Artists beginning with J

J Dilla
Donuts (2006)
James Yancey recorded Donuts while on dialysis and released it the day he turned 32. Three days later, he was dead, but his swan song shows why he was the hip-hop producer's producer. This dense, urgent, soul-drenched splurge of wild ideas and weird juxtapositions is a final celebration of the music he loved.

Janet Jackson
Control (1987)
Any album that coins the catchphrase "It's Miss Janet if you're nasty", is surely a classic. As a bonus, Control is both the apex of producers Jam & Lewis's irresistible club aesthetic and a fierce, no-nonsense statement of arrival from Miss Janet herself.

Joe Jackson
Look Sharp! (1979)
Look Sharp! seemed to herald the arrival of a serious rival for Elvis Costello's position as New Wave's embittered Mr Grumpy. Packed with jumpy little pop grenades - most barely three minutes long, all wildly catchy - it presented Jackson as a neurotic romantic with a lifetime of relationship failures to get off his chest, and then some.

Michael Jackson
Off the Wall (1979)
The odd thing isn't that Michael Jackson got so messed up, but that he managed to make two of the best ever pop albums beforehand. Off the Wall remains the gold standard for dance pop, and the inspiration behind every former boybander's attempt to cut their own solo career.

Millie Jackson
Caught Up (1974)
Jackson comes off like a female Isaac Hayes on this half-sung, half-rapped song cycle about adultery; she switches her sympathies between the mistress and the betrayed wife. The prolix titles - (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right, I'm Through Trying to Prove My Love to You - say it all.

Walter Jackson
Speak Her Name (1966)
One of Chicago's great "ice man" vocalists along with Jerry Butler and Garland Green, Jackson's rich voice took stoicism to new extremes on It's An Uphill Climb to the Bottom and My One Chance to Make It. Riley Hampton's lush but eerie arrangements suit it perfectly.

Wanda Jackson
Rockin' With Wanda (1960)
Few people could have compared themselves to the atom bomb without sounding crass. But that was Wanda Jackson - a prime mover in the 1950s rockabilly scene, whose ponytail-swinging attitude and twanging guitar remain absurdly underacknowledged (not least by the Rock'n'roll Hall of Fame).

The Jacksons
Triumph (1980)
Produced, arranged and composed entirely by the Jacksons, Triumph followed Michael's Off the Wall by a year - but it was arguably the more consistently brilliant work, with eight mini-masterpieces of symphonic disco, including massive hits Can You Feel It?, Walk Right Now and Lovely One, plus one heart-stopping ballad.

The Jam
Sound Affects (1980)
Their most cutting-edge album, and Paul Weller's favourite - brimming with the angular influence of Wire, Joy Division and XTC, and full of the icy foreboding of the early Thatcher years. Among its highlights are the razor-sharp Start and panoramic That's Entertainment, famously written by Weller in a beery fug.

James
Stutter (1986)
Before Madchester, and before the Horlicks rock of Sit Down became ubiquitous, James were an invigorating prospect: a folk-pop band apparently engaged in a bout of pro-wrestling with their instruments. Their debut album clangs like a grand piano tumbling downstairs - leaving singalong melodies in its wake.

Jane's Addiction
Nothing's Shocking (1988)
Questing, querulous and defiantly provocative, Perry Farrell's ­magnificently epic rockers were the ­unashamedly arty wing of the late 1980s LA rock scene. Farrell's ­keening vocal, Dave Navarro's ­quixotic guitar and some astute - if un-PC - lyrical ­leanings made eruptions like Ocean Size and Mountain Song essential and unforgettable.

Bert Jansch
Bert Jansch (1965)
With Dylan it was all about the words, with Jansch the guitar, and never more so than on his keening, threadbare debut. Those spindly, music-box pickings carried British folk into new waters, and came to bear on everyone from Davey Graham to Led Zeppelin. It's virtuosic, but restless, and utterly moving. Needle of Death might still be the saddest of all softly sung tragedies.

Japan
Tin Drum (1981)
All eyeliner and reference points, Japan seemed not so much a band as a phase to be gone through. That, though, would deny their strength of purpose. A single, Ghosts, took the sound of paranoid bats in a windy belfry into the Top 20. Their final LP, meanwhile, refined their intellectual pop aesthetic into a stylish, glossy monochrome.

