Willie Wisely

Tony Bennett’s first album of celebrity duets (2006's Duets: An American Classic) featured an impressive cast of superstars answering the call from the dean of pop vocalists, but the arrangements were overly safe – virtually all of them ballads with soft strings or brassy finger-snappers. Duets II follows the first by five years and features, surprisingly, a cast just as star-laden, but also arrangements that are much more dynamic, and suitable for each song and its participants. (Marion Evans, a veteran whose career goes back nearly as far as Bennett's, handles the charts for a few of the best here.)

Modern day Chicago blues warriors present 14 original songs inspired by the electrifying blues sounds of 1940s through 1960s, and performed with taste, sly humor and pure joy. From locomotive shuffles to deep, slow blues, Moss shines with a Willie Dixon-like ability to write and sing the blues’ honest truth. “An incendiary brew…fiery fretwork and wailing harmonica…soulful, playful and exuberant.”

It was much to soul singer Spanky Wilson's surprise – she didn't realize she had had such an impact – when British multi-instrumentalist/producer Will Holland contacted her in her Los Angeles home in 2004, professing his love of her music and wondering if she'd collaborate with him. Still, she agreed to go the studio, and together they did two songs, "Don't Joke with a Hungry Man" and "When You're Through," for Holland's solo project, Quantic, on the album Mishaps Happening. That collaboration worked out so well that they decided to make an entire record together, this time with Holland's full band, the Quantic Soul Orchestra. Wilson's lovely voice is the centerpiece of I'm Thankful, and it does show a bit of its age, but only in the best of ways, deepening it and giving it an added measure of credibility and authenticity while still preserving its expressiveness and strength.

Tales from the Tiki Lounge is Duke Robillard and Sunny Crownover's tribute to Les Paul & Mary Ford. Robillard, an accomplished veteran guitarist with a background in blues and swing, demonstrates that he knows his way around a Gibson Les Paul model guitar in the ways that Paul played and overdubbed it on his series of hit recordings with his then-wife, Ford, singing from the early '50s to the early ‘60s. Crownover, whose voice producer Robillard sometimes double-tracks or adds echo to in emulation of Paul's recording approach, has a warm tone consistent with Ford's. The selections include many of the Paul/Ford hits, including "Bye Bye Blues," "Just One More Chance," "Smoke Rings," and "I'm Confessin' (That I Love You)," as well as songs Robillard has wisely selected that, while not actually recorded by Paul and Ford, can be performed in their style.