‘Earl is on another level. The way he deploys his skill, humor, and encyclopedic knowledge of hip-hop has made him one of the most effortlessly deep and cool rappers alive’ (Pitchfork).

From August 1965, pitched between the sessions for Song For My Father and Cape Verdean Blues. Both classic numbers are here, in scorching renditions. Twenty-year-old Woody Shaw announces himself in fine style on the helter-skelter opener Kicker. Joe Henderson plays a blinder in Silver’s shows around this time, gloriously cutting loose on the hits. You need this LP plus the Ezzthetics CD Live New York Revisited, which dovetails nicely. Hot stuff.

‘With Touch, the Tortoise bandmembers — Jeff Parker, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon, and John McEntire — harness their collectivist songwriting approach, a slightly anarchistic but resolutely egalitarian process where ideas triumph over ego towards an abstracted muscularity. While there are still excursions into the dusky, elegantly gnarled jazz ambience that flourished on landmark works like Millions Now Living Will Never Die and TNT, Touch is perhaps most remarkable for Tortoise’s unapologetic embrace of grand gesture. Aerodynamically re-engineered Krautrock, hand-cranked techno rave-ups, and pointillist spaghetti western fanfares are all imbued with Tortoise’s now-signature internal logic — equally alluring and confounding, a puzzle to be savored rather than solved.’

A gorgeous reissue of his first LP, from 1957; with Curtis Fuller, Hugh Lawson, Ernie Farrow, Louis Hayes, and Doug Watkins. Beefy, alive, and exploratory, with Lateef’s Eastern trajectory flagged already, in the thrilling argol introduction to the opener, Metaphor. On the flip, Morning is ravishing, unmissable Lateef.