The 200 Best Albums of the 1960s

When considering the whole sweep of 20th century music, the 1960s loom especially large. Some of the importance placed on the music of the decade can be traced to demographics (the massive baby boomer generation born after World War II reached prime music-listening age) and technology (the consumer electronics industry was creating new listening spaces in automobiles and on television, and advancements in sound reinforcement made large concerts possible). Still, there’s no getting around the fact that the music of the ’60s made a huge impact at the time and never really went away. In the 1950s, the album charts were dominated by easy listening singers like Bing Crosby and endless musicals, records that only have niche audiences now. But so many top LPs from the 1960s continue to enthrall old and new listeners, and they're still re-discovered and re-assessed.

This list is Pitchfork’s attempt to do just that. The key for us in assembling this list, which is based on votes from more than 50 full-time staffers and regularly contributing writers, is to make sure we opened up our look at the decade to incorporate all places where great music was happening in LP form. That means, in addition to a mix of rock and pop and R&B, our list is heavy on jazz and includes quite a bit of early electronic music alongside records from outside the English-speaking world. Inevitably, our list also reflects the realities of the marketplace in the ’60s—some brilliant singles artists never made a great album. But we hope this list represents the best of what the decade has to offer and reflects how people explore music now. In 2017, we’re not making the same divisions between, say, Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way and John Fahey’s The Legend of Blind Joe Death or Nico’s Chelsea Girl; they’re all gorgeous records that fill a room, records we stream and collect and share with our friends with a “you gotta hear this one.” Here are 197 more.

Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and our Apple Music playlist.

Ennio Morricone: Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (1966)

Composer Ennio Morricone and director Sergio Leone worked in tandem throughout the 1960s on Italian spaghetti westerns, and their masterpiece is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The entire three-hour epic is conjured fully in the first five notes of Morricone’s theme, that mythical coyote howl. Then comes the anachronistic kang of electric guitar, the strident trumpet, and wooden flute; you can feel the dirt from the graveyard and smell Clint Eastwood’s cigar.

Before the film was shot, Morricone and Leone worked out musical themes for the three main characters, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the greatest soundtracks in history because it feels like the movie was retrofitted to it. What should happen during “L’Estasi Dell’Oro (The Ecstasy of Gold)”? Let’s just have a guy run around in circles for a few minutes. What about “Il Triello (The Trio)”? How about three guys just stand there and stare at each other? These are thrilling moments in cinematic history, devoid of dialogue—just the tactile, otherworldly music of Morricone guiding the film into the sunset. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Ennio Morricone: “Il Triello”

Donovan: Sunshine Superman (1966)

Before the Summer of Love, there was the Season of the Witch. In it, Donovan Leitch transformed from the Scottish Bob Dylan into the Sunshine Superman, a paisley-clad and permed psychedelic who wrote fables about rotund angels, Arthurian queens, and Sunset Strip nightclubs where Fellini dream women danced with sequins in their hair.

Donovan drew his formula from Celtic mythology, hillbilly American folk, Indian sitar ragas, Beat poetry, and the occasional bongo solo. The 20-year-old gypsy also conscripted future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones as session men on the title track, which soared to No. 1 in the United States. In the process, Donovan hallucinated the modern archetype of the guitar-picking mystic, one that would be borrowed by Marc Bolan, pre–Hunky Dory David Bowie, and the Tolkien fanatics who’d just shared his studio. –Jeff Weiss

Listen: Donovan: “Sunshine Superman”

Andrew Hill: Point of Departure (1964)

The fifth album from the Chicago-born pianist Andrew Hill catapulted him to the top tier of forward-looking jazz composers of the ’60s. As Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane pioneered jazz’s “New Thing” movement, loosening the shackles of long-established chord progressions, Hill’s tight-knit pieces played within them, drawing on post-bop, avant-garde, and the blues. Point of Departure is at once abstract and dynamic, labyrinthine and lyrical, dizzying and dense with ideas. In this session, Hill found his perfect foil in the adventurous woodwind multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy (who would tragically die just three months later). Joined by several other talented collaborators, they soar to the furthest reaches of Hill’s ever-shifting compositions, offering a fearless moment in a tumultuous era for jazz. –Andy Beta

Listen: Andrew Hill: “New Monastery”

Cecil Taylor: Unit Structures (1966)

Among the most intense of the early free jazz albums, pianist Cecil Taylor’s 1966 Blue Note debut, Unit Structures, still challenges notions of musical freedom. Recorded during the same season that the psychedelic ballroom scene was starting to bubble in San Francisco, Unit Structures did more to disassemble music than nearly all of the light-show-drenched psychedelia that followed. The album is by no means easy listening; the atonality is unrepentant. But Taylor’s septet finds numerous gorgeous spaces as they interpret “free jazz” not just as the freedom to improvise but the freedom to invent musical worlds and hidden syntaxes. The only way to tap into the “rhythm-sound energy found in the amplitude of each time unit,” as Taylor wrote in the liner notes, is to listen reverently. –Jesse Jarnow

Listen: Cecil Taylor: “Steps”

Wanda Jackson: Rockin’ With Wanda (1960)

To read most rock histories, you’d think women started picking up guitars sometime in the mid-1970s. The truth is, pioneering singer-guitarists like Wanda Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were as instrumental as any male musician in helping rock’n’roll coalesce out of rockabilly, country, R&B, and blues in the 1950s. Jackson, nicknamed “The Queen of Rockabilly,” even toured with—and dated—Elvis when she was a teenager.

The best introduction to Jackson’s early work is Rockin’ With Wanda!, an exhilarating compilation of two-minute masterpieces that showcase her remarkable range. There’s the plaintive country balladry of “Sinful Heart,” the proto-girl-group hearts and flowers of “A Date With Jerry,” and clap-along jump rope jams like “You’re the One for Me.” But her charisma really shines on her fastest, toughest, most boastful tracks. Along with her famous novelty single “Fujiyama Mama” (a big hit in Japan, despite its distasteful references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki), “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad” and “Don’a Wan’a” were the riot grrrl anthems of their day. –Judy Berman

Listen: Wanda Jackson: “Rock Your Baby”

Nilsson: Aerial Ballet (1968)

Harry Nilsson’s third LP, Aerial Ballet, is where his work shifts irrevocably, moving from the quirky psychedelic pop that was tapering off in the late 1960s into the more naturalistic singer-songwriter style of the looming ’70s.

By the time Aerial was released, Nilsson hadn’t scored a hit for himself, but he had written mind-bending, orchestral songs for the Shangri-Las, the Turtles, and the Monkees. But the more low-key aspects of Aerial Ballet reflect the soft rock that would become increasingly popular in the next few years. Ironically, the album’s two most famous tracks are a cover of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” and Nilsson’s own “One,” which the rock group Three Dog Night would turn into a major smash soon after. Both songs are the perfect encapsulations of Nilsson’s unusual yet direct approach to making music: embedding lyrical gut-punches into catchy folk-pop riffs and experimental production techniques. Even before Nilsson made his mark as one of the most coveted songwriters of his generation, Aerial Ballet served as a snapshot of the unconventional style that would make him a cult icon. –Cameron Cook

Listen: Nilsson: “One”

Donald Byrd: A New Perspective (1964)

In 1963, Donald Byrd, already a leading light of bebop as a trumpeter and bandleader, set out to make what he called “an entire album of spiritual-like pieces.” The result was A New Perspective, a sort of symphony in five movements that incorporated blues, doo-wop, and even opera into its more conspicuous hard bop and liturgical influences. Brought to life by an ensemble that included a young Herbie Hancock and a sizable choir, A New Perspective is often dominated by the haunting, otherworldly passages Byrd wrote for its fluid female voices. But unlike other bop compositions of the era, which drew on popular melodies and forms as grist for improvisation, A New Perspective incorporated its hard bop forays into an ambitious art-music framework closer in structure to a classical oratorio like Handel’s Messiah. It’s perhaps one of the purest embodiments of Nina Simone’s famous assertion that the innovative project categorized as “jazz” might better be characterized as “black classical music.” –Edwin “STATS” Houghton

Listen: Donald Byrd: “Elijah”

The Beach Boys: Surfer Girl (1963)

After worshipping waves, babes, and automobiles for two records, the Beach Boys began to look inward on Surfer Girl. Thanks to the success of Surfin’ USA and “Surf City,” a No. 1 track written for their SoCal pop peers Jan and Dean, Capitol allowed Brian Wilson to produce an entire Beach Boys record for the first time; he pulled out all the stops, introducing string arrangements and more session players into the group’s sound.

Though Surfer Girl contains “Catch a Wave,” “Little Deuce Coupe,” and other songs about the Californian myth, two moments emerge as more searching masterpieces. One is the title track, a sleepy love ballad and a sincere expression of longing that portrays the ocean as a delicate place where “love could grow.” And “In My Room” moves even deeper into Wilson’s vulnerability, with nary a mention of romance. Instead, it pays tribute to the sanctuary of the childhood bedroom, a place where Brian and his brothers could escape their abusive father/manager, Murry Wilson, and sing together in peace. In these breaks from the Beach Boys’ pop gaiety, Wilson began to probe the wistfulness at his core, hinting at further genius to come. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: The Beach Boys: “In My Room”

Link Wray & the Wraymen: Link Wray & the Wraymen (1960)

You can’t quite call Link Wray’s debut album his signature effort, since his first and most famous garage-rock single, “Rumble,” isn’t on it. But his next three subsequent, equally great singles are, as well as a tune called “Ramble” that’s basically a self rip-off of “Rumble.” Add a ripping rockabilly jam called “Raw-Hide,” a few homecoming-dance-worthy rock numbers complete with swinging horns, and some more solid originals, and what could’ve sounded like a hodgepodge turns out to be a dead-spot-free display of Wray’s talents.

Most of Link Wray & the Wraymen bears a distinct sonic style that’s still influential today—especially Wray’s high-octane riffs, which basically invented the power chord. The album is also a charming family affair—brothers Vernon (rhythm guitar) and Doug (drums) were Wraymen—though Link’s the clear sonic leader, making the case for a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction that somehow still hasn’t happened. But the list of Hall-of-Famers who worship him—Dylan, Townshend, Page, Springsteen—is testament enough to his power. –Marc Masters

Listen: Link Wray and the Wraymen: “Raw-Hide”

Amon Düül II: Phallus Dei (1969)

Amon Düül began as a radical art commune in Munich, one whose extended jam sessions were open to all. Soon, the most musically adept members went their own way, and this splinter group made their debut with Phallus Dei. In Latin, the title means “God’s Penis”—as statements of intent go, this is certainly up there. Krautrock didn’t exist yet, but 1969 was the year when the political, musical, and social currents running through the German counterculture began to coalesce into actual recorded music.

Pink Floyd and Hawkwind are obvious touchstones, though Amon Düül II felt distinct from much of the prog in the UK or U.S., their music unprissy and shot through with a primal weirdness. “Kanaan” weaves together Eastern scales, rolling hand percussion, and the operatic keening of Renate Knaup into something mystic and heavy, while “Dem Guten, Schönen, Wahren” is a hallucinogenic nightmare of delirious falsetto vocals, curdled acid-folk, and beer-hall chanting. And the title track is 20 minutes of gale-force psych and mangled violin that resembles a Germanic Velvet Underground. –Louis Pattison

Listen: Amon Düül II: “Dem Guten, Schönen, Wahren”

Judy Collins: Wildflowers (1967)

Wildflowers sets three of Judy Collins’ songs alongside covers of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, and her take on Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” turned into the hit that launched this album up the charts. Though a product of the acoustic guitar-favoring Greenwich Village folk scene, Collins was by this point singing over lush orchestral arrangements, with sweet choruses of clarinet and flute complementing the effortless formality of her own voice. It’s that formality that can be a stumbling block to enjoying an album like this some half a century later, but Collins’ powdery femininity is ultimately an impeccable match for the tender naturalism that fills the lyrics of her songs, where love stories play out amid images of “lilies and lace” and “amethyst fountains.” –Thea Ballard

Listen: Judy Collins: “Sky Fell”

The Cannonball Adderley Quintet: Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Live at “The Club” (1966)

While Cannonball Adderley may be the bandleader on Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Live at “The Club,” the record is arguably as much a showcase for his brother’s songwriting and playing. Nat Adderley wrote the two opening numbers, “Fun” and “Games,” which are hard bop at its most enthusiastic and mercurial; his playing is appropriately ecstatic, buoyed by joy into gymnastic flights and contortions. The focus also inevitably drifts to pianist Joe Zawinul, three years before he played the sustained organ notes that opened the title track of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way; here, his composition “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” merges soul and jazz in the hybrid timbre of his electric piano. But it’s the polyphonic sense of play in the group’s improvisations, particularly in Cannonball’s solos, that lends the session its aura of excitability and invention. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t actually recorded at a club but in a Los Angeles studio, to which they invited a small crowd: It only contributes to the feeling that this record, from start to finish, was produced in a totally imaginative space. –Brad Nelson

Listen: The Cannonball Adderley Quintet: “Introduction/Fun”

Dave Van Ronk: Folksinger (1963)

Dave Van Ronk was a ubiquitous figure of Greenwich Village folk culture, one so essential and deeply rooted that he struggled to attract ears beyond it. Ironically, it was a scene he never quite fit into, literally or figuratively: A 6-foot-5 Swede and early mentor to Bob Dylan, the dive-bar philosopher cast a keen ear to blues traditions instead of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger’s acoustic, Americana strums.

On Folksinger, Van Ronk’s somber masterstroke, he filters plaintive 12-bar traditionals through jazzy folk paces and a mournful yet bristling growl. His crawl through the standard “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” is almost oppressively intimate, its spare fingerpicked guitar and slow-pooling croon as stifling as the solitude he’s succumbing to. His soulful yet chatty pass through “Cocaine Blues” brings a modern sheen to the addict’s tale, rivaling Dylan’s reedier, less convincing turn. For such troubles, Joan Baez called him “the closest living offshoot of Leadbelly,” while the Coen brothers loosely based Inside Llewyn Davis on him, finally giving this perennial outsider his due. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Dave Van Ronk: “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me”

Jefferson Airplane: Surrealistic Pillow (1967)

Surrealistic Pillow is to San Francisco what The Velvet Underground & Nico is to New York: an iconic album that captures a city’s sound circa the Summer of Love. Surrealistic Pillow finds the band compiling their cornerstones of crunchy psychedelia, languid blues, and freewheeling jamming—but this time, they have Grace Slick, a femme fatale alto with the fury of a valkyrie. Coupled with Rick Jarrard’s Spectorian production, melodically top-heavy and immediate, Slick’s jagged hooks on “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” earned Jefferson Airplane their reputation as the first big San Francisco band. Surrealistic Pillow is high-definition psychedelia that’s both exotic and approachable. –Zoe Camp

Listen: Jefferson Airplane: “Today”

The Kinks: Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (1969)

Arthur could’ve been the Kinks’ Tommy. Commissioned to accompany a teleplay co-written by frontman Ray Davies, it was forced to stand on its own after the TV movie was scrapped. So instead of a zeitgeist multimedia experience, this follow-up to The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society became the band’s second great, quintessentially English concept album in as many years.

In a 1970 interview, Davies joked that Arthur was “about the rise and fall of the British Empire, which people tend to associate me with,” and he told that story through the eyes of a character based on his brother-in-law, Arthur Anning. After opening with the soaring “Victoria,” a rock monument to the Queen’s bygone Britain, the carpetlayer’s tale descends into the horrors of the World Wars on “Some Mother’s Son” and “Mr. Churchill Says.” Its centerpiece is a one-two punch of sarcasm on “Australia,” a sing-along escape anthem, and “Shangri-La,” a folk hymn to suburban consumerism. But while Davies is barbed, he still shows a grudging empathy for his countrymen, lending an undertone of sweetness to a history lesson that could have come off as merely bitter. –Judy Berman

Listen: The Kinks: “Brainwashed”

Charles Mingus: Mingus Plays Piano (1963)

Few humans were ever able to wrestle melody out of an upright bass or command a cacophonous jazz band like Charles Mingus—though all that is basically irrelevant on this album of solo piano works. The idea seems a bit incongruous, like if Eddie Van Halen decided to release an oboe-only record in his prime, but Mingus was no dilettante on the keys. At a young age, he was mentored on the instrument by the quick-fingered jazz titan Art Tatum, and this album of originals, reinterpretations, and spontaneous performances adds another dimension to his staggering talent.

Unlike Mingus’ full-band albums and shows, which could be rambunctious affairs that teetered on the precipice of chaos, Mingus Plays Piano is gorgeously spare, incorporating elements of jazz, blues, and his beloved classical music. Opener “Myself When I Am Real” was largely made up on the spot, a shapeshifting ballad that doubles as a spiritual portrait of Mingus’ own creativity. Elsewhere, there are skewed standards, quiet confessionals, and an eight-and-a-half minute ode to Mingus’ America, a complex and troubling place where black men like him were often left out. The record’s haunted soul still speaks to artists like Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, who sampled “Myself When I Am Real” to introduce his own profound and personal treatise on being black in America, Freetown Sound. Truth, beauty, liberty—it’s all here. Unadorned. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Charles Mingus: “I Can’t Get Started”

BBC Radiophonic Workshop: BBC Radiophonic Music (1968)

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was founded in 1958 as a space in which composers, musicians, and engineers experimented with techniques for producing sound under the auspices of soundtracking BBC programming. Released a decade into the Workshop’s tenure, this compilation collects 31 short works by Delia Derbyshire, David Cain, and John Baker. Though these pieces were designed for functional use in broadcast programming, taken together, they present a view of the strange, brilliant sonic terrain being forged at the Workshop.

