A mother lode of mind-expanding live music from 1970, the six-disc Cellar Door Sessions marks the moment just before jazz-rock fusion perverted itself into a marketing ploy. Here is Miles Davis, sonic seeker, sending desolate streaks of wah-wah trumpet into the unmapped ethos. His bursts of not-jazz galvanize a rhythm team that respects the backbeat yet delights in trampling convention — listen closely and you'll hear blues cliches and James Brown riffs profoundly and purposefully mangled. On the last night of the run, guitarist John McLaughlin shows up, and the exploration, often guided by Keith Jarrett on gospelized electric piano, reaches higher meta-music plateaus. Though some of the McLaughlin material was used on Live-Evil, much more is seeing daylight for the first time. If anything can possibly redeem fusion, it's this.

“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.