Mary Margaret O'Hara · 1988 · She sang like a woman trying to remember a song she'd only ever heard in a dream.

Various Artists · 1999 · If you ever wondered what a perfectly recorded orchestra sounds like, this is the album your uncle played on his $20,000 system.

Reference Recordings · 1997 · A record store demo disc that actually has musical integrity.

Ahmad Jamal · 1970 · Ahmad Jamal playing like he's solving a puzzle in real time, and the puzzle keeps changing shape.

Mike Oldfield · 1973 · A nineteen-year-old in a converted barn made one of the strangest best-sellers of the 1970s, and nobody — least of all him — has quite explained how.

Gil Scott-Heron · 1971 · Bernard Purdie, Ron Carter, and a man who refused to sing.

Bob Dylan · 1963 · He was 21, wearing a corduroy cap, and about to spend the rest of the century answering for the songs he wrote in one winter.

Joe Henderson · 1967 · Orrin Keepnews let them set up in a semicircle with no isolation, and you can hear Henderson's foot tapping on the floor.

McCoy Tyner · 1967 · This is where McCoy Tyner proved he didn't need a sideman credit to make a masterpiece.

A Winged Victory for the Sullen · 2019 · Two men who make music so slow and huge it feels like a landscape — recorded with forty-eight strings in Budapest and mixed for the hours after midnight.

Caroline Shaw · 2017 · The string quartet as architecture, built by a composer who knows pop, folk, and the baroque as well as any living writer.

Caroline Shaw · 2019 · She treats her own voice like a violin, and the string quartet like a choir — then dissolves into something that sounds like light through stained glass.

Townes Van Zandt · 1968 · A drunk poet walks into a Nashville barn and records the saddest songs you'll ever hear.

John Coltrane · 1964 · John Coltrane's Classic Quartet cut this in the same sessions as My Favorite Things — and it's the one that sat on the shelf.

Little Simz · 2019 Spin it Again - She turned down major label advances to record nine songs in a home studio with one producer. No samples. No radio bait. Just a voice and a beat that still hits harder than most albums with ten times the budget.

Little Simz · 2021 Spin it Again - A rapper who could have taken the easy route instead hired the London Symphony Orchestra and made an album about anxiety.

Cannonball Adderley & Bill Evans · 1961 Spin it Again - This is what happens when a hard bop saxophonist and a modal pianist meet in a room with a bassist and drummer who know when to get out of the way.

The Roots · 1999 Spin it Again - Questlove's drums sound like they were recorded in a room with no parallel walls and a thousand ghosts.

Boogie Down Productions · 1988 Spin it Again - After Scott La Rock was killed, KRS-One didn't retreat — he loaded up on Malcolm X samples and made the hardest political rap album of the 80s.

Pixies · 1989 Spin it Again - Kurt Cobain tried to write 'Gouge Away' and ended up inventing the 90s instead.