Grizzled bluesman Steven Gene Wold's rags-to-riches life story will surely one day end up being adapted for one of those life-affirming musical biopics that so often sweep the boards come awards season. The man now known best as Seasick Steve left home to escape from his abusive stepfather as a young teen, lived as a hobo across Tennessee and Mississippi for the better part of nearly two decades, and was on the fringes of the same scene as Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell while performing as a session musician in the '60s, before eventually receiving an unlikely commercial breakthrough at the grand old age of 65. It's this eventful back-story that makes the 21 primitive blues offerings on Walkin' Man: The Best of Seasick Steve, his first full-length compilation, so compelling. Indeed, as his whiskey-soaked tones gruffly work their way through songs with such brilliantly old-fashioned titles as "I Started Out with Nothin'…

John Coltrane's matchup with singer Johnny Hartman, although quite unexpected, works extremely well. Hartman was in prime form on the six ballads, and his versions of "Lush Life" and "My One and Only Love" have never been topped. Coltrane's playing throughout the session is beautiful, sympathetic, and still exploratory; he sticks exclusively to tenor on the date. At only half an hour, one wishes there were twice as much music, but what is here is classic, essential for all jazz collections.

On Friday 29th July electronic titans The Orb will perform their seminal debut album ‘Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld’ in full for the first time ever, to mark its 25th anniversary. For this very special sliver jubilee gig, Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann will be joined on stage by the original cast of collaborators who helped create the magic on this influential, era-defining milestone, plus a special punk icon whose music heavily influenced The Orb. Paul Cook of Sex Pistols fame will guest on drums and fellow punk legend, original Orb member and ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ co-writer Youth will join on bass. Psychedelic-electronic-prog heroes Steve Hillage and partner Miquette Giraudy co-wrote ‘Supernova’ and ‘Backside Of The Moon’, and will also bring their mythical shamanistic magic to this special show.

Andreas Hammerschmidt is undoubtedly the most unjustly neglected composer of seventeenth-century Lutheran Germany. Very few recordings have been devoted to him, even though his music was widely published during his lifetime. The fifteen or so published collections offer a great variety of works, which, like those of his famous contemporary Heinrich Schütz, illustrate the fusion between the Lutheran polyphonic tradition and the various stylistic influences of the Italian Baroque. For this musical portrait of Hammerschmidt, Vox Luminis has drawn on several of these collections in order to offer as rounded a picture as possible of the variety of the composer’s styles.