VIA PRESS RELEASE | Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, announce the reissue of the landmark box set Miles Davis & John Coltrane – The Complete Columbia Recordings 1955–1961.

The expansive collection of recordings capturing John Coltrane and Miles Davis’ legendary collaborations between 1955 and 1961 will be reissued as 9LP and 6CD sets in honor of Davis and Coltrane’s centennials this year. Produced by Michael Cuscuna and Bob Belden, Miles Davis & John Coltrane – The Complete Columbia Recordings 1955–1961 won two GRAMMYs (Best Boxset or Limited Edition Package and Best Liner Notes) and was only released on vinyl in a super limited edition via Mosaic Records.

Now available widely for the first time, the 9LP includes vinyl of Mark Wilder’s remixed and remastered audio from 2000 cut directly from the analog tapes by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound. Each LP is in an individually-designed jacket housed in a luxe slipcase accompanied by a gorgeous 60-page adaptation of the original book with stunning rare photography and essays by original producer George Avakian and Kind of Blue drummer Jimmy Cobb, insightful GRAMMY-winning notes by noted critic Bob Blumenthal, timeline and further notes by Cuscuna and Belden, and the original liner notes to Kind of Blue by pianist Bill Evans.

The CD reissue re-configures the 2000 6CD set with its 116-page book and 6 individually designed minijackets, all housed in a beautiful slipcase.

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Celebrating Jules Alexander in advance of his 83rd birthday tomorrow. —Ed.

The Association didn’t exactly win friends and influence hippies with their square-john antics in the mid- to late sixties; they may have been the first band to perform at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, but most of your smirking counter-culture types considered them about as authentic as a cheap plastic peace symbol.

But hey–as that great philosopher Huey Lewis pointed out, it’s hip to be square, and all of your REAL swinging girls and boys know The Association is the Nazz. So what if they flunked the Acid Test and would have been more at home at Tricia Nixon’s wedding than a Human Be-In? The Association rose above it all, producing a rapturous dream pop that Tricky Dick himself might have tapped a toe to.

And you can hear The Association in all their vocal glory on the 2018 Anthology: Just the Right Sound. It’s 51 songs are a definite case of overkill–and I’ve docked it a half-grade accordingly–but it’s worth the purchase price (and more!) if you want to hear not only the songs that melted your heart but such berserker numbers as “Pandora’s Golden Heebie Jeebies,” to say nothing of a couple of cuts off 1972’s justifiably neglected Waterbeds in Trinidad!

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Some albums arrive. Anghellic detonated. Twenty-five years ago, Tech N9ne split himself into three acts—Hell, Purgatory, Heaven—and dared the rest of hip-hop to keep up with his tongue. It cracked the Top 60 of the Billboard 200 and hit No. 50 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop chart, but chart position was never the story. The story was that nobody in 2001 sounded remotely like this, and nobody since has caught him.

Anghellic: The Resurrection is not a victory lap. It is Tech taking the master tapes back and finishing an argument he started a quarter century ago.

He went back in with engineer Ben “Bengineer” Cybulsky and remixed and remastered the record himself, and you hear that intent immediately. The low end has weight now instead of mud. The Halloween piano, the talkbox, the horror-movie air around the vocals, all of it has been pulled apart and given room to breathe. Nothing is scrubbed. It just hits harder.

Then there is the object. This is a 2xLP, one disc a devil-red crimson, the other a light celestial blue, the whole Hell-to-Heaven concept sitting in your hands before the needle drops. Four sides also means the three-act sequence lands in chapters instead of one long haul. The fold-out is stacked with photography and full song credits, the kind of packaging that makes you sit on the floor and read while side one plays. Vinyl earning its keep.

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Remembering Linda McCartney, born on this date in 1941. —Ed.

Paul McCartney was the member of the Fab Four whom so many used to relish knocking around. Whether it was in spirited bar chats or animated discussions at parties, when the tide turned to The Beatles, somebody could always be counted on for a hearty jibe at Macca’s expense. And in my above use of “so many,” I’m generally referring to males, and by “somebody,” I’m specifically speaking of those who indisputably consider John Lennon to be the Best Beatle.

While for those truly devoted fans of the band, there could never be a Worst, for many, Paul was the Square Beatle, a designation not borne out by the facts, for he was as interested in the avant-garde as any other member. Hell, in ’68 he co-produced “I’m the Urban Spaceman” by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, for Pete’s sake, an act that places him rather high up on the cool meter. However, others derided him as the Corporate Beatle. And yeah, it’s true that Paul never lost track of the business aspect of the whole affair. Still, his behavior in this regard hasn’t really played out as particularly odious in comparison to other rock star types of not even half his stature or talent.

