About MustHear's Rosetta Stone Picks In 1799, archaeologists in Egypt discovered the Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering the mysterious hieroglyphs of the pyramids. If you are looking to navigate the overwhelming world of music, then our Rosetta Stone is your key to enlightenment. Let the Stone guide you to the sounds that will magically reverberate in your head for years to come. Whether you're putting together the nucleus of a solid collection or you're just interested in validating what you already know, the time has come to get Stoned. Picks A-L | Picks M-Z | MustHear.com

FEATURED PICK: HERBIE HANCOCK FAT ALBERT ROTUNDA Performing Mozart with the Chicago Symphony at the age of 11, Herbie Hancock was a child prodigy who blossomed into one of the most distinct and influential pianists in the history of modern music. His miraculous playing on all the Miles Davis albums recorded between 1963-68 reveal a musical evolution of quantum leaps and bounds. By the time Herbie graduated from Miles' band in 1968, he left not as a sideman to the great trumpeter, but as an equal. From the late-'60s through the mid-'70s, Herbie's music moved in parallel evolution to that of Miles, with the pair both deeply immersed in genre blurring electronic experimentation. Leaving Blue Note for Warner Bros, Herbie plugged his instrument in and radically changed his sound. His first post-Miles album, 1969's Fat Albert Rotunda was Herbie¹s maiden voyage into the newly emerging realm of jazz-funk. As Herbie explained to Bob Blumenthal in 1971, "I did the music for the Fat Albert cartoon show Bill Cosby did on TV. Bill had the soundtrack tape, which he played for the executives at Warner Bros., and they flipped over it; they just loved it. So I chose to record..."

	LOUIS ARMSTRONG & DUKE ELLINGTON THE GREAT SUMMIT: THE COMPLETE SESSIONS No two musicians defined the first half of the Jazz Century more than Duke Ellington & Louis Armstrong. Duke was the dashingly elegant mad-genius of composition, a black Mozart who imbued jazz with an emotional sophistication and wit that will never be surpassed. Louis almost single-handedly popularized the art of the solo, liberating jazz from the rigid rules...
	MULATU ASTATKE ETHIOPIQUES VOLUME 4: ETHIO JAZZ & MUSIQUE INSTRUMENTALE, 1969-1974 An album of instrumentals, Ethiopiques Volume 4 is a case study in the inventive blending of influences that comprised the Ethiopian groove. Strains of funk and reggae timings permeate the thick and chunky bass lines, which are pushed prominently forward in the mix...
	DEBASHISH BHATTACHARYA HINDUSTANI SLIDE GUITAR I first heard of Debashish Bhattacharya from guitar master Nels Cline, who raved about this album on the "What I've Been Listening to Lately" section of his website. Cline gushed, "What a find this man is! He rocks!! Besides his amazing phrasing and melodic invention (common among scary Indian classical players...), he adds some chording and fingerstyle to his improvisations with great effectiveness." Trusting Nels' taste, I bought it cold, figuring that with a name like Hindustani Slide Guitar, it had to be good. Upon hearing the first few ultra-mellow minutes of the opening "Raga Saraswati," I experienced a...
	RAY BARRETTO ACID Acid remains one of the most far-out fusions of Latin and soul music ever conceived.
	GEORGE BENSON THE OTHER SIDE OF ABBEY ROAD The Other Side Of Abbey Road predates Benson's notorious 70s sellout. This is an incredibly tight and cohesive album, filled with great solos by Benson, Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, and Sonny Fortune. Creed Taylor really hit his stride with this record, laying the blueprint for his classic CTI-label formula: top-ten pop covers, top-flight musicians, tight arrangements, atmospheric Don Sebesky strings, and superb Rudy Van Gelder sound quality...
	ART BLAKEY A NIGHT AT BIRDLAND, VOLUME 1 This was be-bop hardening into hard bop, and it was young lions feeling their influences and letting them fly...
