The latest from Horizon Records in Greenville, SC

Their first studio album in over a decade takes the band back to their roots and the passion for blues music which has always been at the heart and soul of The Rolling Stones. The album was produced by Don Was and The Glimmer Twins and was recorded over the course of just three days in December last year at British Grove Studios in West London, just a stone’s throw from Richmond and Eel Pie Island where the Stones started out as a young blues band playing pubs and clubs. Their approach to the album was that it should be spontaneous and played live in the studio without overdubs. The band – Mick Jagger (vocals & harp), Keith Richards (guitar), Charlie Watts (drums), and Ronnie Wood (guitar) were joined by their long time touring sidemen Darryl Jones (bass), Chuck Leavell (keyboards) and Matt Clifford (keyboards) and, for two of the twelve tracks, by old friend Eric Clapton, who happened to be in the next studio making his own album. ‘Blue & Lonesome’ sees the Rolling Stones tipping their hats to their early days as a blues band when they played the music of Jimmy Reed, Willie Dixon, Eddie Taylor, Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf.

The title of Leonard Cohen’s new album serves as a taunt. It’s a jab at those who expect the 82-year-old poet and singer to just retire, going gently into the good night without a fight. It’s also a treatise on modern culture, particularly fitting for the current presidential election cycle. John Oliver describes us as being “buried alive in the horror that is this election.” Cohen, ever the tidy wordsmith, doesn’t engage in such histrionics. “You want it darker?” he simply offers. The cool inquiry is rhetorical, because who would actually answer in the affirmative? He’s slyly baiting us with our own fears: You think it’s dark now? Just turn on the TV tomorrow morning. The album’s nine tracks tell a different story, however. The songs keep in line with the narrative Cohen laid out in the New Yorker piece about putting his “house in order” before migrating from this earthly plane. A witty couplet (or eight) aside, the album deals in harsh goodbyes. Not entirely welcome, some heave with resignation as others bring a modicum of comfort. “I’m leaving the table/ I’m out of the game,” he sputters in a charcoal growl on “Leaving the Table”. Just two songs prior, he mournfully pleads about how he wishes “there was a treaty between your love and mine” on “Treaty”. If You Want It Darker ends up as Cohen’s last musical will and testament, no distant relative goes without a hefty inheritance. And whether we wake up to a country going along with her or making itself great again on a morning in early November, Cohen’s bare-knuckled insistence that religion, politics, those bound to us by law or sheer will, and even ourselves will fail is a fitting legacy.

“There are not-so-negligible nods to John Fahey, Townes Van Zandt, and Gram Parsons on this record: a kind of crossroads where many of my influences have congregated. I spent about a year writing and recording it alongside Mourning Dove and David Rothon (pedal steel). It’s my favorite record that I’ve made.” —Niel Brooks

A Multitude of Angels is an awe inspiring journey, a magical 4-CD set of recordings from a series of solo concerts in Italy in October 1996, documenting the conclusion of Keith Jarrett’s experiments with long-form improvisation in performances from Modena, Ferrara, Turin, and Genova. “These were the last concerts I played having no breaks within each set,” Jarrett explains in his liner notes. The arc of the music is characteristically comprehensive: “Jazz is ever present here, alongside my deep closeness with classical music (modern and ancient, Ives and Bach).“