But both Paul’s image and the assessment of his post-Beatle solo career have rebounded in recent years. Much of this might have to do with the Four’s constantly regenerating fanbase, which is consistently growing older and perhaps letting go of the rebelliousness that once inspired easy identification with Lennon or Harrison. It might also be related to the race for the Coolest Living Beatle being down to him and Ringo “No More Mail, Thanks” Starr.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Naked Raygun, one of the most influential bands in Chicago punk history, will release Live at Riot Fest on November 6, 2026 via Loud Pizza Records. The 2xLP, pressed on Raygun Infra-Red vinyl, captures the band’s game-changing November 5, 2006 headlining set at the Congress Theater, the reunion show that brought Naked Raygun back from a 14-year absence and relaunched a second act that continues today.

Few bands have shaped a city’s sound the way Naked Raygun did Chicago’s. Active in various lineups from 1980 to 1992, with reunion shows in 1997, the band was one of the first and longest-running Chicago punk bands, and its influence on the scene is hard to overstate. Naked Raygun was one of the few bands to span the entire decade of the 1980s, playing with or helping bring along most of the era’s defining acts. The band reformed in late 2006 and remains active today. In 2021, they released Over the Overlords, their first full-length album of new material in 31 years, proving the reunion was no fluke.

For Riot Fest founder Mike Petryshyn, Naked Raygun’s music was his introduction to the city he’d come to love. “They introduced me to the Chicago I would ultimately fall in love with: loud, uncompromising, beautifully authentic, perfectly abrasive, yet somehow profoundly comforting,” he says. “There was never any pretense with Naked Raygun… It was simply intrinsic to who they were.” That influence became foundational to what Riot Fest itself would become.

“Naked Raygun is inextricably woven into the fabric of this festival: the attitude, the humor, the sense of community, the distinctly Chicago obstinacy, and the conviction that you can create something entirely on your own terms without soliciting anyone’s permission or approval,” he says. Even now, when the band plays Riot Fest, he describes it as something more than another band on a stage, a set with real gravity behind it, carrying a sense of history, continuity, and homecoming.

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Marvin Gaye’s career was cut short at the age of 44, as he was launching a comeback, when he was murdered by his father in 1984. In his short life, he made some of the best R&B and soul music ever, and his music transcended those genres.

Initially known for his slew of popular R&B crossover hits in the 1960s, including his duets with Tammi Terrell and, to a lesser degree, with Kim Weston and even Mary Wells, Gaye later recorded albums that reflected his maturation as an artist and not just a hitmaker.

The first was the iconic What’s Going On, released in 1971, an album that still resonates today with its themes of social injustice and ecological apocalypse. Gaye made one other album that, while not as monumental as What’s Going On, defined 1970s soul music: Let’s Get It On, in 1973.

The album was sensual, sometimes raw, like on “You Sure Love to Ball,” yet tender and untamed in its approach to music for lovers. The title song was a massive hit and set the tone for the album’s largely uncluttered sound. The end of side one features somewhat of a reprise entitled “Keep Gettin’ It On.”

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PHOTO: MIKE OWEN | Everybody has one Soft Cell song. For most people, it is “Tainted Love,” and that is fine. It is a perfect record. It is also a door, not a house.

I went through the door at fourteen and never came back out. What was on the other side was not a synth-pop novelty act with a Northern Soul cover to its name. It was Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, a song cycle about bedsits and hustlers and cheap glamour that owes more to Brecht and Weill than to the chart it briefly conquered.

It was The Art of Falling Apart. It was This Last Night in Sodom, the sound of a band detonating itself on purpose. Then came the solo work, where things got genuinely strange: Marc and the Mambas, Torment and Toreros, a double album Almond himself has described as the sound of a nervous breakdown. Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters. An entire album of Jacques Brel translations.

He is a pioneer of the form, one of the handful who took a cheap synthesizer and a drum machine and got a torch song out of them. He also never once stayed in the room he built. I have seen him play more times than I can count, and I have never seen him coast.

On September 25, Soft Cell will release Danceteria, their sixth and last studio album. Dave Ball finished it days before he died on October 22, 2025, and Almond has been plain about what that means: without Ball, there are no more Soft Cell records.

