Music & Movies

Now we have the Internet; three decades ago we had UHF, the off-brand TV channels that were home to all sorts of oddball programming, too much of it lost to time. Fortunately, “The Chicago Party” remains. A show designed to promote a nightclub, CopHerBox II, it ran for 23 Saturdays in 1982. There was music, sure — many almost-were Chicago acts of the day are assembled on this collection of spirited and sassy funk-soul and jumpy disco, including strong tracks from Jesus Wayne and Ken Allison. But the DVD here is where the real action takes place: live performances, grown folks dancing, on-the-fly fashion shows, variety-show humor, and the sort of arbitrary weirdness that happens when cameras are running and no one is watching. — Jon Caramanica

Early in their career, the Isley Brothers bounced from label to label, but only truly hit their stride with the founding of their own, T-Neck. This heavy box is an almost complete set of the group’s output right up until the time hip-hop became central to black pop (and which they would be a part of, through samples). The music is familiar and frisky: lustrous soul that omnivorously takes in gospel, rock and especially funk. Most notable here is the inclusion of “Wild at Woodstock,” a silky live studio recording that has never before been released in full. — Jon Caramanica

The first in a series of comprehensive Bowie boxes, this set skips his early missteps and instead dives in where the Bowie mythos begins: “Space Oddity,” which showed his comfort with baroque (and also oddball) character and narrative. Featured here are the six studio albums from this period, spanning the first flickers of glam rock on “The Man Who Sold the World” to the spectacle in full flower on “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.” (The inessential covers album “Pin Ups” is here as well.) Rounding it all out are two live albums, a stereo version of “Ziggy Stardust,” and “Re: Call 1,” which includes odds and ends: mono editions, single edits and “Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola,” a version of “Space Oddity” with new lyrics in Italian — Jon Caramanica

This aquatically soothing set collects everything Mr. Mathis released first as a single, which is to say his most craven and market-geared material, though to be fair, for a stretch from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Mr. Mathis and the market were practically one and the same. A judicious singer who expressed excitement or passion with quick jumps in octaves or syrupy notes held for seconds, Mr. Mathis specialized in the gentle vocal gesture. When this set arrives at the late 1960s, he sounds out of sorts in his attempts at folk. That detour aside, early songs like “Let’s Love” and “Call Me” are whispered arguments for the beauty and resilience of restraint. — Jon Caramanica

You know the Little Richard story. For about a year and a half in the mid-1950s he was on an unmatchable tear, one that changed pop music history. “Tutti-Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Lucille,” “Keep a Knockin’,” “Jenny, Jenny”: They all flooded out in that stretch, before Little Richard announced that he was leaving pop for a life in the ministry. This set collects everything from that era, and adds some of the material he recorded in the 1960s after he returned to secular music — though its attempts to remain current with R&B’s changes only underscore how charmed his initial run was. — Jon Caramanica

This box celebrating the life and influence of the mountain-music veteran Ola Belle Reed, who died in 2002, is really a tale of the passions of two folklorists. In the 1960s, Henry Glassie traveled to rural Pennsylvania and recorded Ms. Reed extensively. She has a commanding, slippery voice, conveying sadness and fortitude with equal intensity. By the time Mr. Glassie discovered her, she was practiced and formidable — these crisp recordings are practically acts of reverence. The Reed songs comprise the first disc here, and her shadow hovers over the second. Clifford Murphy returned to the region around four decades later to document the ways her influence persisted. A noble, worthy quest, but one that only reinforces just how vital Ms. Reed sounds, even with a half-century’s distance. — Jon Caramanica

He may have popularized the concept album, headlined television specials and enjoyed success on the silver screen, but Frank Sinatra had an especially charmed relationship with the medium of radio. This collection gathers broadcasts from the first 20 years of his career, opening with the Hoboken Four on “Major Bowes Amateur Hour.” The rest of the trove, culled from multiple archives, comes with the trappings of the given format: cigarette endorsements, cornball banter, callouts to the troops. In his pitches and preambles, Sinatra often sounds like the skinny kid that he was at the time — but as soon as his voice meets a melody, cushioned by Axel Stordahl’s gilded arrangements, a deep composure descends, pointing the way forward. — Nate Chinen

Weather Report formed in 1971, on the leading edge of jazz fusion, but its peak commercial success came later, after the addition of the electric bass virtuoso Jaco Pastorius. These concert recordings, from the same period that yielded the Grammy-winning live album “8:30,” capture a band in full, unabashed ascendancy. The keyboardist Joe Zawinul and the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, its joint leaders, walk the line between melodic focus and fanciful digression. Peter Erskine, the drummer (and one of this set’s producers), pushes just as hard, locking in tight with Pastorius on signature tunes like “Black Market” and “Birdland.” — Nate Chinen

