Fred Kaplan

Does the world need another audiophile reissue of Kind of Blue? This was the obvious question to ask upon news that Chad Kassem's Analogue Productions was joining the party. The album's arrival in the mail (yes, of course, I bought one) signaled that something special might be happening: the classy hard-box slip case with the wooden dowel spine, the Stoughton tip-on gatefold jacket graced with well-reproduced session photos, a handsome booklet, and, finally, the LP: a 200gm UHQR pressing on off-white Clarity vinyl.

Mario Rom's Interzone: Eternal Fiction, Joe Lovano & Dave Douglas' Soundprints: Other Worlds, Jack Brandfield: I'll Never Be the Same and Charles Lloyd & The Marvels: Tone Poem.

A review of the Archie Shepp/Jason Moran duet album Let My People Go, in the April issue, may have startled some readers. Shepp is a tenor saxophonist known for tearing across the fiercest climes of the avant-garde (his seminal album is called Fire Music); yet at 83, he's playing standards, spirituals, and slow blues. In fact, Shepp has been exploring such traditional terrain for several decades. So—for the debut of an occasional column on underappreciated albums, artists, genres, and labels—let's shine some light on Archie Shepp's ballads.

Paul McCartney: McCartney III, Loretta Lynn: Still Woman Enough, Little Freddie King: Going Upstairs, Irma Thomas: Love Is the Foundation, Goat Girl: On All Fours and James Yorkston: The Wide, Wide River.

George Russell was a major innovator in modern jazz: a pianist-composer-theoretician who profoundly influenced Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Gil Evans, and the "modal revolution" that propelled so much music of the 1960s and beyond. But he's largely been forgotten. He was also the leader of ensembles, big and small, on more than two dozen albums. A few of those albums are acknowledged masterpieces, but they too have been overshadowed by some of his acolytes' classics.

Diana Krall: This Dream of You, Ella Fitzgerald: Ella: The Lost Berlin Tapes and Charles Mingus: @ Bremen 1964 & 1975.

Fred Hersch: Songs from Home, Horace Silver Quintet: Further Explorations, Juliet Kurtzman/Pete Malinverni: Candlelight: Love in the Time of Cholera and Matthew Shipp Trio: The Unidentifiable.