Carnival of Soul

(Bear Family; 10 CDs plus hard-bound book, $179.68)

The city of Bakersfield, Calif. emerged in the 1950s to rival Nashville as the place defining country music. The Bakersfield sound clung tenaciously to country’s most twangy, sinewy elements — bluegrass, Western swing, honky-tonk, rockabilly — to accompany lean, down-to-earth, working-class storytelling. Buck Owens and Merle Haggard were the city’s superstars, but this copious 10-CD set, which includes an extensively researched hardcover book, digs far deeper. It starts with Library of Congress recordings of migrant Southwestern farmworkers in California — real “Okies” — and celebrates Bakersfield’s studio mainstays. It rediscovers rowdy rarities like Phil Brown’s “You’re a Luxury” and Rose Stassie’s “Out of My Mind.” Instead of well-worn hits, it selects lesser-known cuts from Owens and Haggard, including their barely distributed debut singles. While Nashville eventually won country radio, at least Bakersfield never got slick. JON PARELES

(UMe; one CD, $13.98; two LPs, $24.98; eight 7” singles, $109.98; or digital)

“HERstory Vol. 1” is a selective but not wrongheaded retelling of the early years of Mary J. Blige’s career, when she emerged from Yonkers with a hefty, scarred voice and became an essential component of the hip-hop soul mélange that Sean (Puff Daddy) Combs was helping build. Her collaborations with rappers were foundational, and many of the most important ones are here, including “I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I Need to Get By” with Method Man and “Can’t Knock the Hustle” with Jay-Z (from his debut album, “Reasonable Doubt”), though the latter is only on the physical versions of this release. JON CARAMANICA

(Pearl; various configurations of seven LPs and seven CDs, $34.99-$129.99)

A doorstop of a box that celebrates peak Garth-mania, that period in the early 1990s when Garth Brooks took the smoothed-out country music of the 1980s, pumped it up with steroids, gave it a polished gleam and took it to arenas around the nation (and later, to Central Park). This set, which contains four albums and his live triple album, is available in analog and digitally remastered versions. But it’s slightly haphazard: It includes “No Fences,” a diamond-certified album from 1990, and “The Chase,” an almost diamond-certified album from 1992, but not “Ropin’ the Wind,” a diamond-certified album from 1991. Fans of the studio version of “Papa Loved Mama”: I don’t know what to tell you. CARAMANICA

(Hyperdub; two CDs or digital, $18.99)

Burial’s morose dampness and hooligan thump were among the defining sounds of British music in the mid-2000s. Since then, however, he’s receded somewhat. This two-and-a-half-hour compilation comprises most of what he’s released since his second album, in 2007. He’s been working with a slightly broader palette — there are touches of techno and garage here — but in the main, his commitment to dark dance floor shards is persistent and bracing. CARAMANICA

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(Earwig; four CDs plus hard-bound book, $79.99)

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Narvel Eatmon, the self-styled Cadillac Baby, owned a club and a store that sold records on the South Side of Chicago. He started the short-lived labels Bea & Baby, Key, Key Hole and Miss — barely footnotes now in blues history. He recorded performers who played the club and other local talent including Hound Dog Taylor, James Cotton, Sunnyland Slim, Eddie Boyd and a handful of gospel groups. Bea & Baby’s biggest hit was Bobby Saxton’s 1960 single “Trying to Make a Living.” Saxton disappeared into obscurity, as did many of the other performers on this comprehensive collection. But in bare-bones studios, with amps cranked up and bluesmen who could shout, Cadillac Baby captured a vital era. Six decades later, songs by L.C. McKinley, Willie Williams, the Daylighters, Little Mack Simmons, Andrew “Blueblood” McMahon, the Gospelaires and others still hold their raw spark. PARELES

(Resonance Records; 10 LPs, $194.98; seven CDs, $94.98)

Before he became one of the world’s biggest pop stars, Nat King Cole was a young jazz pianist developing his craft on the Los Angeles club scene. This imposing collection, available as 10 LPs or seven CDs, shines a light on this lesser-known opening chapter of his career. It contains all of the nearly 200 tracks Cole is known to have recorded in the late 1930s and early ’40s, just before he signed with Capitol Records and leapt into the national spotlight. At times, his dazzling piano playing calls Art Tatum to mind; elsewhere, singing lighthearted ditties like “There’s No Anesthetic for Love” in a repartee with his trio-mates, he sounds a lot like Louis Jordan. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

(Craft Recordings; eight LPs, $259.80; five CDs, $74.99)

From one angle, John Coltrane’s career was a case study in nonstop evolution: He was forever breaking new ground, then moving swiftly along to the next revelation. In a different sense, his legacy is tied to a constant: The classic quartet that he held together for four years in the 1960s changed jazz forever. So this box — which collects the 37 tracks he recorded for Prestige Records in 1958 — invites a celebration of Coltrane untethered from the standard narratives. In that year he was still experimenting with a variety of bands (Red Garland, Kenny Burrell and Donald Byrd were some of his side musicians) while settling deeply into a harmonically complex style, one that would define his output in the years immediately ahead. RUSSONELLO