Many of these pieces are essentially jingles, driven by lilting melodies, but even the most cloying of tunes are uncanny in their construction, featuring experimental techniques ranging from musique concrète tape-collage to recording and sampling odd everyday sounds. Derbyshire dips into the weird, particularly, and her work would prove invaluable to generations of electronic experimentalists who followed her, including Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers. She relishes in new sounds and unsettling melodic forms; the metallic clatter and modulated vocals of a track like her “Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO” anticipates the twists that pop would soon take. –Thea Ballard

Listen: John Baker: “Milky Way”

Mickey Newbury: Looks Like Rain (1969)

According to the chorus of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jenning’s song “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love),” the Holy Trinity of country music includes Willie himself, Hank Williams, and the somewhat lesser-known Mickey Newbury. The latter’s 1969 album Looks Like Rain might get chalked up as a record by a songwriter’s songwriter, but his music served as an offering to pop, soul, and country singers alike: Jennings, Kenny Rogers, Solomon Burke, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis all covered his songs. He became the spiritual forefather for the outlaw country movement, and later for indie singers like Bill Callahan and Will Oldham. Here, Newbury accompanies his songs of unbearable heartbreak with acoustic guitar, but he also couches them in church choirs and sitar, as well as the sounds of chimes, rain, and distant trains, creating a singular album that might best be described as ambient country. –Andy Beta

Listen: Mickey Newbury: “San Francisco Mabel Joy”

The Soft Machine: The Soft Machine (1968)

Soft Machine’s self-titled debut album is a Rosetta Stone for adventurous rock music. The British band’s founding lineup—bassist and baritone vocalist Kevin Ayers, shirtless drummer and devastating high tenor singer Robert Wyatt, organist Mike Ratledge, and Australian guitarist Daevid Allen—ranked alongside Pink Floyd in London’s psychedelic underground. After visa issues forced Allen out, the remaining trio toured with the Jimi Hendrix Experience and finally cut an LP with Hendrix’s producer.

The Soft Machine unites psych-rock frenzy with modern-jazz improvisation, a refreshingly new idea at the time, and the joyful medley kicked off by opener “Hope for Happiness” still breathes with discovery. Better yet is the Ayers-led “We Did It Again,” a brutishly minimalist link between the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” and krautrock’s motorik that could stretch out to a trance-inducing 40 minutes live. Today, the Soft Machine are known as pioneers of prog-rock, jazz fusion, and the Canterbury scene, and their members have enjoyed fruitful avant-garde careers. This debut captures a pregnant moment when all paths remained open. –Marc Hogan

Listen: The Soft Machine: “Hope for Happiness”

Lesley Gore: I’ll Cry If I Want To (1963)

Lesley Gore’s debut album, which she began recording when she was just 16, follows a party attended by a teenage love triangle: herself, her beau Johnny, and that interloper Judy. For a record that kicks off with seven songs about sobbing, I’ll Cry If I Want To maintains an impressively consistent, candied sweetness throughout; produced by Quincy Jones, the album epitomizes the sound of early-1960s girl-group pop, airtight in structure as it soars, dreamy-eyed, through tales of young love and loss. Gore eases through shimmery choruses and lovelorn ballads, but she also embraces despair, spite, and other less lovely parts of being a young woman. Before she released the second-wave feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me,” Gore was, in a way, already carving out room for women within the narrow parameters of girl-group femininity. –Thea Ballard

Listen: Lesley Gore: “Cry Me a River”

Wilson Pickett: The Exciting Wilson Pickett (1966)

Despite his charismatically gruff vocals and emphatic style, Wilson Pickett was just one more struggling R&B singer until Atlantic Records sent him down to Stax studios in 1965. There, he recorded his career-making “In the Midnight Hour” and “634-5789 (Soulsville U.S.A.),” among other hits. But Pickett alienated his fellow musicians in Memphis, to the point where Stax president Jim Stewart nixed further recording there. So the singer trekked even further south to Muscle Shoals, Ala., where he recorded at the legendary FAME Studio.

Pickett’s third album chronicles that journey, playing like a battle between the Stax house band and the FAME crew. The edge may go to the Alabamans, mostly for Roger Hawkins’ relentless drums on “Land of 1,000 Dances,” but as a whole The Exciting Wilson Pickett helped distinguish Southern soul as grittier, rawer, and more immediate than its northern and Midwestern counterparts. The album established Pickett as a major star, a compelling bandleader who could mold these dynamic groups into his own vision. –Stephen M. Deusner

Listen: Wilson Pickett: “You’re So Fine”

Art Ensemble of Chicago: Message to Our Folks (1969)

In the spring of 1969, Lester Bowie moved his band, the Art Ensemble, to Paris. To afford the tickets, the Chicago trumpeter sold his furniture. “He put an ad in the [Chicago] Defender,” collaborator Roscoe Mitchell recalled in 2015. “‘Musician sells out.’” By July, the group found itself at the Pan African Cultural Festival, where they rubbed elbows with other avant-garde jazz composers, Nina Simone, and the Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver. Message to Our Folks was compiled during an intense week of recording sessions in the French capital with musicians the Art Ensemble met at the festival. Equal parts gospel, bebop, and abstract dissonance, Message pays homage to jazz music’s foundation while reaching for outer space, offering a shining example of unfiltered black art and compelling Afrofuturist music in the vein of Sun Ra. The Art Ensemble’s music remains difficult to grasp, but the spirit of it—the complex sonic arrangements, the “all for one” ethos—can be heard in modern-day jazz leaders like Kamasi Washington and Shabaka Hutchings. –Marcus J. Moore

Listen: The Art Ensemble of Chicago: “Old Time Religion”

Wendy Carlos: Switched-On Bach (1968)

The earliest electronic music was equal parts experimental art and temperamental science project. When Wendy Carlos recorded this suite of Bach pieces, she could only play around one measure at a time before her delicate synthesizer fell out of tune. She worked with inventor Robert Moog himself to build her prototype, a decade before touch-sensitive keyboards became standard.

The nuance of Carlos’ playing here feels miraculous: “Prelude and Fugue No. 7” manages to segue from crystallized harmony to dainty counterpoint, while “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” sheds its usual stately ceremony, trilling the melody like a bird. Switched-On Bach sold more copies than any previous classical album, bringing a mass audience to an alien medium. Her choice of material had its strange logic: Writing to glorify God, Bach often composed with no particular instrument in mind. He never heard a synth’s unearthly tones, or a drum machine’s divine precision, but his notes reveal the beauty of every device. Long before music melted into data, Carlos presided over a kind of transcendence. –Chris Randle

Herbie Hancock: Empyrean Isles (1964)

Pianist Herbie Hancock was already an elite jazz session player when he led this set for Blue Note. Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard had likewise distinguished himself as a post-bop player with an edge by working with drummer Art Blakey and avant-garde reed player Eric Dolphy. Here, joined by some of Hancock’s rhythm section colleagues from Miles Davis’ quintet, they could have turned any group of tunes into one hell of an album.

But Hancock was also hard at work on his compositional craft. His four original pieces on Empyrean Isles prompt motifs based on brisk chord changes as well as scale-based improvisation. Nearly two decades before his embrace of turntablism on “Rockit,” Hancock was already signaling his intention to swing between radically different formal designs. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: Herbie Hancock: “One Finger Snap”

Townes Van Zandt: Townes Van Zandt (1969)

In the late 1960s, when he was a hard-luck troubadour gigging around Texas and Tennessee, Townes Van Zandt was something of a cult figure: a songwriter already being likened to the great Hank Williams by admirers like Emmylou Harris. Such a comparison cuts both ways, emphasizing the graceful economy of his lyrics and the Hill Country lonesomeness in his vocals, but also acknowledging the self-destructive tendencies that ultimately undermined his career.

On Van Zandt’s third record, he was still figuring himself out, so he took another go at “For the Sake of the Song,” the title track from his 1968 album about a woman who won’t stop singing sad songs to her old man. He similarly recut “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” and “Waiting Around to Die,” the latter arguably the saddest outlaw defense country music has devised. He largely dispenses with the florid arrangements of his previous albums, stripping every song down to its essentials: his dexterous picking, that glorious Lone Star warble, and the occasional flourish of flute or pedal steel. Like all of his records, this one failed to find anything resembling a mainstream audience, but so many years later, it has become the bedrock of his legacy. –Stephen M. Deusner

Listen: Townes Van Zandt: “Columbine”

Ella Fitzgerald / Count Basie: Ella and Basie! (1963)

Truly, the album should be called Ella and Basie and Quincy. Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald had been winding around each other in elegant, wayward jazz-royalty circles for a few years, but it took a young Quincy Jones, then under Basie’s wing, to pull these two forces into the same orbit for a full album. Together, they cut one of the most enduring and beloved records to bear either Fitzgerald’s or Basie’s name. Jones’ arrangements make the off-kilter chemistry between Fitzgerald and Basie’s band crackle to life: As musicians, they had almost too much in common. The horns in his band punched with a lead singer’s brio, while she sang like a horn, winding and unpredictable, the words mere containers for the sounds she made.

Fitzgerald’s trail of records is long and studded with forgettables, but on Ella and Basie!, she is at her peak—mercurial, tart, apple-wry. She worms her way into the deep pockets of space that Basie’s band leaves for her on “Them There Eyes” and wails her way into the stratosphere, sounding drunk on the possibilities open before them. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Ella Fitzgerald & Count Basie: “Tea for Two”

Patty Waters: Sings (1965)

The first side of Patty Waters’ debut album offers seven short, subdued tunes intoned solemnly over hushed piano playing—masterful but easy to miss, given what happens on the other side. As Burton Greene, the pianist who accompanied Waters, put it, “Patty kept going on with the ballad routine. I thought, this chick is sitting on a big egg; this egg is going to be some kind of monster, and I’ve got to help her hatch that egg.”

That egg turns out to be a 14-minute interpretation of the traditional song “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” and Waters cracks it wide open. After a few minutes spent meditating on the melody, accompanied by Greene’s trio, she unleashes every tone and noise her voice can conjure. Her burning strangulations of the word “black” are so direct and bracing, she seems predict the fury soon to erupt in anti-war protests and riots around America. But she also taps into something universal: the extreme energy and emotions that only artistic freedom can access. –Marc Masters

Listen: Patty Waters: “Why Can’t I Come to You”

Duke Ellington: Far East Suite (1967)

Is this a linked “suite,” or just a bunch of songs? Does it really carry a significant “far east” influence? These questions are fun to ponder, though the answers aren’t hugely consequential. Because what Far East Suite does offer is one of the pianist’s large ensembles in a set of music co-composed with the Duke’s longtime collaborator, Billy Strayhorn. Which means it is automatically part of one of the most exalted catalogs in American music. During “Bluebird of Delhi (Mynha),” a clarinet theme that may seem slight at first ends up taking majestic flight over the ensemble’s delirious riffs. And the ballad “Isfahan,” a feature tailored by Ellington and Strayhorn for the altoist Johnny Hodges, has long been recognized as a tour de force saxophone performance. Ellington created some essential music after Strayhorn died later that year, but this final moment in their long collaboration is a pinnacle of their poetically swinging genius. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: Duke Ellington: “Isfahan”

Eddie Palmieri: Justicia (1969)

The montuno—the interlocked bass and percussion groove of Cuban son music—has been convincingly ID’ed as the sonic godfather of the drum-and-bass breaks that characterize American funk. Eddie Palmieri’s 1960s releases reunited these divided streams. Justicia represents the peak of this period, combining the latest Cuban dance craze (a rhythm known simply as “Mozambique”) with elements of blues, soul, and psychedelic rock: the ahead-of-its-time “My Spiritual Indian” wanders around a hypnotic, bluesy chord before descending into a sublime Afro-funk groove augmented by Thelonious Monk-inspired piano work. “Verdict on Judge Street” pushes Palmieri’s jazz conceits even further, building up plonky, dissonant ghost notes that trip over each other in contradictory rhythms yet still remain danceable.

Tying these elements together is Justicia’s unapologetically activist vision and the soulcat slang of late ’60s pro-black, anti-colonial street protests; it peppers the English portions of the LP’s mostly Spanish lyrics. There are clunky moments, like Palmieri’s somewhat wooden vocal cadence on the spoken-word “Everything Is Everything,” a sort of English-language key to both the album’s politics and its kitchen-sink genre fusion. Yet Justicia remains a formidable testament to Palmieri’s inventive powers. –Edwin “STATS” Houghton

Listen: Eddie Palmieri: “My Spiritual Indian”

Various Artists: Golden Rain (1969)

Kecak (pronounced “ket-chak”) is a percussive Balinese chant performed by some 100 men squatting in concentric circles, all hooting and hollering in simian syncopation. Although rooted in an exorcism ritual that dramatizes a monkey-filled tale from the ancient Hindu epic The Ramayana, the music and dance performance is a relatively modern phenomenon dating to the 1930s. Self-described “musical tourist” David Lewiston included a kecak track on all three albums of Balinese field recordings he released on Nonesuch, but the 22-minute side B of 1969’s Golden Rain is the iconic example.

Lewiston taped performances in all their messy vitality, achieving an in-the-moment energy more reminiscent of jazz or punk than lab-coated ethnomusicology. Golden Rain’s “The Ramayana Monkey Dance” remains as astounding now as it must have been for late-night FM audiences. The first side of the compilation is given over to two luminously chiming tracks of gamelan, the trance-like Indonesian traditional music played on marimba-like gongs. The Paris Exposition of 1889, when Claude Debussy encountered Javanese gamelan, has long been considered a turning point for modern music. For the vinyl era, Golden Rain stands as a similar epiphany. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Gamelan Gong Kebjar: “Oleg Tumililingan” (“Bumblebee”)

Roland Kirk: The Inflated Tear (1967)

He was a showman, an eccentric, an advocate, and a scholar—but at the core of Roland Kirk’s appeal, there’s the staggering fact that his performance is the sound of one man harmonizing, thanks to his striking ability to play multiple horns at the same time. One of his earliest records for Atlantic, The Inflated Tear inaugurates his idea of jazz as what he, like Nina Simone, called “black classical music,” a wide-ranging tradition that included everything from the cutting-edge avant-garde to generations-old musical traditions to contemporary pop styles. He could start with a melodic and thematic premise as simple as the slow march of “The Black and Crazy Blues” or a base as familiar as Duke Ellington’s “Creole Love Call” and guide his band to places that tapped the deepest spaces of mood-altering sonics. The purity of lighthearted joy on the flute-led tribute to his young son, “A Laugh for Rory,” the manic giddiness of “Lovellevelliloqui”—it’s all overwhelming, so it’s even more of a rush when Kirk goes on one of his spectacular solo runs, like the Coltrane-rivaling tenor sax fusillade of “Many Blessings.” –Nate Patrin

Listen: Roland Kirk: “The Black and Crazy Blues”

The Sonics: Here Are the Sonics!!! (1965)

Rock’n’roll can be a lot of things, but for a certain snapshot of mid-’60s teenage delinquency—an inner world fueled by shaggy Rat Fink scuzziness and drive-in horror double features—the genre reached its ideal form in the Sonics. They weren’t necessarily the first garage rockers, but nobody embodied the style better, from the moment their debut single “The Witch” peeled fake woodgrain off speaker cabinets in 1964. The formula, as ruthlessly displayed on their 1965 debut LP Here Are the Sonics!!!, was simple: Make every instrument hit with the force of a brand new Pontiac GTO smashing through a guardrail. And if you’re going to get that raucous, make sure you’ve got a frontman like Jerry Roslie, whose range stretches from a demented bellow to an unhinged shriek—all in the service of songs about getting your kicks from drinking poison, tearing around in a “turn-on red” Mustang, and absolutely losing your mind over rejection. Throw in some rock and R&B standards performed as though they were all written by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins at his coffin-busting wildest, and you’ve got the big bang explosion that set the standard for everyone from the Cramps to Nirvana to the White Stripes. –Nate Patrin

Listen: The Sonics: “The Witch”

The Peter Brötzmann Octet: Machine Gun (1968)

When hard-blowing free jazz reaches a certain intensity, you start to wonder how far it can go and what its limitations of expression might be. Machine Gun is one idea of how such an impassable sonic barrier might present itself. On it, the German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and seven fellow improvisors—including British saxophonist Evan Parker and Dutch drummer Han Bennink, who would all make a serious mark in European free jazz—are still tethered to jazz proper, with variations on themes and melody and groove, but the result sounds closer to what we now call noise music.

