The One That

Johannes Ockeghem (c1410 - 1497) was a composer who had one of the most far reaching impacts on the history of music. He was also the father of the musical form of the canon. So whether it is a canon by a modern composer, by Bach or by Pachabel - all these are but ripples of the impact that this man had on the destiny of Western music. However of all of the surviving works - there is a sadly lost 36 part mass cycle - the Missa Prolationum is the one that shows the grandiosity of his musical vision, his audacity and the genius of his mind perhaps far greater than any other.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the release of "She’s The One," we are releasing a remixed, remastered and re-imagined version of this album. The original album included several songs that were left off the original Wildflowers album (recently included as the "All The Rest" disc in the "Wildflowers & All The Rest" re-issue), so this re-release is an appropriate ending to the campaign celebrating the Wildflowers-era. Ryan Ulyate (Tom’s long-time engineer and producer) has remixed the audio, and the song selection is designed to work as a Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers album, rather than a soundtrack album. Four unreleased tracks have been added; the rocker “105 Degrees” (written by Petty), a cover of JJ Cale’s “Thirteen Days”, “One of Life’s Little Mysteries” (another Petty original), and an instrumental (“French Disconnection”) in the same vein as the instrumentals on the original album.

The title of Rarities 1971-2003 is a little misleading, as is the cover photo of the Stones in prime late-'70s form: both suggest that this long-awaited trawl through the Rolling Stones vaults, released in conjunction with Starbucks' Hear Music label but available in all conventional retail outlets, will be heavy on '70s material. That's certainly not the case. There are just three '70s cuts here, actually – four if you count the live "Mannish Boy," which appeared on the 1977 double live album Love You Live and the 1981 odds-n-sods collection Sucking in the Seventies, which was reissued earlier in 2005, the same year Rarities 1971-2003 came out…

Nick Cave is a singular figure in contemporary rock music; he first emerged as punk rock was making its presence known in Australia, but though he's never surrendered his status as a provocateur and a musical outlaw, he quickly abandoned the simplicity of punk for something grander and more literate, though no less punishing in its outlook…

The late '60s and early '70s didn't yield many (as far as we know) unreleased studio recordings of completed, otherwise unavailable Rolling Stones songs. But it did produce a wealth of fairly interesting alternate/working versions and song embryos that never got polished off, sixteen of which are presented on this compilation. As the title Sweet Black Angel implies, many are from that murky early-'70s period when the Stones were working, in fits and starts, on Exile on Main St., and several of these tracks are different versions of songs that ended up on that album…

Christmas came early in 1971; in May, Atlantic released Plastic Dreams, the penultimate studio album from the Modern Jazz Quartet during their main, 22-year run as an ensemble. Of the MJQ's albums, Plastic Dreams has never been a critic's favorite, and was an album that mystified many of the group's longtime followers. First was the gatefold front cover, which featured a "plastic" image of a nude woman that was really pushing the envelope by 1971 standards; it was almost "indecent." Second, the liner notes by arch-New York jazz critic Martin Williams, while appreciative, really made you wonder if Williams was listening to the same album you were…

Light Up the Night marked the end of an era for the Brothers Johnson – it was the last of four albums that Quincy Jones produced for the Los Angeles siblings, and it was the last time a Brothers Johnson album was truly excellent instead of merely decent. When Jones was producing the Brothers Johnson's albums from 1976-1980, he gave them something their subsequent albums lacked – consistency. Even though George and Lewis Johnson recorded some decent material after Light Up the Night, none of their post-Jones albums had the type of consistency that Jones gives this 1980 release. The album gets off to an impressive start with the major hit "Stomp!" (a definitive example of the smooth, sleek brand of funk that was termed sophisticated funk in the late '70s and early '80s), and the tracks that follow are equally memorable. From the sleek sophisti-funk of "You Make Me Wanna Wiggle," "This Had to Be" (which was co-written by Michael Jackson and employs him as a background vocalist), and the title song to the tender R&B/pop ballads "Treasure" and "All About the Heaven," Light Up the Night is without a dull moment.