No one exerted a more powerful center of gravity in avant-garde jazz over the last 35 years than the tenor saxophonist David S. Ware, who died in 2012. This two-disc set gathers his earliest studio recordings, made in 1977 with the fearless trio he called Apogee. The music is volatile, blazingly spiritual and fiercely in the moment, with the pianist Cooper-Moore and the drummer Marc Edwards straining to match Ware’s volcanic outflow. Disc 1 was originally issued on LP in Europe, and has been out of print for decades; Disc 2, from the same sessions, features music of equal fire and purpose, and has never been available in any form. — Nate Chinen

Somehow there had never been a comprehensive survey of recordings by Lead Belly — a.k.a. Huddie William Ledbetter, the Louisiana folk hero and bluesman, and a figure of great lasting influence — before this lavishly produced set. The music, including a rare radio broadcast from 1941, conveys deep, unshakable self-possession, no less in Lead Belly’s quavering holler than in his 12-string acoustic guitar playing. An accompanying coffee-table book is chock-full of striking photographs, reproduced handbills and letters, and insights. — Nate Chinen

There’s only one song on this sleek, expensive objet d’art by the National. That’s a selling point, in case you were wondering. “A Lot of Sorrow” is the byproduct of a durational performance, conceived with the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, in the VW dome at MoMA PS1 in 2013. That piece featured the band playing its mopey anthem “Sorrow” for six hours straight — an experience you are now free to replicate with these nine LPs, made of translucent vinyl and stored in a screen-printed box. (Yes, it’s a lot, but don’t say they didn’t warn you.) — Nate Chinen

Most celebrated field recordings of American folk music are documents of the rural South, but this absorbing collection makes the case for a different milieu entirely — “a territory of deep woods, inland seas, mines, mills, and hardscrabble farms,” as its producer, James P. Leary, observes in the accompanying 456-page book. A mind-boggling swath of material, variously recorded in the upper Midwest by Alan Lomax, Sidney Robertson and Helene Stratman-Thomas, it encompasses jigs and chanteys, lumberyard chants and lullabies, two-steps and drinking songs. There’s a Finnish chant said to cure hiccups; there are Serbian folk tunes, Swedish yodels and a ritual song by the Ojibwe fiddler Joe Cloud. A supplemental DVD contains “The Most Fertile Source: Alan Lomax Goes North,” a new documentary with previously unseen footage from a trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in 1938. — Nate Chinen

Less a work of scholarship than the product of hobbyist enthusiasm, this collection revels in retro grass-skirt exoticism, celebrating not only the likes of the steel guitarist Sol Hoʻopiʻi but also Betty Boop and the “Hawaii Five-0” theme. Produced in consultation with the cartoonist Robert Armstrong, the set features his colorful illustrations; reproductions of vintage sheet music and memorabilia from his collection; and a handful of tracks he has recorded with Ken Emerson, as the slack-key guitar duo Ken and Bob. — Nate Chinen

The Staple Singers celebrated the promise of heaven and called for better times on Earth. Roebuck (Pops) Staples and his children — Mavis, Cleotha and either Pervis or Yvonne — had a gloriously close-knit sound. Pops defined the songs with his bluesy, twangy electric guitar and sang some gently devout lead vocals; Mavis stepped forward for the rest, with a deep voice that became gutsier and sultrier over time. In the 1960s, they sang alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and infused Bob Dylan songs with gospel; in the 1970s, they brought redemptive sentiments to the Top 10 with “I’ll Take You There.” The anthology “Faith and Grace” chooses judiciously from decades of material, while “Freedom Highway Complete” captures a service in a Chicago church in 1965, just weeks after King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. In a song Pops had just written, Mavis declared, “Made up my mind and I won’t turn around.” — Jon Pareles

​F​rom January 1965 to February 1966, Bob Dylan recorded ​the three albums that​ transformed​ him from folkie to rocker — reinventing the sound and meaning of rock and doing it impulse by impulse. The process is revealed on “The Cutting Edge,” collections of studio outtakes from those albums​ in three sizes. With three days to make “Bringing It All Back Home,” it’s clear Mr. Dylan came to the studio with lyrics and melodies worked out. For “Highway 61 Revisited,” he​ was ​thinking like a bandleader, testing tempos, keys and approaches: “Like a Rolling Stone” as a waltz? By the time he record​ed​ “Blonde on Blonde,” everything ​was​ ​up for grabs. “Visions of Johanna” ​mutates from​ fast rocker ​to slow and​ sullenly knowing; “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” gradually ​accelerates​; “Just Like a Woman” briefly flirts with honky-tonk. In the six-CD set, a full disc ​of​ “Like a Rolling Stone” shows the musicians hitting the pinnacle early — Take 4. ​“The Cutting Edge” reveal​s​ how much Mr. Dylan was following brilliant instinct, not a master plan. — Jon Pareles

