ReDiscoveries

After ignominious dismissal from Metallica shortly before that band's debut recording, guitarist Dave Mustaine could have easily become a Greg Walls–esque footnote in metal history. But his seething anger, easily audible in his subsequent discography, led him to retaliate by forming Megadeth, which, if not as lucrative as Metallica, was just as influential.

In the Rolling Stones' long history, the Mick Taylor era was a peak, if not the peak. Taylor, who replaced cofounder Brian Jones in the late 1960s, proved a great musical foil for Keith Richards. He was a technical wizard on the guitar; those fluid higher-octaves riffs and runs were the perfect counterpoint to Richards's jabbing and stabbing and growling style.

In the 1990s into the 2000s, I had the pleasure of interviewing jazz drummer and composer Paul Motian for both Modern Drummer and DownBeat. Motian's playful yet cantankerous spirit shone through in both conversations. The first interview took place at the ECM Records offices in Midtown Manhattan.

In less than 11 years, guitarist Emily Remler went from rising star to shooting star, from her first major exposure—an invitation from Herb Ellis to perform as part of "Guitar Explosion" at the Concord Jazz Festival on July 21, 1978—to her final concert on May 3, 1990, at the Hotel Richmond in Adelaide, Australia, where she was found dead from a heart attack the next day. She was 32 years old.

The recent Resonance Records triple-LP/double-CD set Cookin' at the Queens: Live in Las Vegas (1984 & 1988) is a welcome reminder of her prowess and a sad marker of what she might have accomplished if she hadn't died so young.

No jazz-centric visit to New York City is complete without a trek out to Queens. At 46th Street in Sunnyside stands the apartment building where famed cornetist Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke's alcoholism finally killed him in 1931. Farther out, in Corona, is the newly enlarged and expanded Louis Armstrong House Museum. The actual house Armstrong bought in 1943 and lived in until his death in 1971 is just the way it was when his fourth wife, Lucille, died there in 1983. The long white couches, bright blue kitchen cabinets, and wall-mounted reel-to-reel tape decks behind his desk in the upstairs den remain, all extraordinarily well-preserved. Just north of there, in Flushing Cemetery, you can visit Armstrong's grave.

Pops, as he was affectionately known by friends and fans, was an inveterate maker of scrapbooks and tapes of his music. By spring 1969, he had a pair of Tandberg reel-to-reel recorder/players up and running. One of his then-new treasures was a set of tapes made by the BBC from television broadcasts recorded the preceding summer. Music from those tapes—13 tracks in all, four for the first time ever—has just been released on CD, LP, and streaming, as Louis in London.

The first Beatles music is more than 60 years old, and the group broke up 53 years ago. Yet they and their music remain relevant. So when Apple Corps announced "The Last Beatles Song," on October 26, the world's media ran with the story.

Beatles fans span at least four generations, and the group's promotion machine is looking to hook today's youth, and perhaps rekindle old flames, with 50th Anniversary deluxe reissues of the "Red" (1962-1966) and "Blue" (1967-1970) compilations. These expanded editions—12 new tracks on Red and nine on Blue, including the new-old single "Now & Then"—sport remixes performed since 2015.

1972 is widely praised as the most fertile year ever for rock albums, notching such classics as The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street, David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and Neil Young's Harvest. But albums released in 1973 and currently celebrating their 50th anniversary may be even better: Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, ZZ Top's Tres Hombres, and Bruce Springsteen's The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, among others. But of all the enduring albums of '73, the most exotic, audacious, and ultimately entertaining must be Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies.