After his remarkably successful acoustic album Wind, Maalouf comes back with a more electric sound on Illusions. It is an album born out of, and designed for, performance on stage. It not only features the members of his regular band, Frank Woeste on the keyboard, François Delporte on the guitar, Xavier Roge on the drums et Laurent David on the bass, but also adds three more quarter-tone trumpeters (Youenn Le Cam, Yann Martin and Martin Saccardy) to bring a even higher level of dynamism to the sound. Maalouf says, "I wanted this album to be festive and full of positive energy… it starts with the most tragic view of the world: cynicism. It then gradually evolves towards light and hope."

This 1975 Kudu album by Joe Beck was never reissued on CD in the United States but available only as a Japanese import on the King label. Beck is a masterpiece of mid-'70s funky jazz and fusion. Beck retired in 1971 to be a dairy farmer. He returned to make this album his opus. Featuring David Sanborn, Don Grolnick, Will Lee, and Chris Parker, all of the album's six tracks were recorded in two days. Overdubs were done in another day and the minimal strings added by Don Sebesky were added on a third day. "Star Fire" opens the set and features the interplay of Beck's riffing and lead fills with Sanborn's timely, rhythmic legato phrasing, and the communication level is high and the groove level even higher. On "Texas Ann," another Beck original, Sanborn hits the blues stride from the jump, but Beck comes in adding the funk underneath Grolnick's keyboard while never losing his Albert Collins' feel. On "Red Eye," Beck's two- and three-chord funk vamps inform the verse while Sebesky's unobtrusive strings provide a gorgeous backdrop for Sanborn, who stays in the mellow pocket until the refrains, when he cuts loose in his best Maceo Parker. The deep funk of Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin's "Café Black Rose" showcases the band's commitment to groove jazz with a razor's edge.

March 4th 2013 will see guitar legend Gordon Giltrap and keyboardist Oliver Wakeman (following his years of touring with the classic progressive rock band Yes) release their debut collaborative album 'Ravens & Lullabies' by Esoteric Antenna, a 13 song collection of hard hitting memorable rock pieces coupled with thought provoking lyrics alongside acoustic duets featuring their fine instrumental interplay. Gordon and Oliver spent 2012 writing and recording the album which features a return for Gordon to his rock roots following a 30 year absence and Oliver's first recorded works since his departure from both Yes and Strawbs. The album has been recorded and mixed by 'Threshold' guitarist Karl Groom (who also mixed the Yes 'Live In Lyon' record which featured Oliver on keyboards)…

It's hard to believe that's such an artist as Javier Vargas, who's recorded & performed with some of the world's heavy weights such as Santana, Double Trouble, Jack Bruce, Devon Allman, Larry Graham, Carmine Appice, Tim Bogert, Junior Wells, Glen Hughes and Chris Rea to name a few, is still expanding his Blues n Swamp rock spectrum with outstanding results. The Jams and the collaborations will never end as far as Javier is concerned & Heavy City Blues, which featured Carmine Appice, Paul Shortino and Bobby Alexander, is just another stepping stone forward for this Blues Rock phenomenon - namely the Vargas Blues Band.

On The Blue Room, her second Decca recording, Madeleine Peyroux and producer Larry Klein re-examine the influence of Ray Charles' revolutionary 1962 date, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. They don't try to re-create the album, but remake some of its songs and include others by composers whose work would benefit from the genre-blurring treatment Charles pioneered. Bassist David Pilch, drummer Jay Bellerose, guitarist Dean Parks, and pianist/organist Larry Goldings are the perfect collaborators. Most these ten tracks feature string arrangements by Vince Mendoza. Five tunes here are reinterpretations of Charles' from MSICAWM. "Take These Chains" commences as a sultry jazz tune, and in Peyroux's vocal, there is no supplication – only a demand. Parks' pedal steel moves between sounding like itself and a clarinet. Goldings' alternating B-3 and Rhodes piano offer wonderful color contrast and make it swing. Her take on "Bye Bye Love" feels as if it's being narrated to a confidante, and juxtaposes early Western swing with a bluesy stroll. A rock guitar introduces "I Can't Stop Loving You," but Peyroux's phrasing has more country-blues in it than we've heard from her before. The use of a trumpet in "Born to Lose" and "You Don't Know Me," with Mendoza's dreamy strings, allow for Peyroux to deliver her most stylized jazz performances on the set.