Bobby Rush made his first singles in the late 1960s as a soul shouter; the funky “Chicken Heads,” in 1971, was the song that got him noticed. But he had been playing guitar and harmonica on the blues and R&B chitlin’ circuit for years before that, and he has spent most of his career where the chitlin’ circuit survives in the Deep South, where blues, soul and funk are all part of the mix. This collection demonstrates his tenacity, his adaptability from blues moans to nasal funk yowls to suave soul, and his stockpile of down-home, storytelling songs full of everyday situations and wry raunchiness, delivered with plenty of humor amid the grit. In “I Got 3 Problems,” he itemizes: “I got a problem with my woman, with my girlfriend and my wife.” — Jon Pareles

Jackson C. Frank put out only one album before his death in 1999. His self-titled 1965 release, produced by Paul Simon, was a collection of pensive and unsentimental songs, with his kindly tenor voice accompanied by just an acoustic guitar or two. Frank’s life before and after 1965 was difficult; he was badly scarred during a fire at his elementary school, and in later years he was in and out of mental hospitals and sometimes homeless. He wrote and recorded songs when he could, and they were just as folky and approachable as his earlier ones, yet newly cryptic and even more haunted, particularly the half-dozen songs from the early 1970s that this collection has unearthed. His last recordings, solo in a kitchen in 1997, show a far more weathered singer, but not a bitter one. — Jon Pareles

Unwound, a very postpunk band from Olympia, Wash., lasted just over a decade (1991-2002). It stayed rigorously alternative — as in writing unpop songs and touring only all-ages venues — while the world discovered grunge. Unwound’s songs were serious, dissonant and made for both visceral power and conceptual rigor, riffing hard and asymmetrically behind contentious, sardonic lyrics. Numero Group has been gradually reissuing Unwound’s albums, and “Empire” completes the job with the band’s last two albums, “Challenge for a Civilized Society” (1998) and the double album “Leaves Turn Inside You” (2001), along with demos. The songs churn and squall, make math-rock patterns and plow through them, drone and seethe, glower and persevere; even when the music turns low and slow, there’s a coiled tension. — Jon Pareles

“REMTV” spans 25 years of R.E.M.’s performing live, 1983-2008: on small stages and huge ones, calmly acoustic or loud and distorted, wearing T-shirts or suit and tie. The band was gawky at first, but Michael Stipe’s command as a frontman grew with R.E.M.’s audience. And from the beginning, R.E.M. was rightly confident that its musical boundaries — a mid-1960s spectrum of folk rock, garage rock and psychedelic pop, charged with a hint of punk recklessness and delineated by Peter Buck’s guitar picking — were capacious enough for decades of ideas. The set doesn’t include R.E.M.’s music videos — only its live shows, which often repeat obligatory hits like “Losing My Religion.” The sixth disc is a documentary built from MTV interviews through the years, showing a band determined to follow its own impulses. — Jon Pareles

Mid-1960s Los Angeles psychedelia reached one of its peaks with Arthur Lee’s band, Love. His songs swiveled amid folk rock, blues rock, jazz, baroque pop and, now and then, flamenco; his voice and lyrics could be wild-eyed, enigmatic or disarmingly unguarded. But Lee, who died in 2006, toured sporadically, and the record company that released Love’s best album, “Forever Changes,” in 1967, didn’t leave behind high-quality live recordings. This anthology of Love in concert starts in 1970, with Love’s sinewy but less adventurous second lineup, still honoring the songs’ odd shapes. Two guitar acoustic shows from 1992 bare the vulnerability and waywardness in Lee’s songs, and triumphal early 2000s performances of “Forever Changes,” backed by strings and horns, prove how durable those psychedelic artifacts remain. — Jon Pareles

Bruce Springsteen’s 1980 album, “The River,” was expansive — two LPs interlaced with themes of fleeting time and tenuous human connections — even as it forged his newly succinct songwriting approach of character studies told as laconically as possible. Getting to that balance was torturous. Dozens of songs were recorded and set aside; a 10-song album was prepared for release, then withdrawn and reworked for a year. This boxed set expands the original album with the one-LP version and 22 finished but unused songs — half of them previously unreleased, including worthy ones like “Chain Lightning,” “Stray Bullet” and “Little White Lies.” The DVDs hold an hourlong documentary of Mr. Springsteen’s reminiscences about making “The River” and more than two hours of a 1980 concert in Arizona with Mr. Springsteen and the E Street Band in their wild-eyed, crazy-legged prime. — Jon Pareles

