Better known as founder and leader of the progressive Canadian band Sense, Stéphane Desbiens makes no compromises on "Shimmering Lights" (2006), offering us an exceptional and unconventional musical experience. Calling on its various influences, from blues, hard rock to jazz and classical music, this amazing guitarist makes no excuses as he proposes a very personal and alternative view of progressive rock music. Tomas Bodin (Flower Kings), Martin Orford (IQ) and Fred Schendel (Glass Hammer) have all contributed to this very special project…

Electric Light Orchestra's more modest follow-up to Eldorado is a very solid album, if not as bold or unified. It was also their first recorded at Musicland in Munich, which became Jeff Lynne's preferred venue for cutting records. At the time, he was also generating songs at a breakneck pace and had perfected the majestic, quasi-Beatles-type style (sort of high-wattage Magical Mystery Tour) introduced two albums earlier. The sound is stripped down a bit on Face the Music, Louis Clark's orchestral contributions generally more subdued than on Eldorado, even when they compete with the band, as on "Strange Magic." The soulful "Evil Woman" was one of the most respectable chart hits of its era, and one of the best songs that Lynne ever wrote (reportedly in 30 minutes), while "Strange Magic" showed off his writing in a more ethereal vein.

Founding Happy The Man members Frank Wyatt and Stan Whitaker take you on a musical journey through explosive progressive rock sagas, acoustic instrumentals, avant-garde jazz, and symphonic soundscapes. Influences range, quotingly, from Gentle Giant to Pink Floyd, King Crimson to Procol Harum, Mahavishnu Orchestra to R. Towner, plus solid Canterbury classics (Gong, Egg, Soft Machine) or the Italian PFM.

Electric Light Orchestra's third album showed a marked advancement, with a fuller, more cohesive sound from the band as a whole and major improvements in Jeff Lynne's singing and songwriting. This is where the band took on its familiar sound, Lynne's voice suddenly showing an attractive expressiveness reminiscent of John Lennon in his early solo years, and also sporting a convincing white British soulful quality that was utterly lacking earlier. The group also plugged the holes that made its work seem so close to being ragged on those earlier records. "Showdown" and "Ma-Ma-Ma Belle" (the latter featuring Marc Bolan on double lead guitar with Lynne) became AM radio fixtures while "Daybreaker" became a concert opener for the group and, along with "In the Hall of the Mountain King," kept the group's FM/art rock credentials in order.

Das erstklassige Solistenensemble, der RIAS-Kammerchor und die Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin und nicht zuletzt Jacobs selbst sind Garanten für lebendige historische Aufführungspraxis, so dass diese Interpretation der h-Moll Messe von der Fachpresse entsprechend enthusiastisch aufgenommen und den wenigen Referenzeinspielungen an die Seite gestellt wurde.

One of the first of the blissed-out rave acts to storm the charts, and also one of the longest lasting, the Future Sound of London deserved a good singles compilation, and fortunately they get one with the Virgin retrospective Teachings from the Electronic Brain. Their highest moments were virtually always their singles, and short-form tracks offer a much easier path to understanding the music of Brian Dougans and Garry Cobain than their occasionally bloated LPs. Teachings from the Electronic Brain neglects nothing of real value, beginning with their first chart hit ("Papua New Guinea") and grabbing the best tracks from their albums Accelerator ("Expander"), Lifeforms (the title track), the live-in-the-studio ISDN ("Far-Out Son of Lung and the Ramblings of a Madman," "Smokin' Japanese Babe"), and Dead Cities ("We Have Explosive"). Best of all, licensing requirements prevented the addition of material from 2002's half-baked The Isness.

"Ascanio in Alba" K. 111 came about through the good offices of Count Firmian, who had shared the Milan audience's enthusiasm for "Mitridate" and exerted his influence on the Empress in Vienna. He suggested entrusting the young Mozart with the composition of a festa teatrale for the wedding of the Empress's son, Archduke Ferdinand, and Maria Beatrice d'Este of Modena. Mozart began working on the score in late August 1771.

SF Jazz Collective wowed critics and jazz fans alike with their debut offering on Nonesuch. Pared from a triple disc offered on their website to a single CD, it was the first to showcase the group's M.O.: to pick one jazz composer per season, focus on reinterpreting that work for octet, and showcase for the writing of individual members - one song by each - and record it all. Their debut, SF Jazz Collective, focused on the tunes of Ornette Coleman and was stellar in every way. The Collective went through some personnel changes in their second season: bassist Robert Hurst was replaced by Matt Penman, drummer Brian Blade by Eric Harland, and trombonist Josh Roseman by Isaac Smith. Returning are pianist Renee Rosnes, saxophonists Miguel Zenón and Joshua Redman (the group's artistic director), trumpeter Nicholas Payton, and the legendary vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson…

Fond of Tigers is a Canadian seven-piece post-rock instrumental band from Vancouver. An article in Exclaim! describes the band's sound: "with cacophonous explosions of percussion and guitar underlying wild strains of trumpet and violin, only to drop out for unexpected, ambient glimmers of a once-roaring piece." The group began in 2000 as a solo project of guitarist Stephen Lyons. After Lyons' pop group Beauventure disbanded, Lyons performed solo, and soon began playing along with tape loops and recorded sounds. In 2003 the project expanded to become a full band. Band members include Stephen Lyons on guitar, JP Carter on trumpet, Morgan McDonald on piano, Jesse Zubot on violin, Shanto Bhattacharya on bass, and Skye Brooks and Dan Gaucher on drums.

Although ELO quickly became Jeff Lynne's baby, it was launched as a collaboration between Lynne and his bandmates in the Move, multi-instrumentalist Roy Wood, and drummer Bev Bevan. Indeed, the label on ELO's first album reads "Move Enterprises Ltd. presents the services of the Electric Light Orchestra," and most histories claim that the initial idea for the spin-off group combining rock and classical music was Wood's, not Lynne's. Wood and Lynne split the songwriting duties on Electric Light Orchestra, much as they did on late-period Move albums, but it seems like their visions of what ELO was were widely divergent. Wood's songs are clearly more classically influenced, with the string and horn sections driving the songs rather than merely coloring them, as they do on Lynne's tunes.

These "Final Cuts" are an odds-and-sods collection of music Marc Bolan had been working on – and it's in various stages of completion – before he was killed in 1977. Some of the music here appears on other recordings of late cuts; some are reworkings of tunes or alternate takes of tracks that appeared on Futuristic Dragon or Dandy in the Underworld; some never appeared at all. You have to be a hardcore T. Rex and/or Bolan fan to want this music. There is a weird version of "To Know You Is to Love You" with a vocal by Gloria Jones (the disco star who was Bolan's wife), and the rest has either new tags, or more or less guitars, or reworked melodies. You get the picture. Usually Edsel is spot-on, but this is dodgy. About the only thing you can really compliment the compilation producers for is good-quality sound – it's top-notch for what it is.