The Rolling Stones’ “A Bigger Bang: Live on Copacabana Beach” (Mercury) is a legendary concert recording and DVD that captures the band’s historic February 8, 2006, concert at the epid Rio de Janeiro locale before 1.5 million people in one of the biggest free concerts in rock and roll history. The show was originally put out on DVD in 2007 as “The Biggest Bang.” This new set includes four songs not on the first version (“Tumbling Dice,” “Oh No, Not You Again,” “This Place Is Empty,” and “Sympathy for The Devil”) and has been remixed, re-edited, and remastered. Filmed by 50 cameras, some aboard yachts and helicopters, the band emerge across a purpose-built bridge from the Copacabana Palace Hotel as a comically bombastic video plays on big screens stretching a mile down the beach. Suddenly, Keith’s center stage, high-kicking his way through the intro to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” on his black Tele-Custom as if it’s 1968. The set finds the Stones at the top of their game – who’d have thunk this far into their career they’d still know how to strut? This is the first time that the gig has been released in its complete form, and as expected, it’s a gas, gas, gas.

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Joni Mitchell continues to mine and release songs and albums from her Reprise catalogue. “The Reprise Albums (1968 – 1971) finds Joni at her finest with four signature albums: “Songs to a Seagull,” “Clouds,” “Ladies of the Canyon” and “Blue.” If Bob Dylan’s trademark was his unknowability, Mitchell’s was arguably her decision to let everything be known – Kris Kristofferson once famously told her she ought to “save something for yourself“. But to write so openly was radical for a female artist – through these portraits of her own emotional life, its darknesses and complications, Mitchell achieved a kind of emancipation. It is wrong to entirely disentangle “Blue” from its predecessors: to listen to the Reprise albums as a collection is to be reminded of the wild distillation of talent contained in four short years and four remarkable records.

Certainly, with knowledge of ‘Blue,” there is something still guileless and green about “Seagull” – the music holds a folky formality, and Mitchell never seems to truly inhabit the lyrics, beyond, perhaps “Cactus Tree,” in which a woman catalogues ex-lovers, her heart “full and hollow like a cactus tree.” It is the toughness of femininity that runs through this collection: songs that are beautiful and uncompromising and groundbreaking; a dismantling of defenses that would lead to the most strikingly honest work of Joni Mitchell’s career.

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L.A. troubadour Jackson Browne returns with “Downhill from Everywhere” (Inside Recording) and if the first single, “A Little Too Soon to Say” is any indication, JB hasn’t lost his touch as one of the Southern Californian rock traditionalists. Though the track, and its nine companions here were written and recorded pre-Covid, there’s a definite sense of living on borrowed time. He himself tested positive but came through intact. Album opener “Still Looking for Something” is classic soft-rock in conventional Browne mode, and it attests to his ever-questing nature. But it’s “Minutes to Downtown” – describing his life as “a story this long and this close to the end” – that sounds like the first classic, “Take It Easy.” Inspired by a recent romantic encounter, it suggests you can teach an old dog new tricks. And

The title track borrows its riff-based structure from the Stones, but the lyrics are inspired by a non-musical character: Oceanographer Captain Charles Moore who, while navigating the Pacific, realized he was passing through a sea of plastic. The almost monotone vocal delivery evokes Warren Zevon, aperformer the 72-year-old Browne discovered and who has predeceased him.

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Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the 2-CD soundtrack to the cult film “Almost Famous” (Geffen), director Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece about his days as a cub reporter for Rolling Stone, is a beat-up setlist that perfectly encapsulates the 70s rock era. (You can practically smell the bong water.) From Simon & Garfunkel’s “America” to Iggy Pop & the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy,” “Famous” is Crowe’s love letter to a lost decade. A deluxe reissue – five-CDs- marks the first time that all the music featured in the film is being released together in one package. The expanded package tracklist includes songs by Led Zeppelin, the Beach Boys, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, the Who, and Fleetwood Mac, alongside all the material created for the film’s fictional rock group, Stillwater, which was written by Crowe, Nancy Wilson and Peter Frampton. For many, this is the soundtrack to their youth; to others, an opportunity to revisit some groovy music.

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