(VP; four CDs, four 12” records and four 7” records, $149.98)

This ambitious boxed set tracks one of reggae’s biggest and most diverse success stories, VP Records, as it helped shape the sound of the genre, one single at a time. This collection, limited to 2,000 copies, features plenty of popular crossover hits, from Beenie Man, Ini Kamoze, Sean Paul and more. But thankfully, they’re mere footnotes to the larger story here, which is about how faithful roots reggae has remained over the decades, how flexible dancehall has been, and how — owing to the ubiquitous influence of songs like Yellowman’s “Zungguzungguguzungguzeng” — this music from Jamaica has seeped into the sounds of the rest of the world. CARAMANICA

(Young Money/Cash Money/Republic; digital only, $9.99 or on various streaming services)

In the age of digital ephemera, music can be released in a way that’s permanent but also disorganized — a link might live forever, but your ability to index, locate or remember it could fade. Such is the case with Drake’s early-to-mid-2010s loosies, which were largely released on SoundCloud and include some of his most memorable, and fraught, music. “Care Package” finally brings these songs to streaming services, and they showcase Drake’s emotional sinew at its most rarefied — the tough-tender push and pull of “Paris Morton Music,” the callow chest-puffing of “Dreams Money Can Buy.” CARAMANICA

(Columbia/Legacy; three CDs, $29.98; three LPs, $49.98)

Bob Dylan recorded “Blonde on Blonde” in Nashville in 1966, but when he returned in 1967 — after his motorcycle accident, his seclusion in Woodstock and the “Basement Tapes” sessions with the Band — he was intent on mastering the terseness and deceptive simplicity of country tradition, first with the skeletal, Sphinx-like “John Wesley Harding” and then with the jovial, honeyed “Nashville Skyline.” He’s both apprentice and master on “Travelin’ Thru,” which gathers outtakes from those years, including Dylan singing part of “Wanted Man,” a song he wrote for Johnny Cash, an early Dylan advocate. The handful of outtakes from “John Wesley Harding” are more foursquare, less swinging and less tense than the superior album versions. And there’s no undiscovered masterpiece; “Western Road,” a previously unreleased song, is just a blues pastiche. A jokey session with Cash, and duets from the first episode of Cash’s television series, show what happens when two lifelong mavericks try to harmonize. PARELES

(Palmetto Records; six CDs, $46.99)

The pianist Fred Hersch might be jazz’s patron saint of restraint. He can push hard against the rhythm or abandon a piece’s harmony altogether without seeming like he’s gotten his hands dirty or gone overboard. Yet he never feels impassive or aloof, either: There’s tremendous emotional complexity to his contrapuntal, Romantic-influenced style. Like Bill Evans, his clearest progenitor, Hersch thrives in a trio format, and for the past decade he has led an expert combo featuring the bassist John Hébert and the drummer Eric McPherson. This compact box features all five albums the group has recorded together, three live (including the double-disc “Alive at the Vanguard”) and two in the studio. RUSSONELLO

(Strut; one CD, $15.99; two LPs, $33.99)

Strut Records’ Nigeria 70 series continues to unearth remarkable tracks that were previously unreleased outside Nigeria. The musicians were listening to music from nearby Ghana and Benin and to American funk and rock as well as local traditions; they sang, sometimes in English, about black pride, political strife, love and, in a song by Etubom Rex Williams and His Nigerian Artistes, “psychedelic shoes.” Each of the dozen extended songs — only one runs less than five minutes — sets out a different polyrhythmic mesh of guitars and percussion (and sometimes horns). The dance floor-tested grooves tangle and flex and evolve as they go — especially the prismatic Ukwuani style of the International Brothers and Rogana Ottah & His Black Heroes. PARELES

(Warp; 10-LP box, $150; each disc also available separately)

For its 30th anniversary, Warp Records selected 10 radio sessions — each the length of an EP, but pressed onto a 12-inch LP — from its archives spanning 1990 (LFO) to 2019 (Kelly Moran, Mount Kimbie, Bibio). Collectively, they testify to Warp’s aesthetic: largely but not exclusively electronic, full of loops but welcoming interruptions, blurry at the edges, more moody than propulsive but not ruling out an occasional dance beat. In these sessions, tracks are perpetually in beta mode, getting tweaked through real-world experience. Oneohtrix Point Never hews closely to the studio versions of his music (a technical feat); Boards of Canada recasts its loops and transposes its chord progressions. Flying Lotus, leading a virtuosic jazz ensemble, lets improvisation reign. Kelly Moran, whose compositions explore the gonglike or clanking resonances of a prepared piano, remakes her pieces in ways that are barer and more impulsive; Bibio, a guitarist and singer-songwriter who harnesses electronics, becomes folkier but no less precise. The boxed set lumps together the rare and the redundant; luckily, each session is available separately or streaming. PARELES