My favorite Soft Cell song has always been “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye,” and I have never had much of a defense for that beyond the fact that it takes me apart every time. It went to number three in Britain in January 1982, an Almond and Ball composition, a breakup staged in an ordinary nightclub and sung with more contempt and more tenderness than a chart single is supposed to hold.

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There is a version of every record you own that you have never heard. Not a remaster, not a better pressing—the one the people who made it were hearing while they made it. Ultimate Ears Pro has spent three decades building the hardware that grants that access, starting in 1995 with a pair of custom monitors for Alex Van Halen and ending up in the ears of a startling percentage of the artists on your shelf.

I have spent my listening life on the other side of that glass: speakers, a room, a needle, the compromises of moving air across fifteen feet. So, I sat in an audiologist’s chair and had impressions taken of my ear canals, then sat with UE Pro and blind-tested all eight monitors in its lineup until my own ears picked a winner, and about ten days later, took delivery of a pair of UE Premiers that fit nobody else on earth. Then I plugged them into a turntable. What came back wasn’t a smaller version of my system. It was a much bigger one. And because UE Pro would rather you hear this for yourself than take my word for it, they’re giving a pair away to one of you.

It starts with your ears, and that is where I had badly underestimated things. The mold is not packaging. It is the first component in the chain, and everything the monitor does downstream is built on top of it. A custom shell seals the canal completely, and that seal is what gives twenty-one drivers something to push against—without it, there is no real low end and no isolation worth the name. A universal tip approximates your ear. An impression doesn’t have to approximate anything.

I went to Ann Mundell-Noel at Amazing Hearing in Laguna Hills, and the appointment felt closer to a medical exam than a fitting, which is essentially what it is. She inspected both canals first, reading the depth and shape she’d be casting, clearing anything that would compromise the mold, and narrating every step a beat before she took it.

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Remembering John Coltrane, born on this date in 1926. —Ed.

John Coltrane’s Atlantic period presents an arresting convergence of circumstances. It was a time of raised profile and considerable transition, the artist’s confidence audibly growing as he united jazz tradition and experimentation; most of all, it was an era of major breakthroughs that established the saxophonist as a leader in his field. The Atlantic Years in Mono doesn’t include all of his work for the label, but it ably documents a thrilling era that brought Coltrane to a mainstream audience. 

By the time John Coltrane hooked up with the Ertegun brothers he’d already chalked up a significant list of achievements, serving as a powerful voice in post-bop’s development via the bands of Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis, guesting for a track on Sonny Rollins’ Tenor Madness, teaming with Hank Mobley, Al Cohn, and Zoot Simms for Tenor Conclave, and leading bands for Prestige and for one LP Blue Note.

Top billing came with Coltrane in 1957, and next was Blue Train for Blue Note, which many consider to be his first great album. John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio followed in ’58 (aka Traneing In for its ’61 reissue), and Soultrane retained the services of the Garland band. As Coltrane’s fame grew, Prestige would later release nearly a dozen albums under his name from unissued sessions and elevated sideman dates, in turn possibly lending a false impression of the saxophonist as unusually prolific during ’57-’58.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Velvet Underground’s influential 1969 classic The Velvet Underground is the latest addition to UMe’s Vinylphyle series, presenting Lou Reed’s intimate original “Closet Mix” of the album as a meticulously crafted new premium vinyl edition.

Marking a striking evolution for one of rock’s most influential bands, the record traded the abrasive experimentation of its predecessors for a quieter, more melodic approach that revealed a new emotional depth in Reed’s songwriting. Available to order today exclusively via uDiscover Music, the album is presented on 180-gram black vinyl pressed at RTI and housed in a tip-on gatefold jacket with a four-panel insert featuring source tape scans and newly commissioned liner notes by four-time Grammy nominee and author Scott B. Bomar.

Cut by Joe Nino-Hernes, The Velvet Underground is an AAA cut from the 1969 “Closet Mix” stereo album master, Reed’s intimate original mix featured on the earliest pressings of the album in 1969.

Originally released in 1969, The Velvet Underground represented a dramatic shift from the confrontational sound of the band’s first two albums. Songs including “Candy Says,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “Beginning to See the Light,” and “After Hours” brought warmth and vulnerability to the group’s singular sound, while retaining the uncompromising perspective that had already set The Velvet Underground apart. The result was an album that stood distinctly apart from the two that preceded it and revealed another dimension of Reed’s songwriting.

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