	ART BLAKEY & THE JAZZ MESSENGERS FREE FOR ALL The music on Art Blakey's seemingly run-of-the-mill 1964 Blue Note reissue of Free For All will not only knock you out of your seat, but put you up on two wheels, flip you eleven times and drop you off the Golden Gate Bridge. The must-be-heard-to-be-believed rhythmic ferocity and unraveling chaotic grace of tracks one and three outpace...
	ROY BROOKS THE FREE SLAVE Roy Brooks demonstrates on this live date just how alive and creative acoustic jazz could still be in that pivotal year of 1970. Brooks drives his all star quintet, which includes the grossly underrated Woody Shaw on trumpet, the heavy-weight George Coleman on tenor, the unstoppable Cedar Walton on piano, and the fluid Cecil McBee on bass...
	DONALD BYRD ELECTRIC BYRD Psychedelic funk jazz with a leaning towards the avant-garde.
	DONALD BYRD KOFI An album of previously unreleased material taken from two 1969-1970 sessions which capture the immensely talented trumpeter Donald Byrd in a transitional moment of artistic brilliance...
	RAY CHARLES RAY CHARLES LIVE Ray Charles's career has seen him play for and with the entire spectrum of humanity. He’s hobnobbed with royalty, poverty, and even Muppets. But back when he was playing what the establishment had branded, “race music,” his label, Atlantic Records (the preeminent producers of R&B and soul) put out one of only three live Ray Charles albums. Aptly titled, Ray Charles Live, this classic presents two important performances captured ten months apart in July of 1958 and May of 1959....
	DON CHERRY BROWN RICE BROWN RICE is Don Cherry's mid-70s masterpiece, pulling from every corner of the planet (and beyond) to deliver a deeply spiritual groove that pulses with primal energy and folksy beauty. Combining elements of Middle-Eastern, African, and American music, BROWN RICE brilliantly succeeds in covering the breadth of Cherry's music interests while still remaining accessible, even danceable...
	NAT KING COLE THE COMPLETE AFTER MIDNIGHT SESSIONS The voice of voices returned to his jazz roots to record his greatest album.
	ALICE COLTRANE JOURNEY IN SATCHIDANANDA A mystical excursion into the realm of jazz-infused Eastern music by the widow and the disciple of the stellar John Coltrane. Spiritual and atmospheric sounds flow out of the harp and the piano of Alice Coltrane and the soprano saxophone of Pharoah Sanders...
	JOHN COLTRANE A LOVE SUPREME This recording represents the single greatest achievement of an artist who left the world with an extensive discography full of magnificence. The spiritual intensity of A Love Supreme leaves one profoundly moved and quietly ecstatic...
	JOHN COLTRANE LIVE TRANE: THE EUROPEAN TOURS (BOX SET) The 1961-63 European tours that yielded the music found on these discs took place just prior to the breakthrough of A Love Supreme. It¹s amazing, when you think of his recorded output, that Coltrane died before he was 40 years old. The man uttered (the unutterable) so much in that brief stretch of time, and went through such an evolution, that his career resembles a time-lapse film of a larva turning into a butterfly. From the first musings with the Miles Davis Quintet, to the final free-jazz screechings of Ascension, is a quantum leap. The extended-songs that fill Live Trane: The European Tours were performed when Trane only had a few years left to live and was moving into the last of his transformations...
	JOHN COLTRANE OLE COLTRANE A transitional record, "Olé Coltrane" successfully navigates the line between Trane's sonically challenging later years and his earlier accessibility. A magnificent milestone in Trane's artistic growth, this is an essential recording for any collection...
	THE CRUSADERS CRUSADERS I Crusaders I is not only the band's most successful post-Jazz Crusaders album, it stands as one of the highpoints of their entire productive career (that is, before they started cranking out worthless fluff). This 1971 double-album captures a talented bunch of jazz musicians energetically reaching out to embrace the best elements of rock and funk, but without compromising their integrity. With their masterful improvising skills...
