Tom Wilson

Wednesday Morning, 3 AM doesn't resemble any other Simon & Garfunkel album, mostly because their sound here was fundamentally different from that of the chart-topping duo that emerged a year later. Their first record together since their days as the teen harmony duo Tom & Jerry, the album was cut in March 1964, at a time when both Simon and Garfunkel were under the spell of folk music…

When trumpeter Tom Browne hit the Billboard charts in 1980, one would have thought that he was an overnight sensation. However, the licensed pilot had several years under his belt working with Weldon Irvine, Sonny Fortune, and others. His debut smash single, "Funkin' for Jamaica (N.Y.)," took the music industry by storm. Between Browne's piercing horn intro and his chilling riffs in the vamp, the New York native and his cohorts lay down one jammin' groove. From the thunderous bass of Marcus Miller and Browne's trumpeting trips to the salacious vocals of Toni Smith and the colorful conversation referencing Browne, this single was slick and exhilarating.

It's been long time since Tom Waits recorded an album as saturated with tenderness as this one. The carny-barker noise merchant who has immersed himself in brokenness and reportage from life's seamy, even hideous underbelly for decades has created, along with songwriting and life partner Kathleen Brennan, a love song cycle so moving and poetic that it's almost unbearable to take in one sitting. Alice is alleged to be the "great lost Waits masterpiece." Waits and Brennan collaborated with Robert Wilson on a stage production loosely based on Alice Liddell, the young girl who was the obsession and muse of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books. The show ran in Europe for a time and the production's 15 songs were left unrecorded until now. Alice forgoes the usual nightmare lyric sequences, warped, circus-like melodies, and sonic darknesses that have been part and parcel of Waits' work since Swordfishtrombones…