Laddio Bolocko played dirty, aggressive, improvised, exacting and oblique instrumental music — with guitars, drums and the saxophonist Marcus DeGrazia — in Brooklyn during the mid-to-late-’90s, when the rock scene there was unimpressive at best. (I never saw them. I only knew what became of them: Two members, Drew St. Ivany and Ben Armstrong, went on to found the excellent band the Psychic Paramount; the indefatigable drummer Blake Fleming helped start the Mars Volta.) During the band’s life it rehearsed where it lived, jamming for hours, collapsing the space between free jazz and prog-rock, and put out records in small pressings. Laddio Bolocko broke up in 2001, and two years later the label No Quarter released the band’s studio recordings posthumously. But now we get the tapes from its rehearsals and live sets, and perhaps that’s even better. This was almost a private band, and the box set provokes a kind of double-take: Did this even really happen? — Ben Ratliff

When country singers of the 1950s were suiting up in pastel colors and rhinestones, Tennessee Ernie Ford — with a killer bass-baritone voice, refined and stentorian, corny around the edges — took on the appearance of statesman, professor or gentleman farmer, presenting a kind of Americana cabaret. He was a television presence, as host of the “Kollege of Musical Knowledge,” and eventually of his own popular half-hour variety program, “The Ford Show.” (That renown gave him an instant audience for “Sixteen Tons,” in 1955, his biggest hit.) Bear Family’s lavish and informed box set stops in 1960, just before Ford lost his modicum of hipness and plunged into alcoholism and Bohemian Grove meetings. The music comes entirely from the archives of Capitol Records, which set him up with the sophisticated and slightly eccentric arrangements of Jack Fascinato — a thicket of clarinets, oboes, jazz improvisers, electric guitars and strings. Consistent through it all is the voice: oh, the voice. Like Dorival Caymmi with goofiness, or Hank Snow with depth of feeling. — Ben Ratliff

Joe Castro was a good jazz pianist in the mid-1950s — concise, cool, swinging. He was also dating the tobacco heiress Doris Duke, among the richest women in the world. One of the ways that his romantic life changed his jazz life was that he could invite his friends over to play in a nice studio over the garage. The tapes from those sessions are released here for the first time. Mostly they come from the house in Beverly Hills, once owned by Rudolph Valentino, where Castro lived with Duke; or from the Duke family’s New Jersey estate. They involve some of the great and inveterate jammers of the day. On the West Coast: Buddy Collette, Chico Hamilton, Teddy Edwards, Billy Higgins and Leroy Vinnegar. On the East Coast: Zoot Sims and Oscar Pettiford and Lucky Thompson. You should be excited reading the name Lucky Thompson — in 1956 he was stealthy and brilliant, even in casual circumstances like these — but in general this is a set of solid, genial work organized by one of the few jazz musicians who didn’t have to hustle. — Ben Ratliff

Craw, a Cleveland band that found momentum in the early 1990s with its first three albums, used jamming and structure to move forward American postpunk sources like the Jesus Lizard. Those three albums, reissued in this box set, were organized explosions, increasingly complex and forecasting a strain of meticulous but heavy music that’s still developing around the world; they were recorded by Steve Albini, who likes dry vocals and powerful drums. It feels like a missing link from a strange dead zone in American underground rock — the six or seven years, let’s say, after the end of Nirvana. — Ben Ratliff

These CDs consist of 42 tracks of live recordings made by the Velvet Underground in a small San Francisco club called the Matrix on Nov. 26 and 27, 1969. Fifteen ended up on “1969: Velvet Underground Live,” which came out on LP in the mid-’70s, after the group had ended; to some ears it’s the best thing the band ever did, even with its slightly amateurish four-track audio. What you have here is mostly not the obdurate noise and drones of their early work (though there is a little of that), but something different, joyful and delicate and intimate. Here was where the group did it all best, folding together Memphis R&B, Tin Pan Alley, Bob Dylan, Bo Diddley and the sensual aggression of the early New York minimalists. Lou Reed sounds as engaged as he could be, singing alternate verses to his story-songs, playing rhythm guitar with obsessive focus; Maureen Tucker’s drum beats were precise and calibrated, not just simple. This isn’t an art project — it’s a working band. Even better, the whole thing has been given a new mix, such that you can hear the music in all its particulars. — Ben Ratliff