The Avant Garde was a coffeehouse in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that played host to a variety of rock, blues, and folk performers in the '60s, and Windy City guitar wizard Magic Sam (aka Sam Maghett) rolled in to play a few sets in June 1968. A local kid with an interest in recording named Jim Charne showed up with a reel-to-reel machine and a couple of microphones, and he captured Magic Sam's show on tape; 45 years later, those tapes have finally been made public on the album Live at the Avant Garde, and given the relatively small amount of material that's surfaced on the late blues legend (who succumbed to a heart attack when he was just 32), this set is a very welcome find. Live at the Avant Garde has a decidedly different feel than Magic Sam Live, which preserved radio broadcasts from 1963 and 1964 and a 1969 appearance at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival; while those recordings blazed with intensity, this captures Magic Sam and his band in more laid-back form, playing a small, booze-free venue rather than a rowdy bar or a festival audience in the thousands.

Omar Dykes, of Omar & the Howlers, pays tribute to blues icon Howlin' Wolf on Runnin' with the Wolf. All of the tracks on this disc were written by either Wolf or Willie Dixon except for the Omar original "Runnin' with the Wolf." Dykes stays close to the original versions of these songs, which most listeners have heard in some form or other: "The Red Rooster," "Back Door Man," "Smokestack Lightning," "Wang Dang Doodle," and "Killin' Floor." That doesn't mean these are straight covers. The passion in the performances is undeniable, but so is the fun these musicians are obviously having. Dykes has the perfect voice for this project and is complemented by Derek O'Brien on guitar, Ronnie James on bass, Ted Roddy on harp, and Wes Starr on drums along with Mark Kazanoff and Les Izmore on saxophones, Nick Connolly on organ, and Mike Buck on percussion.

On their second album since their 2005 reunion, synth pop pioneers Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark rekindle the spirit of two new wave classics, the first being their own "slept on" masterpiece from 1983, Dazzle Ships, an album that pushed the boundaries sonically. From the blippy, robotic, and almost musique concrète opener "Please Remain Seated" to the geometric sleeve that credits DZ designer Peter Saville with Executive Art Design, English Electric carries on the pop-meets-avant-garde spirit of that fan favorite album. It gives up a love song like "Night Café" that's so glossed and polished that it could be used in a John Hughes film, and then it offers an edgy swerve like "Decimal," where answering machine messages, countdowns, and other disembodied voices provided some kind of silicon chorus that's equally majestic and precise…

Protest Songs was recorded by Prefab Sprout in 1985 in the wake of the masterful Steve McQueen/Two Wheels Good, but shelved in favor of the subsequent From Langley Park to Memphis; it finally surfaced to little fanfare in 1989, appearing almost as mysteriously as it was abandoned four years earlier. It's a wonderful record, but perhaps too close in sound and spirit to Steve McQueen for comfort – From Langley Park, for all its flaws, is a much more adventurous effort, and with the benefit of hindsight, it seems reasonable to assume that Paddy McAloon wished not to stick with the tried-and-true but instead attempt something new and different, successful or not.

The opera is based on a libretto adapted by the poet Silvio Stampiglia for Giovanni Bononcini, whose setting was staged at Rome’s Teatro di Torre Nona in 1694. Handel completed his opera in 1738 in little more than a month. However, his typically swift pace and resourceful treatment of musical themes and models should not be misconstrued as complacency, carelessness, or low imaginative powers. The autograph manuscript reveals that Handel invested considerable skill in arias that are perfectly tailored to the dramatic storyline, many of which were meticulously crafted and then redrafted.

US band Unified Past, at first known as Labyrinth, has been around in one shape or another for some 20 odd years by now. As Unified Past they made their debut as recording artists in 1999, but then a 10 year long pause followed before they resurfaced with their second production in 2009. The band appears to have entered a two year cycle of releasing albums since then. Following "Observations" from 2011, "Spots" from 2013 is their fourth studio effort, and was released through the US label Melodic Revolution Records. The band's fourth studio album "Spots" is a production that should see the band establishing a reach towards a fairly broad sized audience. Their blend of classic hard rock and progressive rock into what I'd describe as a pomp rock sound is often an interesting one, and fairly appealing at that.