Machine Gun is a roaring mass of energy that serves as an auditory Rorschach test: Given its title and its initial release during a violent, tumultuous, and war-wrecked year, the album can easily inspire fear, horror, and images of violence. But its spirit of collective invention, and the sheer delight of musicians pushing their instruments beyond their design, also yields an equally vivid joy. It’s the sound of eight creative people confronting musical barriers and working together to annihilate them. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Peter Brötzmann: “Machine Gun”

The Impressions: Keep On Pushing (1964)

With “Keep On Pushing,” penned in the middle of the civil rights movement, Curtis Mayfield channeled his gospel roots into a moment of motivation. The song’s message of strength and persistence had been stewing in him his whole life—a meditation on love, faith, existing on the streets of segregated Chicago, and how he thought things ought to be. Aided by his bandmates Fred Cash and Sam Gooden’s harmonies, Johnny Pate’s horn arrangements, and of course, the warm flourishes of his electric guitar, Mayfield’s stunning falsetto exuded the power and strength he preached.

Keep On Pushing was the Impressions’ first attempt at a proper album—their previous records were essentially singles collections. Every song is crafted just as beautifully as the title track, with Pate’s expert arrangements backing the trio’s earworm harmonies. Mayfield cements his soul icon status with songs about love affairs that are new (“Talking About My Baby”), forbidden (“I Ain’t Supposed To”), and gone (“Long, Long Winter”). And while Chicago blues is certainly present, gospel is the key ingredient. One year after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the Impressions’ version of the spiritual standard “Amen” is arranged as a march. Mayfield’s first proper LP with the Impressions hinted at the artistic intent that would follow: Not long after its release, the Impressions would further soundtrack the movement with “People Get Ready,” “We’re a Winner,” and several other classics. With Keep On Pushing, Mayfield became a star, and it was just the beginning. –Evan Minsker

Listen: The Impressions: “Keep on Pushing”

The Byrds: The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968)

In 1968, the Byrds could be described as Sgt. Pepper’s-curious: a band longing for experimentation but still in touch with their jangly roots. There are moments when they sound like a conservative dad’s worst nightmare: aloof, stoned, and gently rebelling. “Things that seemed to be solid are not,” goes one trippy line from “Change Is Now,” and the song’s guitar solo is the sound of thousands of high school longhairs being threatened with military service. But for every early, intrepid use of a Moog synthesizer, there’s something like the gentle cover of Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “Goin’ Back,” which came with its own confession: “A little bit of courage is all we lack.” The Notorious Byrd Brothers catches the band in a space between, it’s the sound of psychedelic pop’s sugars fermenting, but not yet turning into alcohol. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen: The Byrds: “Dolphin’s Smile”

Sonny Rollins: The Bridge (1962)

After releasing over 20 albums from 1953 to 1959, Sonny Rollins found himself being named in the same breath as John Coltrane and Miles Davis. But at the height of his fame, the tenor saxophonist disappeared from the jazz scene. Convalescing from the stresses of addiction and success, he began practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge’s pedestrian walkway, far from the peering eyes of the world (save the chance passerby).

Those three years of meditations led to The Bridge, an album that turns panoramic NYC vistas into ballads and bop of utmost soul. Stylistically, the record doesn’t veer far from the hard bop of Rollins’ celebrated 1956 LP Saxophone Colossus, but it digs a little deeper. The nimble title track, in particular, is a snapshot of his new level of control as his solo winds through a series of tempo changes. While his peers started to explore the structural limits of the genre with free jazz in the early ’60s, Rollins went further into what he knew, into himself, discovering a fount of grace in the process. –Kevin Lozano

Listen: Sonny Rollins: “The Bridge”

The Beatles: A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

Beatlemania was well underway when the Fab Four created A Hard Day’s Night; they were also simultaneously filming their first feature, and the flurry of activity forced the songwriting team of John Lennon and Paul McCartney to focus on cranking out their first album of original tunes. Some tracks echo their earlier songs and influences—girl groups, Motown, and even Tin Pan Alley—but by synthesizing these sounds, the Beatles wound up with a style that felt like the start of something new. It’s not just the songs, it’s the grace notes: the double-tracked vocals on “Any Time at All,” the country-rock gait of “I’ll Cry Instead,” the 12-string George Harrison wields throughout. The album also opened the floodgates for all the beat groups and blues combos lying in wait in the UK, ready to cross the Atlantic once America was ready to hear them. Every band in the British Invasion owes a debt not just to the Beatles but to A Hard Day’s Night specifically: It is the record that created a whole new world. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen: The Beatles: “Can’t Buy Me Love”

Big Brother & the Holding Company: Cheap Thrills (1968)

Janis Joplin proved she was an electrifying performer at the Monterey Pop festival, but she didn’t cement her legend until the next year, on the fourth track of Big Brother & the Holding Company’s major-label debut. “Piece of My Heart” is spare for a Big Brother track, with Sam Andrew and James Gurley’s rock guitars forced into the background by Joplin’s annihilating vocals. She squeezes out the chorus as though she is about to tear open her chest cavity.

Like the rest of Cheap Thrills, “Piece of My Heart” derives some of its power from John Simon’s canny production. By adding crowd noises to Big Brother’s studio recordings, he creates the impression that Joplin was fronting San Francisco’s rowdiest bar band—climbing up on a table, beer mug in hand, to howl about heartbreak to an audience of emotional drunks. On “Turtle Blues,” a ballad that mingles old-school blues piano with nimble guitar riffs, you can hear a glass shatter. The first 10 seconds of “Ball and Chain,” which transforms Big Mama Thornton’s classic into a languid acid-rock jam, sound like a false start. These moments could have felt like gimmicks if Joplin’s sincerity and fervor hadn’t endowed the album with such intimacy. –Judy Berman

Listen: Big Brother and the Holding Company: “Combination of the Two”

Dr. John: Gris-Gris (1968)

Mac Rebennack was far from the bayou in 1968. As a session musician in Los Angeles, he sat in with Frank Zappa, Phil Spector, and the Wrecking Crew at the height of the city’s psychedelic heyday, before the Manson family murders cast a pall over the Laurel Canyon dream. But despite being recorded in Spector’s favorite studio, Gold Star, not a sliver of local sun cuts through the mist of Gris-Gris, Rebennack’s debut album as his voodoo-inspired persona Dr. John the Nite Tripper. It’s a direct portal to his hometown of New Orleans, a sinewy swamp-funk jam that simmers together Afro-Caribbean percussion, earthy congas, whirling electric guitars, and pernicious flutes. Dr. John proves instantly at ease on opener “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya,” purring as he proclaims himself “the last of the best” medicine men, a French Quarter Rasputin as shifty as he is seductive. From there, he offers a collection of eccentric pleasures—aural charms and amulets amassed to foster luck and ward off evil spirits. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Dr. John: “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya”

White Noise: An Electric Storm (1969)

On November 23, 1963, one day after the assassination of JFK, British TV viewers were treated to their first episode of “Doctor Who,” an iconic TV series that would introduce not only the wonders of time travel and lo-fi monsters but also the sonic joys of early electronic music, thanks to the work of the fabled sound effects unit the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Five years later, Radiophonic composers Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson joined classical bass player David Vorhaus in White Noise, an experimental electronic act avant la lettre.

Their debut album, An Electric Storm, is astonishingly original. Side A is ostensibly in the lineage of ’60s psychedelic pop, home to the same darkly experimental melodic instincts that drove early Pink Floyd or the United States of America. Here, though, the music is adorned with tape-spliced electronic collages and sound effects, from the scrabbled circus sounds on “Here Come the Fleas” to the unsettling—and very “Doctor Who”—electronic pulses on “Firebird,” which create the impression of shifting sonic sands beneath the listener’s feet. Side B, however, is something entirely new, a terrifying theatrical soundscape of ghastly sonic intensity. One year later, Kraftwerk would release their debut album, but the future of electronic music had already arrived. –Ben Cardew

Listen: White Noise: “Love Without Sound”

Phil Ochs: I Ain’t Marching Anymore (1965)

Aesthetes who sneer at so-called “protest music” like to pretend that all songs with political agendas are strident statements of the obvious—sermons devoid of beauty, nuance, and especially humor. But Phil Ochs, a self-described “singing journalist” and a Dylan for the student-radical set, recorded some of the funniest, smartest, and prettiest tracks of the ’60s on his second album, I Ain’t Marching Anymore. The hilarious “Draft Dodger Rag” finds a would-be soldier telling the draft board he’s got epilepsy, a ruptured spleen, and, by the way, “I always carry a purse.” He also issues a scathing leftist critique of labor unions’ racism, over violently strummed acoustic guitar, on “Links on the Chain.”

Ochs’ most memorable songs make their points through poignant storytelling. The rousing title track is an allegory of a mythical soldier who’s spent over 150 years fighting for America and can no longer stomach imperialist violence. “Here’s to the State of Mississippi” closes the album with a vividly painted panorama of enforced ignorance, systemic bigotry, and police violence. These songs succeed as both art and political critique; it’s just unfortunate that, 50 years later, not one of them sounds like the relic of a less enlightened time. –Judy Berman

Listen: Phil Ochs: “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”

Ray Barretto: Acid (1968)

Although not nearly as “out there” as its title and artwork suggest, Ray Barretto’s 1968 experiment in Nuyorican soul is nevertheless an essential trip. It’s a missing link between the insanely catchy yet quickly dated Latin boogaloo sound of the early ’60s—a New York phenomenon that Barretto helped take international with his hit “El Watusi”—and the more expansive, Afrocentric Latin sound of the 1970s. Its strongest soul/boogaloo tracks have a Memphis-via-Harlem swing that captures the fierce, aspirational joy of mid-’60s soul.

Still, these moments are ultimately outshone by the pure, virtuosic salsa workout of “El Nuevo Barretto,” which opens the album. Its combination of Cuban roots and R&B vamping clearly foreshadows the more mainstream Latin rock of Carlos Santana. But if Acid is notable for its prophetic fusion, its real treasures—the bass-heavy, eight-minute jam “Espiritu Libre” and the minimalist title track, with its relentless Afro-Cuban drums—are not so much ahead of their time as they are removed from time, difficult to assign to a particular decade or hemisphere. –Edwin “STATS” Houghton

Listen: Ray Barretto: “Acid”

Alice Coltrane: A Monastic Trio (1968)

Alice Coltrane’s solo debut, A Monastic Trio, is also her tribute to her husband John Coltrane, who died the year before—a star-is-born/star-is-extinguished moment that remains unique in music. Anchored by Jimmy Garrison’s heavy bass frequencies, which take the modal structure of blues into something beyond it, its compositions sound like death. Coltrane’s resonant harp sets an ecstatic base for the strangled cries of Pharoah Sanders’ bass clarinet and tenor sax improvisations, and the album’s opening passages convey struggle and discord before giving way to celestial string trills and a lighter second side. Whether this sonic transformation is meant to embody John’s spiritual journey or Alice coming to terms with her grief, it is the rare instrumental album that is a difficult listen, both for the emotions it confronts and its willingness to push the boundaries of conventional music. It is equally difficult to forget. –Edwin “STATS” Houghton

Listen: Alice Coltrane: “Lord Help Me to Be”

Merle Haggard: Mama Tried (1968)

By 1968, Merle Haggard had made a comfortable niche singing honky-tonk-influenced songs about tough stuff like being a drunk and going it alone. At sharp but comfortable odds with the orchestral dressings of late-’60s Nashville—“countrypolitan,” they called it—Mama Tried is an album of difficult situations described with frankness and care, where a man sings of remembering his father’s hands broken and bleeding from work or the sight of his mother bedridden with disease his family was too poor to treat. At no moment does Haggard perform with undue sentiment; at no moment is his sound calibrated for pity. If anything, there’s something dreadful about Haggard’s ability to get on with it. True believers in sin, his narrators don’t bother seeking absolution through song. They wait for God, and already have a pretty good idea of what God’ll say. Blame the career-defining title track for inspiring hundreds, possibly thousands of tattoos worn by people with a dozen stories to tell but no good way to say they’re sorry. –Mike Powell

Listen: Merle Haggard: “Folsom Prison Blues”

Ornette Coleman Trio: Live at the “Golden Circle” Stockholm Vol. 1 (1965)

Ornette Coleman’s music is a study in contradiction: He questioned structure and his ideas launched the free jazz revolution, but he also had an infallible ear for melodies you can hum. He developed densely theoretical justifications for his boundary-pushing music, but his tone and approach were indebted to early days spent playing blues and R&B in bars. He was greatly admired by virtuoso players, but he was drawn to untutored playing, whether via his own experiments on trumpet and violin or by recruiting his 10-year-old son to drum on a record. It was never possible to boil Coleman’s music down to one or two concerns, but so much of what made him remarkable can be heard on At the “Golden Circle” Stockholm Vol. 1.

After an early run of quartet records with provocative titles (The Shape of Jazz to Come, Change of the Century, This Is Our Music), Coleman spent the rest of his career experimenting with instrumentation, arrangements, and settings. His 1965 tour of Europe found him performing in a trio with bassist David Izenzon and drummer Charles Moffett. With Coleman’s alto saxophone alone in front, he indulges his boundless melodic imagination, treating his new tunes like putty to be reshaped with each passing bar. His horn bellows, squeaks, and wails while also communicating on a microscopic level, with subtle shifts in phrasing and intonation that bring to mind the human voice. Golden Circle (and its equally fine, if further out, Vol. 2 companion) serves as both a terrific introduction to Coleman’s music and a towering highlight from his first decade. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Ornette Coleman Trio: “European Echoes”

Moondog: Moondog (1969)

The release of Moondog’s second self-titled album followed a 12-year hiatus, though in that time the iconoclastic poet and musician certainly wasn’t silent: Installed, as always, in his Viking garb on the streets of New York, he was in the company of Beat poets and members of all corners of the city’s musical avant-garde. (He even lived with Philip Glass for a period.) This album sees him trading in the shuffling modesty of his older recordings for a series of fully realized micro-symphonies that nevertheless retain his loving, oddball spirit. Many songs double as tributes to artist friends and inspirations: “Witch of Endor” was composed for a Martha Graham ballet; “Symphonique 6 (Good for Goodie)” and its woodwind swing nods to Benny Goodman; and “Lament I, ‘Bird’s Lament’” pays tribute to Charlie Parker with a free-ranging alto sax solo. Leaning as much on the bombast of European classicism as it does on the new rhythms coming out of New York minimalism, Moondog absorbs the essence of an era while peering beyond it. –Thea Ballard

Listen: Moondog: “Bird’s Lament”

The Delfonics: La La Means I Love You (1968)

For most of the ’60s, soul music was defined by the pop-minded sounds of Detroit and the bluesier rhythms of Memphis, but with this album, Philadelphia elbowed its way to the table. Spearheaded by producer/conductor Thom Bell, the Delfonics’ fastidiously orchestrated debut introduced the world to an imagining of R&B so suave and gentlemanly, it made the tuxedoed crooners of Motown sound like motorcycle-riding bad boys. At a time when soul was becoming faster and funkier, this effortlessly smooth group made an album with two Burt Bacharach covers on it.

The Delfonics’ sound became the foundation for some of the best soul music of the early ’70s, much of it also recorded with Bell, including classics from the Spinners and the O’Jays. As durable as the template proved to be, though, few of the Philly soul full-lengths that followed cast quite the same spell as La La Means I Love You, nor committed so completely to its pristine, white-marble vision. It’s still impossible not to be swept away by the sheer decadence of it all. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: The Delfonics: “Losing You”

Max Roach: We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (1960)

In 1959, drummer Max Roach and writer Oscar Brown Jr. began working on a civil rights-themed suite for jazz ensemble and chorus. They planned to debut it in 1963, in the 100th anniversary year of the Emancipation Proclamation. But when sit-in demonstrations against segregation began, Roach and his collaborator moved up their timetable. The urgency of the two 1960 recording sessions that resulted in We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite still prove dramatically gripping, just as the political themes that spurred the bebop drummer remain salient.

On “Driva’ Man,” Brown’s lyrics sketch the practices of sexual assault on plantations. Vocalist Abbey Lincoln handles Roach’s world-weary melody with defiant grace as saxophonist Coleman Hawkins projects mournfully. On the wordless “Triptych,” Lincoln creates a sense of drama and resolution by moving through textures of solemnity, rebellion, and repose. Whether in the company of a Nigerian percussionist (“All Africa”) or working with bop stylists like the trumpeter Booker Little, Roach’s playing is as sharp as his arrangements. By building successfully on jazz’s previous political messages (including Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”), We Insist! played a catalyzing role in the music’s next decade of protest. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: Max Roach: “All Africa”

Jacques Brel: Ces Gens-là (1965)

Jacques Brel defected from the bourgeoisie as a young man, abandoning his stuffy Belgian family for the cabaret nightclubs of 1950s Paris. By 1966, he was an international icon, packing concert halls in New York, London, and throughout the Soviet Union. That year, a dozen before his death, the master songwriter threatened to retire from music, but not before releasing Ces Gens-là, a slippery chanson classic. In charismatic vignettes, Brel presents a cast of flawed and unreliable narrators—jealous lovers, inspired drunks, would-be superstars. His theatrical delivery conceals intimate observations, and he exorcises his characters’ unrealized dreams just when we might question their motives. On the song “Jef,” strings lurch across a tightrope of discord, mirroring the precarious friendship between a heartbroken alcoholic and his stargazing, gutter-dwelling savior. On the title track, the narrator deliciously satirizes a family of bourgeois degenerates: imitates their porcine soup-slobbering, laments their impatience for a rich relative’s death. As strings part the sky, he announces the family’s gravest crime: forbidding his relationship with Frida, the family daughter. Was his vicious class commentary a farce? Either way, a final twist somewhat validates their reservations: Our narrator—passionate, lovably flawed—half-confesses to having slit cats’ throats. “They didn’t smell good,” he reasons. Brel could not, at the very least, be accused of writing stock characters. –Jazz Monroe

Listen: Jacques Brel: “Ces Gens-là”

La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela: The Black Record (1969)

By 1969, La Monte Young already had a significant influence on the trajectory of popular music. A guru of drone switched on by the hum of electrical generators and high winds that surrounded his childhood home in rural Idaho, come the early ’60s, Young had relocated to New York, where he founded the experimental performance group Theatre of Eternal Music. Among his players was a young John Cale; shortly after, Cale took up his viola as part of a downtown rock band called the Warlocks, soon to be renamed the Velvet Underground, and the rest is history.

