Blessed with a distinctive, flexible voice and genre-bending taste, Mississippi-born singer Cassandra Wilson is one of the best and most celebrated jazz singers of her generation. Influenced by the innovative styles of Betty Carter, Shirley Horn, and Nina Simone, Wilson emerged from Steve Coleman's M-Base Collective in the late '80s as a highly individualistic performer. Although she is an adept interpreter of the standards and blues-based jazz tradition, she's equally at home reinventing the songs of folk, pop, and country artists like Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Hank Williams, and the Beatles.

The Best of Buffy Sainte-Marie is a compilation album taken from her first six albums with Vanguard Records, released in 1970.Sainte-Marie pursued a variety of musical styles, from folk to country to experimental rock, and all are represented on this wide-ranging double-record compilation. It doesn't all work, but there are some terrific songs, among them the Native American lament "My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying," and the romantic "Until It's Time for You to Go," and a musical adaptation of a passage from a Leonard Cohen novel, "God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot."

Soul Jazz Records' new release Black Fire! New Spirits! is a deluxe double CD (and limited triple LP) exploring deep, radical and spiritual jazz in the USA in the period 1957-1982. In the 1960s and into the 1970s jazz music in the USA was in an almost constant state of revolution, with the music and lives of African-American artists radicalised by the advent of the civil rights movement, Black Power, and a new spiritual awakening.