	BETTY DAVIS BETTY DAVIS The former wife of Miles, Betty Mabry Davis is perhaps the only woman in the world who could rightfully have the following legend tattooed across her rear: THIS ASS INVENTED FUSION. While their marriage only lasted a year (1968-1969), Betty's impact on the immortal jazz trumpeter was tremendous...
	MILES DAVIS THE COMPLETE BITCHES BREW SESSIONS At times fearsome, others breathtaking, the music of Bitches Brew is a musically liberated organism, surging and soaring, gorgeous and terrifying, taking you dark and fantastical places to which only it holds the map...
	MILES DAVIS THE LIVE EVIL There's something about the way this music hits me. It¹s not as if I haven¹t been exposed to lots of hard, loud music ­ in fact, compared to some of the stuff that now gets called "fusion," Miles Davis' version can often seem quaint on the surface. At the time of the shows documented on this 1970 set, he was playing with a new band (something he was doing more often than in any period of his life theretofore), and playing music that, while broached in the previous couple of years by himself and very few others, was rather unheard of to most music listeners of the time, and certainly the canonical jazz guard...
	MILES DAVIS THE COMPLETE IN A SILENT WAY SESSIONS I never waited as impatiently for a boxed set to be released as I did for this one. I assumed that the only thing that could possibly be better than In A Silent Way was The Complete In A Silent Way Sessions, because there would be so much more of it. Now that I have it all to enjoy (!), I'm finally able to appreciate the full magnitude of the original release of In A Silent Way. After withstanding three decades of overplay, In A Silent Way remains a mysterious, urgently necessary, life-affirming masterpiece that stands outside anything Miles or anybody else has ever recorded. When I first got the box, I had the insane expectation that...
	MILES DAVIS IT'S ABOUT THAT TIME Recommending a Miles record is a lot like making a public service announcement: it's a strong statement of the obvious that surprisingly large numbers of people still need to hear, like smoking kills or friends don't let friends drive drunk...
	MILES DAVIS ON THE CORNER An electrified and multidimensional burst of ass-shaking funk straight from the master himself. If Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix took a space ship to India together, they very well might have come up with something approximating On The Corner...
	ERIC DOLPHY NAIMA Recorded less than 3 weeks before his tragic death at the age of 36, Naima ranks among Eric Dolphy's greatest creations. Brilliantly opening the album with an unaccompanied statement on bass clarinet, Dolphy stretches out on...
	ERIC DOLPHY OUT TO LUNCH Some of the most original sounding jazz ever created.
	NICK DRAKE PINK MOON Haunting songs of untold beauty.
	DUKE ELLINGTON FAR EAST SUITE Rather than trying to reproduce the music they heard on their journey through the East, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn "let it roll around, undergo a chemical change, and then seep out on paper." By opening The Far East Suite with a song entitled "Tourist Point of View," Ellington makes it clear that the album¹s Eastern sounds are no more than the musical impressions of two Westerners. "Tourist Point of View" is fresh, dramatic, and mysterious‹as the East always appears to unfamiliar eyes...
	BILL EVANS AT THE VILLAGE VANGUARD Sublime pianist’s legendary live dates.
	GIL EVANS THE INDIVIDUALISM OF GIL EVANS Those who only know Gil Evans though his collaborations with Miles Davis will be astounded when they discover The Individualism of Gil Evans. The five recording sessions that went into the making of this album yielded music as compelling as anything Evans created with Miles. And that¹s no minor feat, considering just how instrumental the trumpet playing genius was in helping Evans push the limits of jazz orchestration on such classics as Sketches Of Spain...
	THE FATBACK BAND LET'S DO IT AGAIN One of the best-kept secrets of the early '70s, "Let's Do It Again" is a classic feel-good party album loaded with some of the tightest instrumental funk jams around. Released in 1972, the album gave the Fatback Band its first successful R&B single, "Street Dance" An infectious in-the-pocket vamp that crosses the danceable grooves of the Meters and the JB's with the driving Memphis soul of the Stax Horns, "Street Dance" hits its delirious high with a funk-jazz flute solo by future Charles Mingus band member George Adams...