The Theatre’s ’60s recordings have emerged only as bootlegs, so it’s the so-called Black Record—its unofficial name a reference to the calligraphed cover by Young’s wife, collaborator and fellow Theatre member Marian Zazeela—that stands as the earliest official example of Young’s recorded work. Handily, its two side-long tracks neatly encapsulate Young’s late-’60s process. Untethered from the 12-note Western music vocabulary, the pair experiments with long, droning pitches that seem to collapse time around them. On “31 VII 69 10:26-10:49 PM,” Young and Zazeela vocalize around a single glowing sine wave, while on the flip (“23 VIII 64 2:50:45-3:11 AM”) we hear a gong acquired from the sculptor Robert Morris played with a double bass bow. The result is a yawning metallic void that presages everything from Brian Eno’s ambient music to the amplifier armageddon of Sunn O))). –Louis Pattison

Listen: La Monte Young: “31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM The Volga Delta”

John Coltrane: Olé Coltrane (1961)

Olé Coltrane is a curious record in John Coltrane’s career. It’s his last session as a bandleader for Atlantic; it features one of his largest ensembles, including two bassists—Reggie Workman and Art Davis—and Eric Dolphy on flute. It precedes the spiritual and interstellar exploration of his work for Impulse! Records. Over the previous years, he had developed a method of improvisation, classified by critic Ira Gitler as “sheets of sound,” in which he would vertically and vertiginously stack arpeggios in his solos.

So it’s strange that Olé is, in a way, Coltrane’s most horizontal album, if only for how much real estate he cedes to the rhythm and groove. This is especially evident on “Olé,” which unfolds for 18 minutes on a hypnotic rhythm sustained by the fixtures of John Coltrane’s band, pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones. Workman and Davis, meanwhile, try to destabilize this groove by drawing strange, pulsing magnetic fields and sawing their basses so vigorously, they form long, dark shadows into which the song sinks. When Coltrane finally takes his solo, 13 minutes into the track, what pours out of his saxophone isn’t a toppling structure: Instead, one hears him scraping against the upper limits of his range. It sounds like he’s starting to escape the atmosphere. –Brad Nelson

Listen: John Coltrane: “Olé”

Son House: Father of Folk Blues (1965)

Eddie James “Son” House, Jr. did not sell his soul; he was not blinded by lye. If he seems less mythologized than the average bluesman of his era and stature, it’s largely because he was alive to record this album and subsequently receive polite applause at colleges and folk festivals for a decade afterward. But there’s no questioning his bona fides: House was blues bedrock enough to have once shooed away a young Robert Johnson.

His rediscovery in the ’60s resulted in Father of Folk Blues, an album that’s even more stripped-down than his ’40s Library of Congress sessions with Alan Lomax, driven by his slinky steel guitar work and deceptively sweet vocals. More than a guitar player, House was a singer and a writer: Eight of this album’s nine songs are credited to him, and “Death Letter” and “Levee Camp Moan” have become classics in their own right. He may have never made a deal with the devil, but House paid a different cost, taking terrible jobs as a chef and railroad porter, waiting until someone cared. Father of Folk Blues is the payoff. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen: Son House: “Sundown”

Roberta Flack: First Take (1969)

Roberta Flack’s singing is like a fever. Even as her vocals gather mass and volume, there is the sense that she is communicating something so intimate and honest that it burns from the inside. She returns to certain phrases and words in a way that widens their definitions; on her glacial recording of the Donny Hathaway/Robert Ayers–written “Our Ages or Our Hearts,” from her debut album First Take, she sings, “I thought… I thought we had a love that was true.” The second “thought” is broader than the first, drawing the unabridged history of a relationship into itself.

On First Take, Flack’s singing and spacious piano playing blend soul, blues, jazz, and folk. The arrangements are dense, but they almost exclusively express themselves in flourishes; in the opening track, “Compared to What,” the horn section abruptly sprouts out of the chorus. It’s a remarkable song on a remarkable debut, Flack expressing political and personal dissatisfaction while barely raising her voice. “Hate that human/Love that stinking mutt,” she sings in an angry simmer. “Try to make it real/But compared to what?” The fire in her voice flickers beyond a composed surface, but it still burns. –Brad Nelson

Listen: Roberta Flack: “I Told Jesus”

Don Cherry: Eternal Rhythm (1969)

A crucial player in the birth of free jazz in the early ’60s, trumpeter Don Cherry discovered an even freer world on Eternal Rhythm. Recorded in Berlin in November 1968, the album found him working with a transcontinental, all-star cast that included guitarist Sonny Sharrock and avant-garde French percussionist Jacques Thollot, establishing the Oklahoma City-born Cherry as a joyous visionary and global intermediary. Finding shapes on the far side of complete freeness, the LP’s two side-long suites encompass clouds of group improvisation but also mini ensembles, coalescing motifs, and solo flute pieces. Throughout, the constant chime of melodic percussion gives the music a rolling lightness, even as the ensemble hits full density on “Autumn Melody,” an earthy grounding for Sharrock’s splintering guitar. Open-eared and timeless in spirit, Eternal Rhythm remains a glowing doorway to music from the other side. –Jesse Jarnow

Listen: Don Cherry: “Eternal Rhythm, Pt. 1”

Jorge Ben: Samba Esquema Novo (1963)

Though most widely known for launching the endlessly covered “Mas, Que Nada,” Jorge Ben’s debut album is a bossa nova masterpiece rounded out by 11 other equally immortal, if less imitated, songs. Raised in Rio by an Ethiopian mother, the 18-year-old Ben infused fresh blood into the city’s established sound, incorporating a stronger samba influence in his rhythmic guitar style than his predecessors. Likewise, his vocal style was much less restrained, as likely to slide upward into a soaring, yipping cry for joy (“Uála Uálalá,” “A Tamba”) as it was to remain in the quiet, warm lounge tone most associated with the genre.

Samba Esquema Novo is one of most distinctive bossa nova albums ever recorded and a tantalizing glimpse into Ben’s unique oeuvre, which straddles bossa, samba, Tropicália, and Afro-funk. His impact as a songwriter and sonic innovator is particularly foreshadowed on the spooky, minor-keyed passages of “Quero Esquecer Você” and “A Tamba.” Though he has often been overlooked in comparison to contemporaries like Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, and Sergio Mendes, particularly outside Brazil, his contribution is no less major. –Edwin “STATS” Houghton

Listen: Jorge Ben: “A Tamba”

Archie Shepp: Blasé (1969)

Before taking up the saxophone, Archie Shepp studied drama, training that proved belatedly useful: The players on Blasé sometimes seem to be trading off monologues, circling each other at his direction. Shepp’s theatrical form of jazz estranges tradition—the first sound heard here is blues harmonica, off-key and dissonant. The hymn “There Is a Balm in Gilead” is pared down to a resounding nothing: muted flugelhorn, piano keys faintly brushed. Like much of the album, one of five Shepp recorded in the same year, it wouldn’t work without the singer Jeanne Lee, who gives that title such ironic sting: “Blasé, ain’t you, daddy?/You, who shot your sperm into me/But never set me free.” Warmth and reproach mingle in her voice, like a handful of cinders. The notes contort while crawling on ahead, intimately menacing. –Chris Randle

Listen: Archie Shepp: “Blasé”

David Axelrod: Song of Innocence (1968)

In 1968, a former boxer turned producer, composer, and A&R man sets to work on his most ambitious project yet: an orchestral tone poem based around Song of Innocence and of Experience, a book of poems published by the visionary English author William Blake some two centuries before. David Axelrod had previously been the creative force behind the Electric Prunes’ Mass in F Minor, a psychedelic religious opera sung in Latin that all but killed off the hapless garage rockers that were its unlikely vessel. Despite that album’s noble failure, Axelrod somehow assembled an ensemble of some 30 players—including members of L.A.’s hotshot session players the Wrecking Crew—to bring Song of Innocence to life.

Baroque and of rarefied atmosphere, “Holy Thursday” and “The Smile” blossom with sumptuous strings, horns, and scorching electric guitar leads. But you can also hear hints of Axelrod the pugilist in the album’s punchy, funk-inflected drum breaks. Song of Innocence was seen by some as a folly, but by the 1990s, Axelrod’s work was being rediscovered by a generation of crate-diggers like DJ Shadow and Madlib, who recognized the holy, beautiful vision writ through his grooves. –Louis Pattison

Listen: David Axelrod: “Song of Innocence”

Alexander “Skip” Spence: Oar (1969)

A catalyst behind the early San Francisco rock scene, Alexander “Skip” Spence followed up a stint as the drummer in Jefferson Airplane by joining the star-crossed psych rock outfit Moby Grape. It didn’t go so well: While working on an album in New York, Spence took a fire ax to his bandmates, landing him in the Tombs and, eventually, Bellevue. After his discharge from the mental hospital, he went to Nashville and cut the entirety of Oar in four days with himself on every instrument. By turns shambolic, astonishing, silly, and shattered, the album is a haunting snapshot of an artist mastering country, loose-limbed rock, ghostly gospel, free-love ditties, and drum’n’bass abstraction as his mental state crumbles. There’s no darker portrait of the perils of the psychedelic era. –Andy Beta

Listen: Alexander “Skip” Spence: “Diana”

Frank Sinatra: September of My Years (1965)

The dewy-eyed oldie “It Was a Very Good Year” is on the shortlist of songs that define Frank Sinatra’s midlife resurgence, but the title also describes the year he was having when he sang it. In 1965, at age 50, the Voice got his second wind: He was the subject of the Emmy-winning special Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music and made his directorial debut in None But the Brave, which he also starred in and produced. He was shadowed by Gay Talese for what would become the mythic Esquire article “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” He bought his first Learjet, and two albums he released would go on to win Album of the Year Grammys. As he entered his golden years, Sinatra was solidifying his legend.

Even amid this career renaissance, twilight was clearly setting on the storied songman. So it’s fitting that September of My Years, the first of those two Grammy-winners, is a traditional pop standard-bearer about learning to accept growing old. The aging Lothario gazes longingly at young lovers and remembers his conquests, and he gazes reflectively at himself through the looking glass, catching glimpses of the man he once was. The album’s extended metaphor—autumn signaling the coming of the end—presents a bittersweet backdrop for his soul-searching. This collection of sentimental songs from a self-professed playboy feels as essential to his myth as any of the swanky displays of his youth; the writing is wistful and evocative and his voice swells into lush, crescendoing strings. September of My Years is graceful and meditative, willingly accepting of a time-imposed truth: “That world I knew is lost to me.” –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Frank Sinatra: “Once Upon a Time”

Shirley and Dolly Collins: Anthems in Eden (1969)

On 1969’s Anthems in Eden, English folk singer Shirley Collins and her sister Dolly delved into the past to give the modern folk scene a kick up the ærs. Shirley refashioned a clutch of traditional numbers into a song-cycle about women in wartime. Dolly arranged the material for David Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London, featuring the strange, dissonant sound of crumhorns and sacbuts. Together, they imbued this Old English material with disarming new vitality.

Anthems opens with “A Song-Story,” which describes a relationship between a young woman and a blacksmith who are besotted with one another. He betrays her, and a valuable, progressive lesson rings through their centuries-long tale (“There’s no trusted man/Not my own brother/So girls, if you would love/Love one each other”). Along with stories of personal treachery, Anthems offers a subtle indictment of war’s effect on the British working classes. Romantic, earthy, vengeful, and above all self-possessed, the album tells a timeless narrative of innocence and experience, and suggests that sacrifice is only worth making on one’s own terms. –Laura Snapes

Listen: Shirley and Dolly Collins: “God Dog”

Mary Lou Williams: Black Christ of the Andes (1964)

Upon her conversion to Catholicism in the 1950s, piano innovator Mary Lou Williams all but disappeared from the world of jazz. The following decade, she emerged from her prayerful isolation with this visionary 10-song LP. Initially an eponymous release, subsequent reissues formalized its title as Black Christ of the Andes—a reference to St. Martin de Porres, a dark-skinned 17th-century healer who symbolized racial harmony and was later canonized by Pope John XXIII. The first track is Williams’ largely a cappella hymn to the saint, its choral exclamations driven by traditional, mid-century pop-group harmony. But Williams also throws in startling, modernist harmonic material, reflecting her connection to bebop. Toward the end of the song, her piano makes a swooping entrance—and when the singers join her, there are swinging rhythms and call-and-response vocalizations in the reverent mix. This rich variety sets the tone for the rest of the album, which moves from the avant-garde solo piano strains of “A Fungus A Mungus” to the rousing and sanctified small-band groove of “Praise the Lord.” In earlier decades, jazz was seen as principally belonging to the secular realm, but Williams showed how swinging compositions and spiritual reflection could be one and the same. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: Mary Lou Williams: “Black Christ of the Andes (St. Martin de Porres)”

Stevie Wonder: For Once in My Life (1968)

The story of Stevie Wonder’s first decade in music is his rise from young talent to true auteur—no small accomplishment for an artist working in Motown’s famously controlling machine. Wonder hadn’t completed that arc yet at age 18 when he released For Once in My Life. It was already his 10th LP, but this record marked some major milestones, including his most writing credits yet on an album and his first production one. Most significantly, it marked the first of Wonder’s pop albums to feature the clavinet, the instrument that would come to symbolize his creative ambitions.

Song for song, For Once in My Life is stronger than Wonder’s previous albums, but it’s the sheer eagerness of his performances that makes it stand out. By 1968, he’d fully grown into his adult voice, and he lets it soar here, eager to show off all its new tricks. You can hear Wonder take a deep breath and smack his tongue against the roof of his mouth before hitting the show-stopping note on “I Don’t Know Why,” and by the end of the song, he’s practically run himself ragged. Even would-be ballads like the title track get an ebullient, swinging treatment. The last thing Wonder wanted to do, at this point in his career, was slow down. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: Stevie Wonder: “For Once in My Life”

Sun Ra and His Arkestra: The Magic City (1966)

Keyboardist, bandleader, and self-proclaimed spaceman Sun Ra released more than 20 albums over the course of the ’60s. They all have their charms, but The Magic City is particularly vehement about being jazz on Ra and his Arkestra’s terms and no one else’s. Named after a train station sign in Ra’s hometown of Birmingham, Ala., “The Magic City” itself is a 27-minute group improvisation, with Ra playing fractured figures on a piano and reeling spacey whistles out of a Clavioline (sometimes simultaneously). For most of the piece, he pulls two or three musicians at a time into the spotlight, then out again; the Arkestra probes tentatively around the neon-light field of the imaginary place their leader is evoking, and sometimes erupts into swaggering clusters of horns. As a further backhand to jazz convention, the album includes both “Abstract Eye” and “Abstract ‘I’”—two versions of the same piece that suggest the flexibility of what a “composition” could mean to Ra and his group. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra: “The Magic City”

The Isley Brothers: It’s Our Thing (1969)

As It’s Our Thing opens, Ronald Isley catches a woman in a compromising situation. She’s been sleeping around, but Isley preempts any fears that he might rat on her. It’s all right, he assures her: He’s been cheating on his girl, too. And so sets the tone for one of the most exuberantly hedonistic soul albums of the ’60s, a judgment-free celebration of free love and freedom in general.

Autonomy was strong on the Isley Brothers’ minds at the time. They’d spent the previous few years on Motown, where they’d begun to feel out of place—Isley’s untamed voice often clashed with the smoother songs they’d been assigned to record, and the group had grown resentful as the label continually passed its surefire hits to other artists. Without Berry Gordy overseeing their image, the Isleys were free to run with their wild side, writing every song on It’s Our Thing themselves, and concocting a looser, funkier, and kinkier record than anything Motown would’ve allowed. The group would reinvent themselves ceaselessly over the next decade-and-a-half, but It’s Our Thing marked the moment where they first grasped how infinite the possibilities were. They could sleep with whomever they wanted. They could make whatever music they wanted. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: The Isley Brothers: “It’s Your Thing”

Roy Orbison: Crying (1962)

On the engagement ode “She Wears My Ring,” Roy Orbison allows himself a rare moment of pure joy. “She swears to wear it with eternal devotion,” he beams. Alas, this bliss is short-lived. On the album’s very next track, he’s all alone once again: It’s his wedding day, but all he has to hang on to is that same cold, gold ring. She’s gone.

