These 1983-84 concerts feature a mix of uptempo originals, dark ballads and slow rockers, and traditional folk numbers. Taken together, they showcase Thompson's brilliant songwriting and aggressive, sometimes psychedelic guitar wizardry.

Severely underfed, beaten, deprived of food and water as punishment for infractions big and small, and afflicted with rampaging fevers, thousands of prisoners died on British prison ships off Brooklyn during the Revolutionary War. Robert P. Watson draws on the accounts of survivors to paint a lurid picture of this hellish but little-known aspect of the war.

Dingler smoothly fuses Ethiopian musical traditions with jazz, while Torres's winning new album is a feast for both heart and mind.

Jordan Bak, a marvelous young violist, helped remind us that 20th-century American composers kept audiences in mind even as they created original, boundary-breaking concert music.

Concord Music assembled this blast of classic gospel from the 1950s and '60s expressly to show the direct and multifaceted influence of gospel music on secular soul and rock 'n' roll. In addition to its historical and musicological interest, it's pure enjoyment any old way (but if you have a record player, get the 3-LP vinyl edition.)

The Irish-French chanteuse strikes a teetering balance between a kaleidoscope of rocky personal emotional and an homage to a great inspiration.

The playwright had the brave idea of hanging emblematic tales of black men's struggles on the trellis of the ancient Egyptian myths of Isis and Osiris.

Faded painted signs from times past linger on the sides of Manhattan's buildings, advertising everything from theaters to hosiery, meat markets to hotels, stables to department stores. Ben Passikoff's big, crisp photos of these relics preserve a vanishing history of industry in New York.

Not since Stevie Ray Vaughan has a true-blue blues guitarist captured a mainstream audience the way Bonamassa has.

Straight-ahead but rough-edged and with quirky lyrics, Lisik's songs are self-aware with a sometimes tongue-in-cheek attitude but nonetheless soaked in real feeling.