Saturday is lost classics day. Way back in 1958, Tin Pan Alley songwriter Hoagy Carmichael (“Stardust,” “The Nearness of You,” “Heart and Soul,” “Georgia On My Mind”) wrote a collection of songs for children titled Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop. Twelve years later, Carmichael’s son Hoagy Bix was working at the Boston PBS tv station WGBH and wanted to produce a show featuring his father’s children’s music. He hired vibraphonist Monty Stark to organize the effort. On the surface, the result would have been expected to be some pleasant children’s music, and if that had been the case then the effort would have been forgotten by now. Instead, Stark brought in his avant-garde psych-rock be-bop group The Stark Reality (which featured a very young John Abercrombie on guitar) to record the songs. The result was a collection of improvised songs called The Stark Reality Discovers Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop, a now highly prized piece of vinyl originally issued on Ahmad Jamal’s AJP Records that was ignored at the time. The songs have since been sampled by hip-hop pioneers Pete Rock and Q-Tip. This is probably the coolest thing you will listen to this year if you take the time to listen to the entire double album’s worth of amazing material the group created.

• Saturday Lost Classic
• Song of the Day (2025)