It has to hurt to be dumped from the band you lead, but that's what happened to Pete Brown with the Battered Ornaments – and to add insult to injury, right on the eve of a prestigious support slot opening for the Rolling Stones at London's Hyde Park in 1969. But Brown, already an acclaimed poet who'd penned many of the lyrics for Cream, dusted himself off and founded Piblokto!. This, their first album, was actually far more accessible and commercial than his work with the Battered Ornaments. The inventive title track percolates, and "High Flying Electric Bird" (which was the B-side of the band's first single) features Brown on the highly unusual rock & roll slide whistle, mimicking a birdsong.

You can't help but get the idea that Domenico Scarlatti rather lived under the shadow of his father Alessandro. It is only with his move to the Iberian peninsula that his career seems to liven up. Very few of his surviving choral and vocal works live up to the imagination at play in the keyboard sonatas. His vocal works were highly regarded by his contemporaries and Charles Burney was admiring indeed. Remarkably, as recently as 1941, only his Stabat Mater had appeared in a modern edition. It was during the centenary in 1985 that new music was discovered and made available.

‘Why has this intense, brilliantly orchestrated, claustrophobically gripping masterpiece been so neglected since its 1977 premiere?’ asked Richard Morrison in The Times of the concert performance in the Barbican that preceded this recording. Miss Julie is Alwyn’s last large-scale work, written in 1973-76. Alwyn set his own libretto, based on Strindberg’s 1888 play of that title. The naturalistic drama and lifelike characters of that play appealed to Alwyn from an early age – in fact, he previously attempted to compose an opera on Miss Julie in the 1950s. That attempt failed, because of differences with his then librettist, Christopher Hassall.

The convent of St Francis in Assisi is a place of pilgrimage and the founding location of the Franciscan order. In the baroque period novices hoping to enter the order were trained in music, and there is a long musical tradition there. Most of the performances here are world premiere recordings of baroque vocal compositions from the library of the convent of St Francis in Assisi. All the vocal pieces are for soprano solo (combined with solo alto in Finale's `Oh Quam Jubilat'), and it is thought that the solos may have been sung by young men. Here they are taken by very fine female singers, and the accompanying ensemble is made up of top players.

Kind of Blue isn't merely an artistic highlight for Miles Davis, it's an album that towers above its peers, a record generally considered as the definitive jazz album, a universally acknowledged standard of excellence. Why does Kind of Blue possess such a mystique? Perhaps because this music never flaunts its genius. It lures listeners in with the slow, luxurious bassline and gentle piano chords of "So What." From that moment on, the record never really changes pace – each tune has a similar relaxed feel, as the music flows easily. Yet Kind of Blue is more than easy listening. It's the pinnacle of modal jazz – tonality and solos build from the overall key, not chord changes, giving the music a subtly shifting quality. All of this doesn't quite explain why seasoned jazz fans return to this record even after they've memorized every nuance. They return because this is an exceptional band – Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb – one of the greatest in history, playing at the peak of its power.

Van Morrison never stopped recording during the 1990s, but for a little while it seemed as if he was disconnected from his muse. It wasn't so much his series of jazz cover albums – he'd return to this vein often in subsequent decades – but his songwriting that showed signs bitterness, particularly on 1995's Days Like This, where he seemed dismissive of the very notion of being a songwriter. In that light, it's hard not to see 1997's The Healing Game as a rejuvenation. Indeed, the album's very title suggests that Morrison is in the process of mending fences and reconnecting with a sense of joy, a process that began during his deep dive into Mose Allison and other bluesy jazz artists in the mid-'90s. Morrison retains that sense of swing on The Healing Game – he also retains keyboardist Georgie Fame, who would become a fixture on Morrison's albums over the next two decades – and it invigorates a set of songs that aren't necessarily all that different from what he's been writing as of late; he's still specializing in ballads, blues, and folk-rock colored by R&B.