Ardent devotee Bruce Springsteen, who copped Orbison’s melodramatic delivery on Born to Run, once described the singer as “the coolest uncool loser you’d ever seen.” His tinted shades gave him mystique, but he was a pining romantic at heart, an introvert who could turn a teary pop ballad into an opera for the ages. He wasn’t particularly suave onstage, like Elvis, or even that cute, like the Everly Brothers, but his dweebiness made his tales of unrequited love that much more believable. When he sings “love hurts” in that sterling, warbling tenor, you can practically see the bruises. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Roy Orbison: “Love Hurts”

Fred Neil: Fred Neil (1966)

Originally a singer-songwriter cog in the Brill Building pop machine, Fred Neil and his fathoms-deep baritone soon found a more accommodating setting in the Greenwich Village folk boom of the early ’60s. There, he mentored budding young folkies like Bob Dylan, Karen Dalton, Tim Buckley, and David Crosby and released a self-titled album that still resonates in its profundity. “The Dolphins” and “Everybody’s Talkin’” remain evocative classics, as humble and mysterious as the folk music standards Neil and cohorts previously emulated at Café Wha? The album ranges from harmonica and 12-string folk staples to ruminations that shimmer with electric guitar lines. Spare and serene yet with an underlying sadness, Neil proved that “searching for the dolphins in the sea” wasn’t just a metaphor but a life goal, soon turning his attentions from music altogether and towards dolphin conservation in South Florida instead. –Andy Beta

Listen: Fred Neil: “Everybody’s Talkin’”

Duke Ellington / Charles Mingus / Max Roach: Money Jungle (1963)

Already an immortal songwriter and composer, Duke Ellington refused to fade into the background, even as he reached his sixties. And with the one-day 1962 session that resulted in Money Jungle, he took the rare step of paring down his big band sound by playing in a trio with two artists decades his junior: bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach. Together, they catalyzed a rhythm section that pushed Ellington’s melodic and improvisational chops to the limit. On the title track, Ellington enthusiastically reckons with the avant-garde. The album’s quieter moments—the softly rustling “Fleurette Africaine” and the romantic, subtly bluesy “Warm Valley”—find odd-angled routes towards reverie. The album closes with two old standards from Ellington’s 1930s heyday—a deliriously joyful take on Juan Tizol’s “Caravan,” and a lush meditation on the Ellington-composed “Solitude.” They advance the past into the future on terms even a musical forefather like Duke could welcome. –Nate Patrin

Listen: Duke Ellington/Charles Mingus/Max Roach: “Money Jungle”

Aretha Franklin: Aretha Now (1968)

Aretha Franklin’s 15th album, Aretha Now, came into a world on fire. The United States was in turmoil in 1968, reeling from the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; amid protests and uprisings, troops waged war in Vietnam. Perhaps on purpose, Franklin reflected those tensions on her opening song, “Think,” a volcanic soul stomp that cries for freedom.

As the story goes, Aretha Now was recorded in five days under the watch of producer Jerry Wexler, who also oversaw her smash Lady Soul earlier that year. Aretha Now turned out to be a barnburner in its own right, slightly overshadowed by its predecessor yet no less potent. On “You’re a Sweet Sweet Man,” for instance, Franklin sounds especially resonant, and her cover of “Hello Sunshine” might be better than Wilson Pickett’s original. Aretha Now captures Franklin ascending to the height of her power, helping her earn her rightful title as the Queen of Soul. –Marcus J. Moore

Listen: Aretha Franklin: “Hello Sunshine”

The Flying Burrito Brothers: The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969)

In a flowery West Coast scene that dismissed George Jones and Porter Wagoner as conservative squares, Gram Parsons of the Flying Burrito Brothers treated country 45s as sacred texts. What’s more, he adopted their bedazzled Nudie suit uniform, tricking his out with pills and pot leaves. The band, formed by Parsons and Chris Hillman after they left the Byrds, played to Parsons’ strengths: a deep knowledge of country music, a strong voice, a pretty face, rock star friends, and a trust fund that kept him stocked with drugs and flashy duds. 

The Gilded Palace of Sin—the band’s first and best record—establishes their identity perfectly. The warm, loose twang of Kleinlow’s pedal steel underscores Parsons and Hillman’s harmonies. They offer up morality tales about music industry greed (“Sin City”), groupie culture (“Christine’s Tune”), draft-dodging (“My Uncle”), and in true country tradition, heartbreak (“Hot Burrito #1”). They also expand beyond country’s confines, covering two classics by the Muscle Shoals songwriting legends Chips Moman and Dan Penn. Gilded Palace is a testament to the band’s omnivorous nature: They blurred the lines between country and rock, James Carr and Lefty Frizzell, churchgoers and hippie boys. –Evan Minsker

Listen: The Flying Burrito Brothers: “Sin City”

Jimmy Cliff: Jimmy Cliff (1969)

If the 1972 soundtrack to The Harder They Come spread the sounds of reggae worldwide, that film’s star and soundtrack curator sowed the seeds for the incoming revolution three years earlier with his self-titled album. Jimmy Cliff was already a hero in his native Jamaica, a celebrity since he was a teen, but this is the record that brought the 21-year-old singer to an international audience. It includes some of Cliff’s most enduring songs—“Many Rivers to Cross,” “Vietnam,” “Wonderful World, Beautiful People”—and each one became a reggae standard in its own right, covered endlessly after Cliff let them loose into the world. The album also saw him showing off his range as a songwriter who was equally comfortable penning mournful ballads and incisive protest songs as he explored the flexibility of a sound on the cusp of its breakthrough. –Kevin Lozano

Listen: Jimmy Cliff: “Vietnam”

Various Artists: A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector (1963)

A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector is an advent calendar of tracks featuring the producer’s trademark opulence. But its grand soundscapes, from sweeping strings to clanging bells, would be nothing but window dressing without its talented cast—most notably Darlene Love, whose soaring, bittersweet vocals on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” challenge the season’s easy cheer. Throughout, Spector retrofits Yuletide standards with his maximalist Wall of Sound style, helping the Crystals breathe new life into “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and the Ronettes revive “Frosty the Snowman.” –Zoe Camp

Listen: Darlene Love: “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”

The United States of America: The United States of America (1968)

Their name was a provocation—“a way of expressing disdain for governmental policy. It was like hanging the flag upside down,” as the group’s Dorothy Moskowitz told Terrascope. But if you were young in 1968, there was a lot going on—LSD, Vietnam, The White Album, Stockhausen—and the United States of America somehow sounded like all of it at once: a counterculture state-of-the-union address. Their debut album was the work of a group of UCLA students working under the direction of Joseph Byrd, an ethnomusicologist and former student of John Cage.

Byrd, a card-carrying Communist, envisaged an avant-garde rock band with radical politics at its center, and from that combustible starting point came a suite of music that pulls in all directions. Fuzz-rock and musique concrète leaks into traditional jazz and ragtime, with Moskowitz’s beautiful but affectless voice a rare constant. By any conventional yardstick, it’s a jumble, but think of it as the musical equivalent of a Rauschenberg collage and it all makes sense. –Louis Pattison

Listen: The United States of America: “Cloud Song”

John Coltrane: Live at Birdland (1964)

“One of the most baffling things about America is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here,” writes the poet LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) in his liner notes to Live at Birdland. Throughout the 1960s, John Coltrane mastered this paradox, turning harrowing sadness into sublime beauty and vice versa. Live at Birdland, one of his most accessible and engaging albums from the decade, offers plenty of straight-up beauty, especially in Coltrane’s lilting version of Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro-Blue” and two other tunes recorded at an October 1963 concert.

But one piece recorded in a studio, “Alabama,” goes deeper, melding tragedy and grace into something epic despite lasting only five minutes. Written in reaction to the Birmingham church bombing just weeks prior, timed to match the cadence of Martin Luther King Jr.’s memorial speech, “Alabama” is played by Coltrane’s classic quartet with both solemnity and hope. It’s a stirring, timeless example of how music can grapple with incomprehensible human acts. –Marc Masters

Listen: John Coltrane: “Alabama”

The Monks: Black Monk Time (1966)

The Monks were rock’n’roll’s original trolls. In an era when British Invasion bands were sparking sexual revolutions and denying Jesus’ chart appeal, the Monks cheekily pledged allegiance to the monastic tradition, foregoing mop-tops in favor of tonsures. At the dawn of the guitar-god age, they wielded a banjo player. And where most young men their age were starting bands to get girls, the Monks seemed more interested in repelling them with caveman-stomped kiss-offs like “I Hate You.”

But the Monks’ novel nihilism was driven by very real neuroses. While budding U.S. rock bands could spout off about their teen angst from the comfort of their parents’ garages, the Monks were formed by five American GIs stationed in Germany, staring down the possibility of getting shipped off to Vietnam. That cloud of dread consumes even the most joyously anarchic songs on their 1966 debut. The opener “Monk Time” rolls out on a bouncing-ball beat like some children’s-show theme song for juvenile delinquents, but it’s overtaken by Gary Burger’s unsettling shrieks—“Stop it! I don’t like it!”—as if he were suddenly overcome by PTSD. Even when not directly addressing the horrors of combat, Black Monk Time is a discomfiting listen. –Stuart Berman

Listen: The Monks: “Shut Up”

Tammy Wynette: D-I-V-O-R-C-E (1968)

Tammy Wynette didn’t take long to peak. She was only just a couple of years into her career by 1968, but already in the middle of a long run of consecutive No. 1 hits that cemented her stardom. She released her signature song, “Stand By Your Man,” that year, as well as her tearjerker of a third album, D-I-V-O-R-C-E, which captured some of her most harrowing performances.

The main attraction is the title track, about a couple’s attempt to hide their divorce from their not-yet-literate 4-year-old child by spelling out the word instead of saying it. Wynette had a gift for sniffing out the sorrow in any material she was handed, though, so even the obligatory covers typical of country albums from that era soared—especially anguished takes on the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and country fiddler John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind.” Producer Billy Sherrill helped pioneer the “countrypolitan” sound—a sometimes overblown tangle of strings, choirs, and twang—but with Wynette, he always cleared plenty of room for her sterling voice, allowing every quiver and catch in her throat to speak for itself. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: Tammy Wynette: “Sweet Dreams”

Sonny Sharrock: Black Woman (1969)

Sonny Sharrock’s 1969 debut as a bandleader, Black Woman, is a distinguished free jazz record because of three things: the restless thrum of Milford Graves’ drumming, which never assembles into anything as coherent as a pulse; the antlered progressions of Sonny’s guitar playing; and the voice of Linda Sharrock—singular, gorgeous, uniquely capable of deconstructing itself in real time. When all those elements align in “Peanut,” they seem to produce a shimmer; when they stutter and fall apart, as they do often in “Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black,” each part separates into its own bracing fraction. That Linda rarely sings any recognizable words is key: Black Woman tries to give shape to a nameless personal and emotional betweenness—between fraternity and isolation, between singing and screaming, between joy and pain. –Brad Nelson

Listen: Sonny Sharrock: “Peanut”

The Kinks: Something Else By the Kinks (1967)

While many of their British Invasion peers were hypnotized by the escapist allure of psychedelia, the Kinks offered a focused view of the cruel absurdities of real life. Their fifth album, Something Else, may boast all the telltale trappings of circa-’67 rock production (harpsichords, chirpy horns, woozy sound effects, bird calls), but they’re used to subtly color rather than to distort songwriter Ray Davies’ wry, acutely detailed portraits of workaday drudgery, paycheck-draining impoverishment, and family dysfunction (a subject he was all too familiar with). But on Something Else’s swooning closer, “Waterloo Sunset,” Davies’ withering social commentary gives way to a quiet reverence for his surroundings. Part love song, part urban travelogue, part zen mantra, “Waterloo Sunset” serves the same function as psychedelia—inviting us to block out the bustle and grime of city life and bask in a natural wonder—but with a sobering sense of clarity. –Stuart Berman

Listen: The Kinks: “Tin Soldier Man”

Marvin Gaye: In the Groove (1968)

Marvin Gaye and Norman Whitfield hated each other, but the producer Whitfield brought out a newfound intensity and fervor in Gaye’s performances on In the Groove. (Gaye later said his collaborator had him “reaching for notes that caused my throat veins to bulge.”) The strategy worked, though this album’s biggest hit almost didn’t even see the light of day: “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” was shelved for a full year before being added to In the Groove at the last minute. The song became Gaye’s first single to top the Billboard 100 when it was later re-released as a single, eventually selling more than 4 million copies. It cemented the singer’s financial stability and gave him the leverage he needed to break free of Motown’s strict quality-control system and invent a whole new take on soul music a few years later. –Kevin Lozano

Listen: Marvin Gaye: “Chained”

Mulatu Astatke: Afro-Latin Soul, Vol. 1 (1966)

The title is sublimely generic; the “Ethiopian Quintet” credited as backing band is mostly Puerto Rican. Mulatu Astatke would become better-known for the records he made after returning to Ethiopia in the 1970s, but Afro-Latin Soul is trickier than it first appears. His idiosyncratic style, fusing the traditional pentatonic scale with Western jazz chords, remained half-formed—this album resembles Latin dance music of the period, led by someone learning the jams secondhand. On tracks like “Askum,” there’s a charming sense that Astatke  is speeding up to match the tempo of the audience. He wrote lyrics for “I Faram Gami I Faram,” uncharacteristically, and got sideman Louis Rodriguez to sing them in Amharic, along with a trumpeting elephant. The vibraphone you hear everywhere doesn’t comfort or lull; it gives each groove a blurred weight, as if moving through the immaculate lacquer of dreams. –Chris Randle

Listen: Mulatu Astatke: “Shagu”

Desmond Dekker and The Aces: Israelites (1969)

In June 1969, a few years before Jimmy Cliff, Johnny Nash, and Bob Marley introduced reggae to the pop mainstream, Kingston group Desmond Dekker and the Aces cracked the Billboard Top 10 with “Israelites,” beguiling American listeners with an off-kilter, upstroke rhythm, Dekker’s high-pitched croon, and lyrics that linked hardscrabble Jamaican life to Old Testament myths. Dekker had released several Jamaican hit singles through the ’60s (and topped the UK charts in 1967 with the rude boy ode “007 (Shanty Town)”), but the U.S. success of “Israelites” led to a quick LP follow-up helmed by legendary producer Leslie Kong. Far from a simple cash-in, Israelites shows the depth of Dekker’s crossover capacity. Covers of Bill Anderson’s 1960 country hit “Tip of My Fingers” and a ballad version of “For Once in My Life,” a 1968 up-tempo smash for Stevie Wonder, share space with purely Jamaican tunes like the sassy “Rude Boy Train” and “It Mek” (island patois for “that’s what you get”). Unfairly classified as a “one-hit wonder” for the surprise success of “Israelites,” Dekker’s historical role is much more significant: He was the first Jamaican pop diplomat. –Eric Harvey

Listen: Desmond Dekker and the Aces: “It Mek”

Pink Floyd: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967)

As a no-show on classic-rock playlists, Pink Floyd’s debut is rarely anyone’s starting point with the band. But even if the British group had ended with the dismissal of original leader Syd Barrett following the release of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, their place in psychedelic rock would be assured. The album is one of the mode’s greatest achievements, finding space for both fractured fairy tales and 10-minute interstellar freakouts while making both sound equally mind-altering (and frightening). It also makes a tragic hero out of the troubled, brilliant, and ultimately doomed Barrett. Fifty years later, it’s possible to see Pink Floyd as everything punk and indie rock sought to tear down as well as a foundational influence on those same movements. –Ian Cohen

Listen: Pink Floyd: “Astronomy Domine”

The Meters: The Meters (1969)

There were dozens of instrumental R&B hits in the ’60s, but most of them were showcases for a star soloist. New Orleans’ the Meters, the house band for Allen Toussaint, evolved into an impossibly tight funk ensemble without a leader and with no shortage of personalities. Their breakthrough hit “Cissy Strut” bounces equally between all four members, including drummer “Ziggy” Modeliste, whose cymbal smashes are direct commands to the hips.

The group whipped up most of their debut album quickly when “Cissy Strut” started climbing the charts, offering the dance grooves they’d honed and hardened in eight-hour gigs at the Ivanhoe club on Bourbon Street. It’s remarkable how much open air there is in The Meters’ funk: Keyboardist Art Neville glides as the rest of the musicians snap and crack, and burners like “Sophisticated Cissy” and “Ease Back” slow down sensually while heating the dance floor up. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: The Meters: “Live Wire”

The Beach Boys: Smiley Smile (1967)

After Brian Wilson’s epic Smile project came crashing to earth in 1967, the Beach Boys knocked out a quickie album to replace it. Filled with casual re-recordings of songs and fragments considered for Smile, along with two earlier singles that sound completely out of place in their baroque grandiosity (“Good Vibrations” and “Heroes and Villains,” the latter of which was labored over endlessly as Smile’s planned centerpiece), Smiley Smile seems at first like a Beach Boys album to skip, a final squib from the towering ambition of the previous few years.

