Now

When Hoagy Carmichael’s son was a producer at Boston public TV station WGBH, he got the notion to update his father’s 1958 kiddie album Havin’ A Party for the Sesame Street-savvy children of the ’70s. Fatefully, the group he recruited to do this was an experimental jazz ensemble called the Stark Reality, and the resulting 1970 LP The Stark Reality Discovers Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop exposed many unwitting youths to music that sounded like Roy Ayers wrapped in aluminum foil and put in a centrifuge until it all sounded flailingly dizzy. Naturally it became a top-dollar cratedigger nugget, and this collection of cuts from it and contemporaneous sessions made its bizarre wonder available to all.