	STAN GETZ JAZZ SAMBA Driving music designed for sun-drenched drives in sleek convertables along winding coasts with the one you love by your side. Jazz Samba is the album responsible for importing the Brazilian Bossa Nova craze to America in 1962...
	ASTRUD GILBERTO SEPTEMBER 17, 1969 Heavily accented, hesitantly breathy and child-like, Astrud Gilberto's vocals never fail to seduce me. As I play her records (particularly this one), I obsessively pour over the album photos, falling for the sweet faced girl with the adorable voice. An accidental star with no professional training, Astrud was catapulted to fame after singing on the bossa nova crossover hit, "The Girl From Ipanema." The story is that her then husband, Brazilian singer-songwriter Joao Gilberto, was in the studio with saxophonist Stan Getz, when producer Creed Taylor suggested they record "Ipanema" in English in order to give the song a better chance at cracking the charts. By sheer luck, Astrud was the only Brazilian in the room with...
	GRANT GREEN CARRYIN' ON Hypnotically rhythmic and quintessentially grooving, the five tracks on this straight reissue of Carryin' On are all exceptionally tasty bursts of authentic jazz-funk...
	HERBIE HANCOCK MWANDISHI: THE COMPLETE WARNER RECORDINGS Funky soundtrack to Bill Cosby’s "Fat Albert" cartoon show
	JOHN HANDY LIVE AT THE MONTEREY JAZZ FESTIVAL His biggest hit and his brightest moment as a musician, John Handy's immortal Live At The Monterey Jazz Festival ranks as one of the greatest live sessions ever captured on tape...
	THE JOE HARRIOTT - JOHN MAYER DOUBLE QUINTET INDO-JAZZ FUSIONS Not even relegated to the shadowy status of cult figure, Jamaican-born alto saxophonist Joe Harriott remains virtually unknown today. A key influence in the British free-jazz movement of the early '60s, Harriott's adventurous style earned him unfavorable comparisons with Ornette Coleman, even though he was far more boppishly swinging than his volatile American counterpart ever was. An unsung pioneer in the union of Eastern and Western music, Harriott began experimenting with Indian musical forms in the mid '60s, incorporating its distinctive structures and rhythmic patterns into a jazz framework. Harriott soon merged his working quintet with a five-piece Indian ensemble headed up by Calcutta composer, conductor, and violin master (he played in the London Philharmonic) John Mayer, co-leading this Indo-jazz "double quintet" until his untimely death in 1973...
	JIMI HENDRIX AXIS: BOLD AS LOVE An early peak in the painfully short career of the greatest guitarist ever. Axis: Bold as Love was a mind blowing journey through the uncharted sounds and emotions of an artist sharing his pure soul. Love was to be the axis of the new galactic order Jimi envisioned, with his music serving as the otherworldly vehicle designed to take us there at 33 1/3 rpm...
	JIMI HENDRIX NINE TO THE UNIVERSE The album that demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt why Jimi Hendrix still reigns supreme as the God of Guitar. Jimi takes no vocals on any of the six tracks, preferring instead to let his guitar cry and sing...
	FREDDIE HUBBARD STRAIGHT LIFE From the opening bursts of Freddie Hubbard's trumpet on the title track, Straight Life hits the ground running as an electrifying classic. Recorded in 1970, this album demonstrates why the early years of fusion were really the best, as adventurous jazz musicians (like those assembled here) began incorporating the drive of rock and the fat grooves of funk into their evolving sounds...