But over time, Smiley Smile has developed a small cult of its own, attracting those drawn to its stripped-down, highly spontaneous, and deeply stoned vibe. Partly recorded at Wilson’s house, it has the feel of a mixtape, with a zany instrumental interlude, tape-warp nuttiness, explosive fits of laughter, and sound effects; the songs, about hair loss and visions of distant lands and the essential goodness of vegetables, have the cracked and colorful logic of daydreams. Considering how significant the Beach Boys were in the pop landscape at the time, it’s baffling that a major record label would release an album this goofy and slight. But Smiley Smile is a record of startling intimacy, and it basically invented the kind of lo-fi bedroom pop that would later propel Sebadoh, Animal Collective, and other characters. –Mark Richardson

Listen: The Beach Boys: “Little Pad”

Serge Gainsbourg: Initials B.B. (1968)

In the 1960s, the talk was of Swinging London, not Swinging Paris. So few people would have expected a French man who turned 40 in 1968 to make one of the most elegant albums of the decade. Recorded largely in London, Initials B.B. marries Serge Gainsbourg’s peerless sense of dramatic melody with some of the finest orchestral pop production the 1960s could offer, incorporating elements of jazz, yé-yé, chanson, and the baroque pop of the Left Bank with just a soupçon of Rubber Soul–era Beatles. From the cascading strings and imperial brass of the title track to the soulful cheek of “Marilu,” the heartbreakingly doomed love song “Bonnie and Clyde” to the swinging environmental critique of “Torrey Canyon,” not a second is wasted in this taut, 31-minute masterpiece. It evokes London fog and Parisian élan, contemporary pop nous and eternal orchestral splendor, in a way that makes even the most modish Anglo-American pop acts of the era look spectacularly ungainly. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Serge Gainsbourg: “Bloody Jack”

Miles Davis: Nefertiti (1968)

Of the run of albums Miles Davis made with his quintet in the 1960s, Nefertiti is the most alien and the most beautiful. The tunes, all of which were written by members of his band—three by saxophonist Wayne Shorter, two by pianist Herbie Hancock, and one by drummer Tony Williams, leaving only Davis and bassist Ron Carter without a credit—are eerily beautiful explorations of the possibilities of space and repetition, pointing in the direction of In a Silent Way. The pieces float and drift and breathe, with gently curling melodies held aloft by Williams’ astonishingly fluid approach to cymbals. This was Davis’ last purely acoustic album, as in the coming years he would explore dark, churning electronic noise. Nefertiti found him leaving the world of the traditional jazz combo on a brilliantly atmospheric note. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Miles Davis: “Nefertiti”

The Fugs: The Fugs First Album (1965)

Before there was punk, there were the Fugs: antagonistic, hilarious, and radically political to the bone. They were anarchic beat poets in the East Village who took folk instruments they could sort of play and didn’t give a damn. Their debut album was originally called The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views, and General Dissatisfaction—though “sing” is subjective, as their vocals are fabulously off-key. The Fugs’ ringleader Ed Sanders is one of the most crucial figures in countercultural history: He founded the bookstore Peace Eye and the arts journal Fuck You and, among other late-’60s antics, he attempted to levitate the Pentagon and staged a funeral for flower power in San Francisco.

On their debut, the Fugs sing-song a surreal pop ditty about dying (“Carpe penum!/Sing, children, sing!/Death is a’coming!”) and, on “Nothing,” abrasively equate several sacred bohemian staples—Allen Ginsberg, church, sex, The Village Voice—with “nothing, nothing, nothing.” The record was originally released on the legendary labels Folkways and later ESP-Disk, which earned the Fugs their share of people who considered them very talented con artists. Their music was so anti-establishment, though, that it didn’t matter. Evoking the virtues of ugliness with a charisma that couldn’t be faked, the Fugs remain inspiring. –Jenn Pelly

Listen: The Fugs: “Slum Goddess”

Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1966)

It might be possible to ascribe an additional weight to Monk’s Straight, No Chaser based on the 1988 documentary of same name, which features footage of the man on tour and in the studio. That documentary’s image of Monk as an idiosyncratic, sometimes impenetrable artist with odd habits and an even more off-kilter playing style is one of the most detailed looks into the creative process of a jazz musician. But the album, named for a standard Monk first recorded in 1951, has its own perspective, in which his unpredictably timed moments of rhythmic and melodic dissonance are recorded at a continuously evolving state. Reworked original compositions like the title cut, “Locomotive,” and “We See” nail down deceptively lighthearted riffs before sprawling out into conversational improvised exchanges. It’s a versatile approach that he and his quartet apply slyly to the far-flung material of the other artists they interpret. You wouldn’t think there’s a lot in common between Rentarō Taki’s Meiji-period Japanese folk song “Kōjō no Tsuki” and the Cab Calloway–popularized 1930s standard “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” (the latter of which arrives as an almost giddy solo piano rendition), but an artist as boundlessly rule-breaking as Monk always found a way through. –Nate Patrin

Listen: Thelonious Monk: “Locomotive” 

Harry Partch: The World of Harry Partch (1969)

Any popular musician who takes a public liking to creaky, homemade sounds devised in the pursuit of a singular vision is singing the song of Harry Partch. By the time Columbia Records discovered him and released the 1969 album The World of Harry Partch, which offers the most popular overview of his work, the itinerant Californian had spent decades honing the notes of that song, which happened outside of conservatories, outside the boundaries of “classical” and “popular,” and outside of the Western scale. He began by tinkering with violas and soon was inventing his own menagerie of instruments, beautiful creations with magnificent names like “the Quadrangularis Reversum” and the “Cloud-Chamber bowls,” all tuned to his own 43-tone scale.

The music he made with all of those bespoke noisemakers was too luminous and defiantly odd to fit into any existing culture; to a mildly curious new listener, it may have just seemed like a collection of out-of-tune bongs and clonks. But if you probed deeper, you found your way into music both richly detailed and ancient-sounding. These pieces, with their elemental pulses and crystalline webs of rhythm, shivered with the sort of holy feeling you might get upon entering a network of caves. The odd tones swim up to your ears like bioluminescent creatures, while Partch’s dry, avuncular voice patiently explains them all to you.

The World of Harry Partch was a late-breaking shaft of career sunshine for a man who had grown grudgingly accustomed to obscurity: He was a truly independent musician, in a time when that term was much lonelier than it is today. “I am supremely indifferent as to whether anyone chooses to follow in my footsteps,” he professed in 1959. But follow they did: From La Monte Young to Tom Waits, Jack White to Matmos, Partch remains the patron saint for anyone seeking to reconnect us to the physical miracle of sound. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Harry Partch: “Chromelodeon I”

The Paragons: On the Beach (1967)

Originally an uptempo ska vocal group, the Paragons redefined themselves into a Jamaican rocksteady act in the late ’60s, when singer John Holt joined their ranks. On the Beach, their lone album with Holt before he bolted for a successful solo career, remains a high-water mark of that era in Jamaican music; it’s a succinct and breezy encapsulation of the short-lived rocksteady sound, full of lilting rhythms, sparkling horns, and vocal harmonies sweeter than tropical fruit. Holt’s songwriting yielded outright classics like “Wear You to the Ball,” “Only a Smile,” and “The Tide Is High”—songs subsequently covered by admirers as diverse as Gregory Isaacs, UB40, and Blondie. –Andy Beta

Listen: The Paragons: “On the Beach”

Tom Zé: Grande Liquidação (1968)

Tom Zé’s debut isn’t as obviously experimental as some of his 1970s albums, from which David Byrne would largely compile 1990’s Brazil Classics 4: The Best of Tom Zé, the Brazilian musician’s introduction to a worldwide audience after years in obscurity. But even absent the monosyllabic lyrical experiments and unorthodox instruments (a typewriter, a food blender) that pepper his later work, Grande Liquidação’s explosive color and creativity offers a fascinating snapshot of a young talent blossoming amidst cultural upheaval.

“São, São Paulo/Quanta dor” (“São Paulo/So much pain”) begins the album’s very first song, a dulcet tribute to the Brazilian city’s eight million inhabitants; “First lesson/Stop being poor,” he admonishes in “Curso Intensivo de Boas Maneiras” (“Intensive Course of Good Manners”), a subversive look at social norms in post-coup Brazil. Like his comrades in the Tropicalía movement, Zé asks what it means to be a modern Brazilian, constructing magpie-like arrangements in which organs thrum and stacked horns suggest a tropical Sgt. Pepper’s. Through it all, Zé’s playful, slightly pinched voice transmits both wry wisdom and indefatigable cheer. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Tom Zé: “Gloria”

The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World (1969)

As the story goes, the Shaggs were born from a palm reading. When Austin Wiggin was young, his mother predicted that he would marry a strawberry blonde, have two sons whom she would never meet, and also have daughters who would form a popular band. After the first two parts came true, Austin took fate into his own hands: He removed his teenage daughters Dot, Betty, and Helen from school and confined them to constant rehearsals, where they attempted to create pop music on instruments they could barely play.

The New Hampshire trio’s only studio record, Philosophy of the World, more closely resembles Captain Beefheart than their beloved Herman’s Hermits. Their discordant voices and clunky mimicry of pop melodies may be off-putting at first, but beneath the awkward instrumentation are three girls singing earnestly about their lost family cat (“My Pal Foot Foot”) and a lover’s cruel side (“Sweet Thing”). Though the Shaggs never reached the level of fame their father desired, much to their surprise, Philosophy of the World eventually became a cult favorite: Frank Zappa called them “better than the Beatles” and Kurt Cobain dubbed it one of his favorite records. Who could have predicted that? –Quinn Moreland

Listen: The Shaggs: “My Pal Foot Foot”

Terry Riley: A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969)

In 1969, Columbia Records was looking for classical LPs that might “capture the imagination of the young audience,” and Terry Riley was uniquely suited to the task. Over the previous decade, he had steeped himself in minimalism, a new style of American classical music that relied on elements like sustained tones (La Monte Young’s Trio for Strings) or a restricted range of melodic material, explored over long durations (Dennis Johnson’s November). Riley was friendly with Young and Johnson, and inspired by both, but he also brought new elements to the party—including an interest in tape loops and fast, rhythmic pulses.

On A Rainbow in Curved Air, Riley’s layers of fast keyboard riffing on Side A have a rock-ready, psychedelic edge that was quick to filter into the pop consciousness. (The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” gives the composer a sideways name-check.) His droning, multi-tracked soprano sax lines on the Side B opus “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band” connect with elements of the experimental jazz zeitgeist, like the marathon solos of John Coltrane. As indebted to these artists as he was forward-thinking, Riley bridged their aesthetic spheres, calmly creating a new hybrid sound—all without seeming to contort a muscle. –Seth Colter Walls

Listen: Terry Riley: “A Rainbow in Curved Air”

Charles Mingus: Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (1963)

The music of bassist, composer, and bandleader Charles Mingus was an inventive mix of jazz past and present. But Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus is literally old and new: All but two of its tracks are re-recorded versions of songs that had shown up on previous Mingus albums, confusingly (or perhaps deceptively) given new names. But the results are the opposite of retread. Two 11-piece ensembles, both heavy on brass and sax, breathe such fresh, vibrant life into some of Mingus’ best tunes that it often sounds like they’re trying blow them up. His mass of horns push “Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul” to a much louder, denser plane than its appearance on his 1959 album Mingus Ah Um, while the frenetic pace of “II B.S.” makes the 1957 version on The Clown, with the name “Haitian Fight Song,” seem almost tame. Given how driven and sharp the performances are, it’s shocking that Mingus would soon hit a dry spell, releasing no more group studio albums for the rest of the decade. Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus is a fitting coda to a seven-year stretch of greatness, by a musical mind always able to reimagine the past—even his own. –Marc Masters

Listen: Charles Mingus: “Mood Indigo”

Four Tops: Reach Out (1967)

The Motown songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland created classics for everyone from the Supremes to the Miracles, and one of their last recordings for the Detroit label helped cement its trademark sound. Belted by lead singer Levi Stubbs, the Four Tops’ “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” is a soaring paean to romantic loyalty that topped the charts in October 1966. On the vocal group’s accompanying album, Stubbs’ voice ties together Motown’s famed anthemic choruses and lyrical love songs under the same aching banner. Even two Monkees covers are injected with a shot of openhearted soul, showing that the Four Tops’ appeal could cross over the period’s racial music divides in every direction. –Cameron Cook

Listen: Four Tops: “I’m a Believer”

Ornette Coleman: Free Jazz (1961)

No tune, no chord changes, no key. Four top-flight musicians in the left channel, four more in the right channel, enough tape for a whole album. Go.

Ornette Coleman was already a famously polarizing artist when he and his one-off “double quartet” recorded Free Jazz, and although the idea of improvisation without a theme wasn’t entirely new, nobody had filled an entire album with such experimentation before. John Tynan’s zero-stars review in jazz bible Down Beat—paired with an opposing five-star review—called the group “eight nihilists... with one common cause: to destroy the music that gave them birth.” Still, records don’t get genres named after them by playing it safe, and time has been kind to Coleman’s dare—it’s obvious now that the “free” in the title means “no longer captive,” rather than “the ultimate devaluation.” It’s also clearer in retrospect that Free Jazz isn’t totally without structure: A more-or-less composed fanfare introduces each musician’s turn as the leader of the group’s conversation, and the double rhythm section keeps the pulse steady until bassist Charlie Haden, always a revolutionary, nudges them out of it. Over these epochal 37 minutes, you can hear the group shaking off the constraints they’d always taken for granted. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: Ornette Coleman: “Free Jazz (Part 1)”

Simon & Garfunkel: Sounds of Silence (1966)

In a decade obsessed with fashion, there was little cool about Simon & Garfunkel, a bookish duo who looked like they would be more at home poring over folk history books than dropping acid in Haight-Ashbury. This studiousness occasionally creeps into Sounds of Silence, their second album, which includes songs based on an Edwin Arlington Robinson poem (“Richard Cory”) and a newspaper article about a suicide (“A Most Peculiar Man”), as well as a cover of an instrumental guitar piece by the British folk revivalist Davey Graham (“Anji”). However, any sense of intellectual fastidiousness is overcome by songs like “The Sound of Silence,” “April Come She Will,” and “I Am a Rock,” which speak to universal human truths like loneliness, depression, and the impossibility of communication via uncluttered arrangements and crystal harmonies that let the celestial melodies breathe. The effect is quietly devastating, and it seems fitting that an album of such lasting emotional truths has been preserved by the Library of Congress so future generations can cry their eyes out to them, too. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Simon & Garfunkel: “I Am a Rock”

Patsy Cline: Sentimentally Yours (1962)

There was a fullness to Patsy Cline’s vocal delivery, a confidence that heartbreak was the only proper state of being. Her brilliance as a singer allowed her to transcend a wide range of material. Sentimentally Yours, Cline’s third and final album, includes just two songs written specifically for her: “She’s Got You” (which climbed both country and pop charts) and “Strange.” The rest of the album consists of songs popularized by others, but Cline finds a way to make them her own. She added country flair to the pop standards and reigned in the honky-tonk for a note of elegance. She revived the languid “Heartaches,” turning it into a surprise breakout single, while imbuing two Hank Williams songs (“Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love With You)”) with stoic nous more than lonesome blues. Patsy Cline’s singular voice makes Sentimentally Yours entirely hers, teasing out the songs’ nuances that would’ve been less in others’ hands. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: Patsy Cline: “Your Cheatin’ Heart”

Stan Getz & João Gilberto: Getz/Gilberto (1964)

In late-1950s Rio de Janeiro, Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto started a quiet revolution. Jobim, known for his “soft and sophisticated” compositions, teamed with the hushed singer-guitarist Gilberto to create bossa nova, which teleported the swaying rhythms of Brazil’s samba dance style into a more intimate setting. American saxophonist Stan Getz, whose plush yet understated approach the jazz world called simply “the Sound,” was a natural fit. When Jobim, Gilberto, and Getz came together, the result was bossa nova’s crowning achievement.

The Sound met the new sound on 1962’s Jazz Samba, a chart-topping album featuring guitarist Charlie Byrd. Then, what might’ve looked like a fad instead blossomed into Getz/Gilberto. The supple melodies of bossa nova’s American interpreter meld perfectly with the lullaby vocals of the artist who’d defined it. Some of the piano, and most of the eight songs—about stars, seas, love, moonlight, and a certain girl from Ipanema—are by Jobim. The overall effect is of saudade, a beautifully untranslatable Portuguese word for melancholy longing that appeared in the title of Jobim and Gilberto’s first bossa nova record. This is heightened by the casual elegance of Gilberto’s then-wife, Astrud, making her fateful singing debut. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Getz/Gilberto: “The Girl From Ipanema”

Elvis Presley: From Elvis in Memphis (1969)

“I had to leave town for a little while,” sings Elvis Presley at the outset of From Elvis in Memphis. Back in 1969, those words rang true. The singer appeared absent during the height of the British Invasion, making movies that held little interest for him or his audience. Presley’s patience with Hollywood ran out in 1968, though, pushing him to turn a Christmas television special into a showcase for his undiminished skills. Following that famed comeback performance, he was determined to prove his artistic worth, so he set up shop at Memphis’ American Sound Studios and recorded a set of songs that saw no boundary between rock, soul, country, and schmaltzy pop.

