Robert Baird

The story is familiar. The British Invasion caused a deadly tsunami in the American music scene. Established stars, from Elvis to John Lee Hooker to Tony Bennett, saw their careers swept away in a matter of months in 1964. Few groups were impacted quite like the Beach Boys, whose resident genius, Brian Wilson, went into an emotional tailspin trying to compete with the Beatles . . .

Streaming has taken over the world. Not so fast, at least to Sony’s way of thinking.

Fifty-four years after it was recorded, Hank Mobley's immortal Soul Station has become a tale of two LPs.

One, the original pressing (mono or stereo), is an artifact, an insanely valuable antique, the object of fevered jazz collectors the world over.

The other is a fresh vinyl reissue, cut from a high-resolution digital remastering of the original master tapes, that's meant to bring in younger listeners, or those interested enough in the music that they'll pay $19.95 for a new LP.

Do the singles in this boxed set which features a quality pressing job and nice if no frills packaging sound better than the CDs that both Rhino and the pair’s own label mentioned above have been releasing over the years?

For the musically literate it’s an old story but one that I never tire of telling. It was the scruffy, outlaw country singer warbling Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington and the Gershwins? He wasn’t singer enough to carry it, they all said. And even if by some miracle he did, his label was convinced it would never find an audience, it would never sell. When Booker T. Jones of Stax Records fame signed on as producer, heads were scratched, skeptical eyes rolled northward and virtually everyone had their doubts.

Universal Music is gonna throw a listening party, open the public, to preview the 14 LP The Beatles in Mono boxed set, at Electric Lady Studios in NY (Sept. 8) and the GRAMMY Museum in LA (Sept. 10).

He was a victim of his own success. From 1925 to 1929, when he was in his mid-20s, Louis Armstrong changed the world of jazz music forever with his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, and his solos in tunes like "Cornet Chop Suey," "Potato Head Blues," and "West End Blues." Almost immediately, however, he was faced with a question: Now what?