lessons about silence and forsaken the concept album, don't believe it…