This wasn’t Elvis getting back to his roots: In ’69, Memphis was the epicenter of American cool, the place where Southern soul took hold, and by associating himself with the city, Presley reckoned with modern music. Just as crucially, he decided to sing songs that had no interest in separating love from memory and regret—a far cry from the teenage exuberance of his earliest records. So while his culturally explosive Sun Sessions sides from the 1950s retain their excitement, From Elvis in Memphis cuts deeper. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen: Elvis Presley: “Long Black Limousine” 

The Mothers of Invention: Freak Out! (1966)

Birthed by the theatrical Los Angeles “freak” scene—a cousin of the Bay Area hippies—the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! predicted, and in some ways outdid, the LSD-gobbling Summer of Love by about a year. This debut double album was concocted by the drug-despising Dadaist Frank Zappa as a self-consciously smart-assed statement, one that smirked at the “turned-on” generation with songs that were themselves undeniably psychedelic. Freak Out! features some of rock’s earliest and headiest forays into experimental composition and tape looping, sequenced amid ominous pop pastiches like the folk-rock suicide note “I’m Not Satisfied,” the doo-wop throwback “Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder,” and the Watts Riots–inspired blues lament “Trouble Every Day.” Paul McCartney would later claim that Sgt. Pepper’s was the Beatles’ attempt at making a Freak Out!, but from their debut forward, the Mothers were clearly on their own trip. –Eric Harvey

Listen: The Mothers of Invention: “Hungry Freaks, Daddy”

Sun Ra: The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra (1965)

Sun Ra was a Gemini. “That’s one reason I have the big band,” he  explained to a critic toward the end of his tenure on Earth. “I want to hear the alto, then I want to hear the tenor, then I want to hear the trumpet, then I want to hear the rhythm, then I want to hear me—keep moving, that’s my nature.” Ra changed his name, dressed in brilliant raiments, and elaborated a whole Afrofuturist cosmology, but he’d still come up on Duke Ellington. The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra shows his Arkestra navigating between big-band cohesion and loose improvisation, between the concert hall and the stars above.

The label ESP-Disk, which released this album, probably wanted more composed, neo-classical jazz, but Ra spent his life frustrating such desires. Halfway through “Outer Nothingness,” the band abandons any horn charts they’d mapped out; there are long moments of silence, and then the leader’s bass marimba, each strike so deep and resonant that the wood might have landed from a distant planet. Eternity looms behind every latitude they claim, and on Heliocentric Worlds, Ra captures the sound of unity straining to hold itself together. –Chris Randle

Listen: Sun Ra: “Heliocentric”

Gilberto Gil: Gilberto Gil (1968)

Even before it had a name, Tropicália was introduced to the masses at the 1967 TV Record music festival in São Paulo, when the 25-year-old Gilberto Gil brought out a teenaged Os Mutantes to perform “Domingo No Parque.” With acoustic orchestration, electric guitar, and twangy berimbau, the now-classic song told the story of a crime of passion using fragmented word-scenes. It was controversial, overturning conventions of Brazilian song structure and themes typical of música popular brasileira.

Gilberto Gil, the album it soon appeared on, also made waves. From the world of Anglo-American pop, Gil absorbed the Beatles’ psych-rock sensibilities and Jimi Hendrix’s electronic effects and vocal stylings. From his home of Bahia, Gil drew on Afro-Brazilian traditions like capoeira and samba, mashing up snippets of honking horns with ocean waves and absurdist poetry. To the Brazilian military dictatorship, all of this read as provocative and threatening, and in 1969, they exiled Tropicália’s original masterminds, Gil and Caetano Veloso. But by then, Gil had already helped spark an entire Brazilian counterculture. –Minna Zhou

Listen: Gilberto Gil: “Frevo Rasgado”

The Rolling Stones: Aftermath (1966)

The Rolling Stones glimpsed the dark side of the ’60s several years before Altamont, probably because they’d already enjoyed more than their share of sex and drugs by the time hippie kids started flooding Haight-Ashbury. Their sixth album in two years was also the first Stones LP written entirely by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and its best songs make the aggression of “Get Off of My Cloud” sound polite.

“It was the period where everything—songwriting, recording, performing—stepped into a new league,” Richards recalls in his memoir, Life. For proof he wasn’t exaggerating, look no further than the album’s opening track. Rock’s most nihilistic hit to date, “Paint It, Black” finds Jagger confessing urges worthy of a serial killer over an intoxicating collage of guitar, sitar, and kick drum. Sure, Aftermath indulged the Stones’ misogyny on the bitchy diss track “Stupid Girl” and tamed a shrew on “Under My Thumb,” a nasty piece of work that Brian Jones’ bouncy marimbas rendered irresistible even to legendary feminist critics. But with Jones ditching his guitar for a closetful of exotic instruments and the band channeling their touring musicians’ homesickness on the record’s 11-minute culminating blues jam, “Goin’ Home,” they also pushed rock forward. –Judy Berman

Listen: The Rolling Stones: “Goin’ Home”

Randy Newman: Randy Newman (1968)

You’d have trouble finding an album by a young person more at odds with youth culture than Randy Newman’s 1968 debut. At a time when the zeitgeist was occupied with free love and third eyes, Newman—then 24—was writing ragtime-influenced orchestral vignettes about abusing your friends (“Davy the Fat Boy”) and shipping your parents off to die in Florida (“Love Story”), a sound too cruel for squares and too square for anyone else.

Newman, who went on to make a good life as a cult favorite and composer for Disney movies, has maintained he would’ve done better if he’d written more love songs. But those who can get on his wavelength of jaundice and disappointment, of kids who never visit and can’t wait to leave when they do, of the forever teased if remembered at all, know that love songs are exactly what these are. –Mike Powell

Listen: Randy Newman: “Linda”

Howlin’ Wolf: Howlin’ Wolf (1962)

Like so many ’60s LPs, Howlin’ Wolf wasn’t designed as a proper album, per se. It rounds up all the A and B sides from the six singles the Chicago bluesman released between 1960 and early 1962, a time when he was on a hot streak, at least artistically. Wolf hadn’t hit the R&B charts since 1956, the year rock’n’roll reshaped popular music, yet at least half of this record consists of songs known by anybody with a passing familiarity with 20th century blues: “Little Red Rooster,” “Wang Dang Doodle,” “Back Door Man.” In the hands of all the ’60s British blues boys—not to mention all the Americans who followed—these songs lost their tension, with the focus shifting from songs to solos. Still, the appeal of the 12 songs on Howlin’ Wolf  is the wild, rangy groove of the Chess house band and, of course, the full-blooded roar of Wolf. Whether he’s murmuring or howling, the singer seems to keep some essential part of himself in reserve, which is why the music can seem so intimidating so many years after its recording. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Listen: Howlin’ Wolf: “Spoonful”

The Doors: The Doors (1967)

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” So hypothesized the poet William Blake toward the end of the 18th century. More than 150 years later, his theory would become a counterculture mission statement when the novelist Aldous Huxley referenced the quote in the title of his 1952 mescaline memoir The Doors of Perception, which in turn inspired rock’n’roll’s most notorious romantics to call themselves the Doors.

Though their self-titled debut may have launched a thousand trips, it’s anything but hippie-dippy. Instead of endless possibility or untapped potential, frontman Jim Morrison’s notion of infinity suggests an ever-present, invariably destructive cosmic malaise filled with agonizing bar crawls, sordid hook-ups, and, of course, death. How marvelous, then, that as the void closes in on the album’s crown jewel, “Light My Fire,” the predominant mood is cathartic rather than catastrophic. –Zoe Camp

Listen: The Doors: “The End”

Nina Simone: In Concert (1964)

So much of Nina Simone’s power manifested in performance. She was a commanding presence with a rare and extraordinary voice that could cut into even the most hardened skeptics. She didn’t so much communicate pain as inflict it, requiring anyone within striking distance to share her distress. But she was also elegant, capable of capturing and holding a crowd’s attention with sweeping gestures. She had a peculiar showmanship: part entertainer, part instructor, both charmer and empathic guide. She injured; she healed.

Simone’s virtuosity is on full display at Carnegie Hall during the three live shows that comprise In Concert, in which she emerges a civil rights emissary. The album is powerful, funny, and haunting, a daring exploration of bondage and discomfort. “This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written yet,” she says during the first protest song she wrote, “Mississippi Goddam,” coaxing laughter out of her mostly white audience. What immediately follows is a full-fledged condemnation of American values and black displacement. “Lord have mercy on this land of mine,” she sings. “I don’t belong here/I don’t belong there.” Simone is constantly disarming her audience, and it is still affecting to hear her sing “Old Jim Crow” now, as it must’ve been then, amid lynchings, bus attacks, and church bombings. As black bodies continue to be endangered, rendered lifeless, and unavenged today, her voice echoes through time, reminding us that we are scarcely disconnected from the sins of the past. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Nina Simone: “Mississippi Goddam”

Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle (1967)

A former child actor and L.A. session player, Van Dyke Parks became a noted producer in the ’60s, eventually finding himself sitting in Brian Wilson’s sandbox in an attempt to help the Beach Boy wunderkind follow up Pet Sounds. But as that album, Smile, failed to come to fruition, Parks turned his attentions to Song Cycle. Made up of a decidedly unfashionable mélange of vaudeville showtunes, bluegrass, and clashing orchestras, Song Cycle remains one of the most precious and winking albums of its era. Sure, it sounded hopelessly outdated amid the psychedelic swirl of the late ’60s, but Parks sneakily anticipated a future time, when musicians as diverse as Joanna Newsom, Rufus Wainwright, and Skrillex would seek him out for eclectic collaboration. –Andy Beta

Listen: Van Dyke Parks: “Vine Street”

Gal Costa: Gal Costa (1969)

Gal Costa begins as though in the midst of alien invasion, with UFOs whizzing by and a lone pedestrian screaming. The scene, which bookends the opening track “Não Identificado” (“Unidentified”), is a hint that this seemingly saccharine love song isn’t all it appears to be.

Gal, like her Tropicálista cohort, often cloaked her social critiques in absurd or sentimental images and sounds, drawing on everything from Brazilian Cinema Novo to kitsch. Gal Costa classics like “Divino Maravilhoso” are clear in their political undertones, while tracks like “Baby” and “Lost in the Paradise” are hazy, surreal songs that comment on everything from bourgeois living to the state of South America. Where fellow Tropicálistas Os Mutantes shot their political statements through with freaky dystopic psychedelia and edgy humor, Gal Costa veils hers in gauzy melodies and bossa nova–indebted vocals. Able to channel bossa icon João Gilberto as much as blues rocker Janis Joplin, Costa’s delivery is dreamy yet trenchant, making Gal Costa a coil of barbed wire wrapped in silk, an unidentified object ready to cut. –Minna Zhou

Listen: Gal Costa: “Não Identificado”

James Brown: Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud (1969)

Funk was born with a grunt. After a gig in the late ’60s, James Brown started dictating rhythms to his bandmate Pee Wee Ellis in measured, guttural noises. Brown and Ellis turned the exchange into 1967’s “Cold Sweat,” the first true channeling of Brown’s crazed genius and the revolution of the drum break, to boot.

“Cold Sweat” was a funk landmark, but the duo’s breakthrough came in 1969, when they recorded “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud,” weaponizing funk for black empowerment. The song is the only splash of overt activism on the album bearing its name, but far from the only splash of color; Say It Loud is a vibrant selection of funk love songs slathered in blues, featuring the smoldering shrieker “Goodbye My Love, Pts. 1 & 2” and the self-explanatory “Shades of Brown.” The consummate entertainer and authoritarian, Brown displays full command of the band, funneling his revolutionary visions through them and combining secular swing with big gospel soul. “That’s what created funk music—gospel and jazz mixed together by James Brown with a little help from God,” Brown once told Guitar World. Say It Loud is among his boldest works, smooth and slick and strutting—proudly black in each utterance. Inside its grooves, Soul Brother No. 1 refuses to compromise. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: James Brown: “Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud”

Françoise Hardy: Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles (1962)

The early-’60s French “yé-yé” scene was made up mainly of young women who sang sexually-charged bubblegum written by older men. Françoise Hardy stood apart, both by maintaining autonomy over the lonesome yearning in her songs and by writing most of them. Her music would grow more intricate and eclectic over the years, most notably on 1971’s bossa nova–tinged masterwork La Question, but the reasons she ruled over the yé-yé period are apparent on her debut album.

Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles squeezes bouncy charm out of little more than twangy guitar, prominent bass, shuffling percussion, and Hardy’s disarmingly conversational (even if you don’t converse en français) vocals. The title hit, a loveless narrator’s solitary waltz across streets filled with adoring couples, feels like the platonic ideal for songs of this familiar trope. Perhaps it was translated so many times because it can’t be improved upon. But the rest of the album also finds an enduring middle ground between rockabilly shimmy and Gallic introspection, delivered by the most glamorous wallflower in France. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Françoise Hardy: “Tous les garçons et les filles”

The Temptations: Cloud Nine (1969)

In the middle of 1968, the Temptations were at loose ends. They’d kicked out their difficult star tenor David Ruffin, and when Otis Williams, the group’s rock-solid baritone anchor, went to songwriter/producer Norman Whitfield and said he wanted the group to keep up with Sly and the Family Stone’s innovations, Whitfield dismissed the idea. Fortunately, he changed his mind quickly.

“Cloud Nine,” the first signal of their new direction, was a major hit—angry, funky, and hipper than Motown had been in a while—and it won the label’s first Grammy. The centerpiece of the subsequent Cloud Nine album was an even more startling Whitfield/Barrett Strong invention: “Runaway Child, Running Wild,” which segues into harrowing screams and an instrumental jam by Motown’s house band, the Funk Brothers. The Temptations’ psychedelic soul period would continue for the next few years, with Whitfield treating the group’s voices as the brightest hues in his palette. –Douglas Wolk

Listen: The Temptations: “Runaway Child, Running Wild”

13th Floor Elevators: The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators (1966)

The first LP from Austin rock band 13th Floor Elevators was purportedly also the first record to refer to its sound as “psychedelic.” Accompanied by a lurid red-and-green illustration of an eye within an eye, its liner notes—written by founding member and electric jug player Tommy Hall—lay out a blueprint for what the term might mean: In essence, humanity is stilted by what he calls its “vertical” organization of thought, and psychedelic drugs offer a way to see beyond such a limited structure. So rather than seeking a deliberate fringe sound, Hall wrote, “It is this quest for pure sanity that forms the basis of the songs on this record.”

Here, their search involves sunburnt, agitated garage rock that wedges Hall’s freak texture between Roky Erickson and Stacy Sutherland’s blues-inflected guitars. For all its trippy philosophies, this ultimately accessible album doesn’t necessarily strain the limits of the mind too much, and perhaps that’s the point: As the lyrics to “The Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You” imply, the experience isn’t about taking a trip to somewhere faraway as much as it’s about zeroing in to where we already are. –Thea Ballard

Listen: 13th Floor Elevators: “You’re Gonna Miss Me”

Lee Hazlewood / Nancy Sinatra: Nancy & Lee (1968)

Having penned and produced several of Nancy Sinatra’s biggest hits, including “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” Lee Hazlewood, the gravel-throated cowboy songwriter from Oklahoma, gave the Swinging Sixties some of its most enduring anthems. When the pair met up for the duet album Nancy & Lee, the tongue-in-cheek quality of their previous chart-toppers was all but eclipsed by a more robust, intense incarnation of country-tinged psychedelia. On each of the album’s 11 tracks, Hazlewood and Sinatra’s voices intertwine in a sort of intoxicated tango, their harmonies almost out of sync and yet perfectly tempered. Each artist holds their own: On “Some Velvet Morning,” Hazlewood’s sober verses are uplifted by Sinatra’s angelic chorus. They coast through a beaming cover of the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” with an air of sweet resignation, a sentiment that carries them through the album. Though certainly a collection of pitch-perfect country-pop tunes, Nancy & Lee is first and foremost a document of a flawless collaboration, two musicians marrying their bespoke styles for an album that would be the apex of both their careers. –Cameron Cook

Listen: Nancy Sinatra / Lee Hazlewood: “Summer Wine”

Marvin Gaye / Tammi Terrell: United (1967)

In the ’60s, Marvin Gaye was Motown’s solo male sex symbol amid a roster of vocal groups, and Berry Gordy exploited his matinee idol charm by pairing him on albums with Mary Wells and Kim Weston. It was on 1967’s United when Gaye finally met his match, however, in 22-year-old Philadelphia firebrand Tammi Terrell. Discovered at 15 by Luther Dixon, Terrell carried herself like a wily veteran in the studio, pushing Gaye toward some of his finest vocal performances. Gordy paired them with newly signed Motown songwriters Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, who served as the duo’s behind-the-scenes counterparts. They merged Gaye’s smooth, vulnerable tenor with Terrell’s bold soprano on the crossover gospel-pop classics “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Your Precious Love,” transforming the perfectly matched pair into the embodiment of mainstream African-American puppy love.