	BOBBY HUTCHERSON SAN FRANCISCO Someone once said that if Bobby Hutcherson was a horn player, he’d be a household name. The fact is that Hutcherson was a jazz revolutionary who courageously pushed the vibraphone past convention and into uncharted territory. Originally inspired by vibes master Milt Jackson, Hutcherson dramatically expanded the instruments’ emotional vocabulary, playing in a way that has yet to be surpassed. In the 1960s he joined ranks with the most cutting-edge musicians, playing and recording with ...
	FELA KUTI FELA RANSOM-KUTI & THE AFRICA '70 WITH GINGER BAKER-LIVE! As a newly formed unit, this band was out to prove just how bad-ass they really were, and this jamming performance from Kuti's early days demonstrates just how well they succeeded...
	MAHALIA JACKSON LIVE AT NEWPORT 1958 On Sunday, the last day of the festival, Mahalia Jackson, the greatest gospel singer ever, took the stage, and luckily her performance, too, was recorded and released later that year as Live at Newport 1958. The original performance was just over 45 minutes long, but the LP release was much shorter. With the CD release we get more, nine other songs (including a marvelous “Keep Your Hand on the Plow” with the Duke Ellington Orchestra), restoring the entire set. And thank the Lord, as Mahalia might say. From the moment Willis Condover introduces her, she sings as a woman convinced of her place in heaven, if not of her place in history....
	MILT JACKSON SUNFLOWER receded by Lionel Hampton and followed by Bobby Hutcherson, Milt Jackson was one of the most significant pioneers of the vibraphone in jazz. While far from being his most classic recording, Sunflower remains one of his most electrifying...
	ANTONIO CARLOS JOBIM STONE FLOWER Antonio Carlos Jobim is to Brazilian music what Duke Ellington is to American jazz‹an innovative, prolific, and sublime pianist / songwriter whose art has come to symbolize a certain time and place. Influenced as much by the cool sounds of '50s West Coast jazz as by the melodies of Claude Debussy and the rhythms of the Brazilian samba, Jobim wrote the songs that, when performed by the likes of Stan Getz and Astrid Gilberto, drove the global bossa nova craze of the'60s. A subtle pianist and guitarist with a soft gravelly voice and a penchant for writing seductive melodies, Jobim always lived in the shadows of those who covered his songs and turned them into hits. While it was Jobim's "Desafinado" that first put bossa nova on the map in 1962 (when Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd scored a surprise hit covering the song), the man behind the music lived in relative obscurity until he was "rediscovered" shortly before his death in the...
	KALYANJI & ANANDJI SHAH BOMBAY THE HARD WAY Featuring the music of Indian composers (and brothers) Anandji and Kalyanji Shah, who wrote and produced the soundtracks for the so-called "Brownsploitation" films made in India's "Bollywood" during the 60s and 70s, this saffron-funk project is the brain-child of Dan "The Automator" Nakamura, Bay Area producer / remixer of Dr. Octagon fame, with additional beats provided by the immensely talented DJ Shadow. The end product is a potent cross-pollination of Secret-Agent-Man guitar themes, Blaxploitation grooves, jazzy horn and flute riffs, hip-hop beats and loops, and traditional Indian instrumentation...
	ERIC KLOSS ONE, TWO, FREE One, Two, Free is an avant-garde album of often funky music, with its strong rhythms rooted in the driving bass lines of Miles Davis-veteran Dave Holland and the vintage Fender Rhodes sounds of Ron Thomas. Kloss and guitarist Pat Martino stretch imaginatively on the 18 minute title track (seamlessly divided into three parts), crafting a memorable original that approaches the electric intensity of Miles Davis' work from the same era...
	BILL LASWELL & MILES DAVIS PANTHALASSA Bill Laswell, a controversial maverick in the "remix scene", stirs into his musical caldron the work of Miles Davis, concocting a new and fresh brew: Panthalassa...
	CHARLES LLOYD FOREST FLOWER / SOUNDTRACK Recorded live at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1966, Forest Flower was the jazz soundtrack of the Flower Power movement. Always accessible and majestic, the Charles Lloyd Quartet was recorded here at the peak of its powers...