Kaleidoscope

Cyrus Chestnut

What you’ll notice right off is the elegant jazz oneness achieved by Chestnut (precision piano), Eric Wheeler (upright bass), and Chris Beck (understated drums). What you’ll notice next, assuming that you’re not a classical buff, will be Chestnut’s quotations of “Pop Goes the Weasel” (in “Darn That Dream”) and “It Is Well with My Soul” (in “Prayer for Claudine”). If you are a classical buff, you’ll notice, and enjoy, sparklingly recast melodies by Satie, Mozart, Debussy, and Ravel. Deep Purple buffs get—what else?—“Smoke on the Water.”

Stone Cold Soul: The Complete Capitol Recordings

Jackie DeShannon

By 1971, Jackie DeShannon had only two hits and zero successful albums to show for her 15 years in the game. That she was too nondescript a singer to get away with nondescript material was the problem, and her first Capitol producer, the Southern-blue-eyed-soul specialist Chips Moman, seemed to understand. Nevertheless, Capitol rejected DeShannon’s Moman recordings, the hauntingly alluring “They Got You Boy” among them, releasing the nondescript Songs instead. Songs rounds out this 25-track collection. The 16 finally released Moman productions define it.

Heavy Music: The Complete Cameo Recordings 1966-1967

Bob Seger & the Last Heard

A decade before he steered the Silver Bullet Band toward the platinum pantheon, Seger fronted the Last Heard, a hard-rocking garage band whose signature tune was the appropriately titled “Heavy Music” and whose fatal flaw was its lack of identity. Half of the time they could’ve been a novelty act, mimicking Dylan (“Persecution Smith”), Jan & Dean (“Florida Time”), and James Brown (“Sock It to Me Santa”). But they weren’t boring. And sometimes—“Come on, Comet! Come on, Cupid! / Don’t just stand there lookin’ stupid!”—they were hilarious.

True Meanings

Paul Weller

In his fourth musical incarnation (fifth if you consider his 2017 Jawbone soundtrack a thing apart), Paul Weller emerges as a fully formed, brooding British folkie à la Nick Drake circa Bryter Layter. Soft acoustic picking, bucolic melodies, and spectral strings create sympathetic contexts for lyrics that range from savoring a serenity that enables Weller to accept what he cannot change (mutability, outliving David Bowie, dying) to a trepid hope in something bigger than himself (wishing wells, love, “grace”). “What Would He Say?” might even be about Jesus.

ENCORE

The Chicago-blues icon Otis Rush spent his last decade and a half confined to a wheelchair. He was the victim of a stroke suffered just three years after his Grammy for best traditional blues album had elevated his profile to a level commensurate with the influence that his eloquently tortured guitar solos had exerted over the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Rush was quite a singer too, and a powerful live performer during his prime. (Check out his Tokyo-’75 showcase So Many Roads.) But it was the singles that he recorded for Cobra Records from 1956 to 1958, subsequently packaged and repackaged under various titles, that established his reputation as a first-rate purveyor of soulful thrills and chills. Bob Dylan rewrote one of those singles, “All Your Love (I Miss Loving),” as “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” in 2009. You’ve heard “Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan?” Well, nobody sang Rush like Rush. —A.O.