Though the duo would release two more collaborations, this was the only LP with Terrell’s full participation: during a performance of “Mountain” two months after United’s release, Terrell collapsed into Gaye’s arms, the earliest indication of a brain tumor that ended her life less than three years later. While this tragic early end casts United in a sad light, the album’s sincere, simple expressions of youthful romance endure. –Eric Harvey

Listen: Marvin Gaye / Tammi Terrell: “Sad Wedding”

The Byrds: Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968)

Sweetheart of the Rodeo has inspired thousands of denim jacket patches and tasteful alt-country bands, but that took time. Upon the album’s release a half century ago, it caused a crowd mutiny at the Grand Ole Opry; the legendary Nashville radio DJ Ralph Emery even accused them of being hippies while they were guests on his show. Maybe the Byrds flew too close to the sun: Nine of the 11 songs are covers taken from the Louvin Brothers, Bob Dylan, and Merle Haggard. And no matter how respectful they were to the source material, as far as the Ralph Emerys were concerned, the Byrds were longhairs trying to sully the most pure of American music.

Sweetheart of the Rodeo may not have made country cool, but it showed the volatility of two competing visions of Americana coexisting in the same space. If you can’t picture how Sweetheart of the Rodeo would be received right now, just find a record that has its genre’s purists up in arms—it is probably a glimpse of the future. –Ian Cohen

Listen: The Byrds: “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”

Ray Charles: Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962)

Ray Charles’ 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was hailed as a pioneering fusion of Nashville C&W with the swinging R&B for which Charles was known, but the LP is so much more than that. With sweet strings and swooning vocal arrangements by Marty Paich, producer Sid Feller helped Charles pick out the songs to record but ceded full creative control to the 31-year-old genius singer and keyboardist. Taking on Hank Williams (“You Win Again,” “Hey, Good Lookin’”), Don Gibson (“I Can’t Stop Loving You”), and traditional songs he could claim as his own (“Careless Love”), Charles’ performances instantly reveal the illusory boundaries between genres.

The mere existence of Modern Sounds was a statement: an album of “hillbilly” songs, as the music industry once called them, recorded by a black man as the civil rights battles of the ’60s were heating up. And though the album didn’t make a dent on the country charts, its enormous popular success began to break down barriers inside Nashville, musical and otherwise. It helped bring a generation of black artists to country music, and—in a sense, blessed by Charles’ cool—even helped country music itself in its move towards a more contemporary and mainstream image. Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music are tunes about feeling bad that still feel exquisitely good. –Jesse Jarnow

Listen: Ray Charles: “I Can’t Stop Loving You”

Morton Subotnick: Silver Apples of the Moon (1967)

With a $500 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation burning a hole in his pocket, the composer Morton Subotnick commissioned inventor Don Buchla to create an “electronic music box.” Then, with his new Buchla 100, Subotnick made Silver Apples of the Moon. The sounds on it seem like the byproduct of an experiment gone wrong: Its eerie tones, elliptical pulses, enigmatic thumps, and waves of cybertronic wails are still otherworldly.

The album is not only the first piece of electronic music conceived specifically for the LP; it’s also, arguably, the first album of electronic dance music. Anchoring the album is a ghostly chorus of beats and rhythms that would bloom into techno two decades later, and Subotnick was dumbstruck when he saw people dancing to the music during early performances. In a decade dedicated to the exploration of the fringes, of moon landings and subatomic exploration, Silver Apples was another attempt to break open the door into the future and walk on through. –Kevin Lozano

Listen: Morton Subotnick: “Silver Apples of the Moon”

Herbie Hancock: Maiden Voyage (1965)

Improvisation is, essentially, spontaneous composition, but within the realm of jazz, the practice evolved so rapidly and dramatically that it came to resemble telepathy. Toward the end of his solo on the title track of Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Freddie Hubbard produces a sequence of figure eights on his trumpet that resemble a dragonfly gently skating across the surface of a lake. Hancock and Tony Williams—on piano and drums, respectively—anticipate this shift and become the lake; their playing loses shape and melts into something more liquid and impressionistic. The ensemble on Maiden Voyage—consisting of Hubbard, Williams, George Coleman on tenor saxophone, and Ron Carter on bass—are listening to each other so hard, so attentively, that they seem to merge into one unusually flexible mind, as individual waves merge into a body of water. Presumably this is why Hancock found the sea so fascinating that he had to write an entire concept album about it: It’s an endless improvisation. –Brad Nelson

Listen: Herbie Hancock: “Maiden Voyage”

The Band: The Band (1969)

The phrase “the old weird America” is useful to the point of being overused. Coined by Greil Marcus in his 1997 book about Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, it has become easy shorthand for any musical act that draws from sources and sounds predating rock’n’roll. Marcus intended it to describe the strange nation glimpsed through Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and, by extension, through the songs Dylan and the Band recorded together. But few albums have offered such a majestic panorama of the old weird America as the Band’s self-titled second album.

Nothing here sounds up to date. It’s proudly antiquated, pre-modern, the songs stowed for generations in a dusty attic somewhere, cracked and yellowed with the years. Robbie Robertson proves himself a fine storyteller, giving us a Southerner’s view of the Civil War on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and a union worker’s Dust Bowl worries on “King Harvest (Has Surely Come).” But really, it’s the Band who brings these characters and this setting to life, arranging and performing these songs to showcase their own eccentricities—and, by extension, the eccentricities of the nation itself. The album’s weirdness has not waned with time, no matter how many subsequent generations of roots musicians borrow its songs or its ideas. –Stephen M. Deusner

Listen: The Band: “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Kontakte (1964)

Many musicians would be content with discovering a new way to make music, but German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen set his sights higher: He wanted to help us find new ways to listen. Refined over 700 pages of notation and six months of work with tape machines at Cologne’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Kontakte (“Contacts”), was groundbreaking, both in terms of Stockhausen’s process and for electronic music as a whole.

The album is about connections, most obviously between acoustic and electronic sounds—cymbals and gongs ring in alien timbres, woodblocks and bamboo claves transform into gurgles or collapse into pure texture. But it’s also about connections in time and space. This is a sparse, abstract work in which distinct moments reach out to one another across a void; live performances of Kontakte often had the audience situated in the middle of four speakers, where Stockhausen’s experiments in spatial movement could be best appreciated. And while the pace of technological advancement means that Stockhausen’s methods on Kontakte would now be considered antiquated, the work itself still stands up, demanding—and rewarding—concentration and contemplation. –Louis Pattison

Listen: Karlheinz Stockhausen: “Kontakte”

Caetano Veloso: Caetano Veloso (1968)

In 1968, the same year that the Beatles toyed with the idea of revolution, Caetano Veloso was quietly leading his own in Brazil. Four years earlier, a military-led coup toppled the left-leaning presidency of João Goulart, ushering in a period of cultural repression and censorship. Veloso’s self-titled solo debut sparked the Tropicália movement, setting the standard of speaking out “against the dictatorship without saying anything about it.”

Through its embrace of American psychedelia, bossa nova, traditional Brazilian orchestrations, and gentle acoustic guitars, Caetano Veloso rejects the junta’s nationalism and calls for cultural cannibalism, the idea of mixing influences to create a unique entity. Veloso’s lyrics, particularly in the ecstatic “Alegria, Alegria,” use pop culture references like Coca-Cola, Brigitte Bardot, and television to show the Tropicálistas’ embrace of Western culture. Veloso would become a political prisoner the year after Caetano Veloso’s release, proving that even soft protests wield a mighty sword. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: Caetano Veloso: “Alegria, Alegria”

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Willy and the Poor Boys (1969)

Nowadays, we tend to think the cycles of media and fame move at a rate fast enough to bewilder previous generations. But in 1969, John Fogerty was so scared of falling off the charts that Creedence Clearwater Revival released three albums. Willy and the Poor Boys is the last, and breeziest, of those offerings, but that hardly matters: Creedence didn’t meaningfully attempt to differentiate their albums in tone, subject matter, or style. Instead, the business model was this: People need more great songs, so here are some more great songs.

Keeping this hectic pace with relevance, Creedence pumped out felt, lived-in anthems. They’re often held up as a quintessential American band, and they were: They lied about their origins, had bad haircuts, and cribbed all their best moves from African-American pioneers. But their sturdiest tie to the land of the free was their frightening, locomotive commitment to efficiency. –Andrew Gaerig

Listen: Creedence Clearwater Revival: “Down on the Corner”

Silver Apples: Silver Apples (1968)

If Silver Apples sound like they’re rejecting rock on their 1968 debut, that’s because rock rejected them. Singer Simeon Coxe III and drummer Danny Taylor were playing in the Overland Electric Stage Band when Coxe (known since as Simeon) inserted an oscillator into the mix. Their bandmates were so offended that Simeon and Taylor split off into their own group. Adding more oscillators and electronics, Simeon creating a hybrid instrument he called “the Thing,” and the duo made repetitive music that sounded like nothing else at the time.

Silver Apples does sound like a lot of music that came after it, though. Taylor’s ritualistic beats and Simeon’s low-end loops predict Can’s ritualistic jams, while their persistent whirr presages the throbbing pre-punk of Suicide, whose Alan Vega championed Silver Apples around New York. Still, there’s plenty on Silver Apples that hasn’t been replicated, particularly Simeon’s austere falsetto, which floats like an apparition conjured by the duo’s grinding grooves. It’s spooky and trippy but also profoundly calm, a record that still haunts rock simply by standing outside of it. –Marc Masters

Listen: Silver Apples: “Oscillations”

Steve Reich / Richard Maxfield / Pauline Oliveros: New Sounds in Electronic Music (Come Out / Night Music / I of IV) (1969)

The ’60s were a heady time for experimental electronic music. David Behrman, who produced this essential compilation, was at the helm of the Music of Our Time series for Columbia and its Odyssey sub-label, bringing the way-out sounds of electronic composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen to the masses. New Sounds showcased three radically different approaches: The first track on the A-side, Richard Maxfield’s “Night Music,” is a tape collage of pulses meant to evoke “the antiphonal chirping of birds and insects on a summer night.” Pauline Oliveros’ “I of IV,” which takes up the entirety of the B-side, is a real-time studio performance of squealing oscillators and tape delay, with an expressive character that would prefigure noise music and freeform electronic improv for decades to come.

But the highlight of the set is undoubtedly Steve Reich’s “Come Out.” Composed as part of a benefit for the Harlem Six, a group of black teenagers who were arrested and beaten by police, Reich’s piece takes a single line from one of the boys’ testimony—“I had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them”—and loops it across two tape recorders playing out of phase with each other. Turning a documentary artifact into an ominously psychedelic meditation on violence, it is both a cornerstone of minimalism and an enduring snapshot of the decade’s upheavals. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Steve Reich: “Come Out”

Toots and the Maytals: Sweet and Dandy (1969)

Toots and the Maytals were nearly a movement unto themselves within Jamaican music, and Sweet and Dandy catches them at their peak. Its all-time classics, including “54-46 That’s My Number” and “Pressure Drop,” gave reggae much of its sound and momentum, harnessing the forward motion of ska into a slower, chugging tempo, emphasizing the bass work and double-time guitar that are now hallmarks of the genre. (Omitted here, however: Toots’ 1968 hit “Do the Reggay,” which also gave the burgeoning sound its name.)

Toots’ songwriting here shaped reggae deeply. “54-46” indelibly recounts his prison experience (he had served time for marijuana possession), complete with cinematic dialogue, while “Pressure Drop” distills the revolutionary impulse of the ’60s to a single melodic phrase that’s been covered by everyone from the Clash to Keith Richards. His vocals are unstoppable, a transporting Pentecostalist shout that’s been compared to James Brown and Otis Redding—not so much because it’s derivative in style, but because it’s their equal in firepower. –Edwin “STATS” Houghton

Listen: Toots and the Maytals: “Sweet and Dandy”

John Fahey: The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (1965)

John Fahey’s first four albums included the word “death” in their titles, but only the last one framed it as a miracle. With The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death, Fahey suggests that the character he invented on his debut LP, Blind Joe Death, had morphed into something divine, and the music suggested it, too. It’s one of the steel-string guitarist’s most joyously diverse works, a mix of traditional tunes, adaptations, medleys, and inventive originals. Fahey often employed tunings and techniques that he invented himself, but Transfiguration is less about prowess than passion, with every track conveying emotion, enthusiasm, and a reverent awe for the material. There’s a raw edge to the recording—strings buzz, notes echo, even a dog barks—that fits Fahey’s mission to get to the core of things. His playing is precise, to be sure, but The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death is much more about revelation than refinement. –Marc Masters

Listen: John Fahey: “On the Sunny Side of the Ocean”

Joni Mitchell: Clouds (1969)

“We are the first generation to see the clouds from both sides,” Saul Bellow mused about air travel in his novel Henderson the Rain King. “What a privilege!” By the time Joni Mitchell’s Clouds was released a decade later, her signature song “Both Sides, Now”—inspired by Bellow’s words—had already traveled the globe. In 1967, she gave it to Judy Collins, who made it a hit. Later, Frank Sinatra changed its title; Marie Laforêt translated it to French; Leonard Nimoy twisted it into a joke about the Starship Enterprise. It was the first time—though certainly not the last—that Mitchell’s music flew away to find a life of its own.

Clouds, her hushed and hazy sophomore album, marks the end of an era for Mitchell. The bright-eyed, flower-wielding self-portrait she painted on the cover seems to narrate each of its gentle, intricately fingerpicked folk songs: “Aging children, I am one,” she tells us in one of its most psychedelic refrains. On masterpieces to come, Mitchell would paint deeper portraits of the characters she introduced here, fascinated by what keeps them together, what drives them apart, what lingers in the aftermath. On Clouds, she crafts a gorgeous still life as she watches from afar, high above the earth, where there’s only two sides to see things from. By 25, she’d already mastered both perspectives: Soon, she’d discover that there were infinitely more. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Joni Mitchell: “Both Sides Now”

Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin (1969)

Few classic rock bands had the kind of slow and careful buildup that Led Zeppelin had. The members were all seasoned studio professionals by the time they found each other, steeped in the British blues scene, with seemingly no kinks to work out. They locked together like muscle fibers, instantly and irrevocably, and they flexed.

There are precious few secrets or left turns in Led Zeppelin’s discography: They made the Led Zeppelin album, over and over again, and you picked your favorite. This one happened, temporally, in 1969, but that still seems like a mistake. Culturally, it feels like a chunk of the 1970s that crash-landed on the wrong side of the calendar. With the first 30 seconds of “Good Times Bad Times”—track one of their first album—they basically defined what the next 10 years of rock music would sound like. The most perfect-sounding E power chord in rock history, underlined by rock’s most indelible thumping toms; drum fills like rushing water, crystalline and emphatic and happening everywhere. Like all the best Zeppelin music, it is resistant to argument: It is a physically satiating sound for those who crave it, and repulsive to those who hate it, but every reaction to Zeppelin occurs in the limbic system, in dank areas far beneath the bland cubicle of your neocortex.

All of the things that might make someone wrinkle their nose at Led Zeppelin are here, in abundance: the British folk longueurs; the straight blues rips, muddy and a little ponderous; the hammy, howled lyrics about women spending your “hard-earned pay.” But so are some of the most staggering sounds a rock band ever made. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Led Zeppelin: “Good Times Bad Times”

Sam Cooke: Ain’t That Good News (1964)

Sam Cooke’s optimistic swan song, Ain’t That Good News, was clouded by tragedy. Before he finished recording the album, Cooke’s 18-month-old son Vincent drowned in the family’s swimming pool. Only nine months after it was released, the soul singer was shot and killed in a motel. The motel’s manager alleged that Cooke burst into her office and attacked her, and that she fired in self-defense; the circumstances were disputed. A bullet pierced his heart, a sad bit of symbolism for the man who wrote “Cupid.”

Bad news marks Ain’t That Good News’ place in history but, displaced from that reality, it consists primarily of warmth and romance: falling in and out of love, spending a Saturday night trawling for a bedmate, basking in sunny days spent counting cash. These are feel-good romps and ballads anchored by the most stirring voice in soul, croons that would come to define a generation and influence several more. Cooke sings of intimacy and longing with a tenderness that slows time. But then there’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a harbinger of social justice that became a trademark for the civil rights movement. “It’s been too hard living/But I’m afraid to die,” he sings, revealing long-held black anxieties before circling back to the hopeful refrain. The fear of death only strengthens Cooke’s resolve to see a brighter future, to find hope amid strife as only he could. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Sam Cooke: “A Change Is Gonna Come”

Leonard Cohen: Songs From a Room (1969)

While Leonard Cohen’s work would eventually lift skyward in the form of standards, hymns, and prophecies, the music on his sophomore album is something humbler: country tunes. In writing it, he abandoned his initial sessions in Hollywood with David Crosby and headed to Nashville, where he filled the studio with banjos and buzzing jaw harps.

Nashville welcomed him: The album’s opening song, the immortal “Bird on the Wire,” was covered by both Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. Kris Kristofferson famously requested its opening lines be