Craft Recordings’ new vinyl pressing of ‘Smack Up’ is flawless, a term that also describes this music from the late alto saxophonist Art Pepper.

How a ’50s-era recording of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie helped pave the way for updated songs like the Beatles’ “Now and Then.”

Two brilliant live LPs from Kevin Coyne, an idiosyncratic artist who defied the ’70s ethos of prog fantasy, hard-rock machoism, and folky sentimentalism.

‘The Complete Full House Recordings’ finds Wes Montgomery in a small group setting where nothing distracts from his creative yet accessible style.

If you just want to hear Chick Corea and his mates shred like rock stars, 1987’s ‘Light Years’ by his Elektric Band is a good place for that.

Ebarhard Weber’s 1974 debut ‘The Colours of Chloe’ deftly assimilates classical, jazz, folk and even world fusion into an impressionistic whole.

Jan Garbarek would continue to produce great records for ECM in the years and even decades that followed, but there won’t ever be another ‘Triptykon.’

Is this jazz? Is this rock? Is this “progressive” – and if so, what does that mean? Tobin Mueller and Kansas lead us back into an age-old discussion.

Jon Symon’s Warlock proved over three criminally under-appreciated early-’80s albums that Claude Debussy was right when he said “music is the space between notes.”

Hal Galper’s ‘Ivory Forest Redux’ easily justifies the decision to polish up these recordings and take them back out of obscurity. Artists well-known and should be better-known all shine on it.