Early Jazz-Rock fusion. Boston-native Tony Williams started playing with Miles Davis at age 17 and 7 years later had his own group, Lifetime, which was one of the early pioneering fusion groups. This album is definately their weirdest. Combining hard-bop and psychedelic rock it showcases Williams' amazing solo skills on a few tracks, and his unfortunately pedestrian vocal skills on others. Stick with the non-vocal tracks (which really aren't too horrible) and you'll enjoy the album a lot more.

John Zorn and John Medeski's "Emergency" project is a homage to Lifetime's groundbreaking second album, "Emergency", which was a pioneering fusion album.

The Masada songbook may be aging chronologically, especially considering John Zorn's typically shotgun approach to musical styles, but this album shows, once again, that the music will never get old. I'm a huge Bill Frisell fan, love Marc Ribot's guest-work with MMW and others (oddly enough I'm not so enthusiastic about his own stuff) and knew basically nothing about Tim Sparks, other than that Bill Frisell loved him and he had an album of jewish guitar works out on Tzadik, John Zorn's label.

Each track is a Masada song arranged and performed by one of the three guitarists. The performances on this CD are stellar and the recording top-notch. I can see this album quickly becoming one of my all-time favorites.