We took a break from our non-stop heavy rotation of Boz Scaggs’ new Top 20 album Memphis to dig further back into his stirring catalog of sophisticated soul, sizzling R&B and gritty blues.

Longtime readers of SER, if such an animal even exists, knows that some of us like to indulge in noisy, nonsensical and just plain weird-assed music. Once in a while, we’ll encounter something from the margins that’s so beyond the pale it makes even hardened avantists like us do a double take and wonder, “what in the hell was that???”

Bill Frisell’s appearance last Saturday with Marianne Faithfull at Paris’ New Morning club was another reminder of the jazz guitarist’s often underrated affinity for pop and rock music.

Tempe, Arizona: Wilco brought its amazing conglomerate of musicians to Tempe’s Marquee Theatre in support of the terrific A ghost is born, with the equally talented, although unfairly publicly ignored opening act Calexico.

These guys from Dallas, Texas have that Stooges/Ramones/1960s-garage amalgam vibe down solid. Not bad at all.

Never let it ever be said that The Maharajas do not rock, if that ever happens, because they do — and do so quite righteously here. Their high-octane Rocker “Repo Man” sets the pace for In Pure Spite (Low Impact Records).

It’s maybe a little too easy to toss around words like “revolutionary,” but that word certainly applied to the early Ornette Coleman Quartet. There was nothing like it at the time, and the music became ground zero for the free jazz movement.

Affably difficult to dislike, yet seldom transcendent as a solo artist, Ringo Starr would become the only ex-Beatle who failed to earn an individual chart-topper in his native Britain. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t hidden moments to enjoy.

Pete Molinari’s second album found him going electric, with spectacular results. This felt more like a debut album than his all-acoustic low-fi Walking Off The Map.

Anyone can recite, bass line and verse, their favorite moments from Yes’ seminal 1972 release Close to the Edge. Everybody knows about the mountains coming out of the sky, and how they stood there, too.