Victor Jara
Chile September 1973 Manifesto (1998)
Released to mark the 25th anniversary of the murder of the great Chilean singer by the military authorities in 1973, this poignant version of Jara's unfinished album includes Adrian Mitchell reading his final poem, Chile Stadium. Jara's songs provide a stirring reminder of why he has remained an influence on singers such as Robert Wyatt.

Keith Jarrett
The Köln Concert (1975)
The best-selling piano record ever, in any idiom. Distrusting an inferior instrument on this unaccompanied gig, Jarrett stuck to the mid-range and improvised - with sweeping imagination - around a handful of ostinatos and grooves. The result is a hypnotic, romantically lyrical and country-tinged tour de force.

Jay-Z
The Black Album (2003)
For what was meant to be his last studio album, Shawn Carter delivered his most open, intense and honest rhymes. Though the reality fell short of the professed dream (the plan was 10 collaborations with 10 great hip-hop producers), it's his strongest, most consistently inspired set, if not generally his most lauded.

Jefferson Airplane
Surrealistic Pillow (1967)
San Francisco psychedelia captured just before pomposity and bloat set in. Low on indulgent jamming, the songs come in sharp, remarkably potent flashes. Jefferson Airplane would never again sound as concise or powerful as on White Rabbit and Somebody to Love; even the shifting, episodic She Has Funny Cars lasts barely three minutes.

Billy Jenkins and the Voice of God Collective
Scratches of Spain (1987)
The LP sleeve pastiched Miles Davis, and the music served as a strange collision of post-punk anger, Gil Evans-ish chamber jazz and bathetic English satire (sample title: Benidorm Motorway Services). This convinced us that erstwhile glam punk guitarist Jenkins really had become an inspiringly maverick bandleader of great importance.

The Jesus and Mary Chain
Psychocandy (1985)
They may never have matched the shock of first single Upside Down, but the Reid brothers' marriage of 1960s psychedelic pop melodies and raking, jagged feedback was consummated in fine style on this debut. Just Like Honey was the Shangri-Las in an acid bath; Never Understand, the Beach Boys dragged through a punk rock riot; You Trip Me Up, a summery saunter through a hail of noise.

Elton John
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973)
For an album that wallows in sepia-tinged nostalgia, name-checking John Dillinger, Roy Rogers and Marilyn Monroe, Elton John's masterpiece still sounds thrillingly modern. His enthusiasm, sentiment and sense of fun knits the ballads, prog-rock, cod reggae and glitzy pop together with an energy John soon lost.

Linton Kwesi Johnson
Dread Beat an' Blood (1978)
The record that invented "dub poetry" remains a milestone in British urban black music. Dennis Bovell's Dub Band provided anvil-heavy beats to frame Johnson's withering monologues about the 1970s black experience in "Inglan".

Robert Johnson

King of the Delta Blues Singers (1961)

Robert Johnson is the original embodiment of the most enduring myth in popular culture. Not the one about the blues guitarist who sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads - although that was him, too, a ­rumour probably circulated by envious contemporaries. The other myth: the one about living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful body of work behind you, in Johnson's case a small but immaculate collection of the most affecting blues songs in existence.
For about the same price as King of the Delta Blues Singers, you can get, in Columbia's two-CD set, 41 of the 42 recordings Johnson is known to have made ­before his death in 1938, aged 27, of pneumonia, which the notorious womaniser contracted after being ­poisoned by a jealous husband. But that runs alternate takes of individual songs consecutively, and while there's pleasure to be had in noting how Johnson ­reworked his material - hammering a chord here, ­clarifying a lyric there - listening to it inevitably makes one feel like an anorak.
Anything you need to know about Johnson - about most rock music, because on its 1960s release this ­influenced every guitar giant of that decade - is on this 17-track compilation. Crossroad Blues encapsulates black existence in 1930s America: Johnson's ­despair at his low-grade citizenship is palpable. Terraplane Blues takes the tongue-in-cheek "raunchy" form prevalent at the time and makes it raw with heartsore feeling. Me and the Devil Blues pulsates with resignation at the fate of a man given to women and drink.
But there was warmth and humour in his songs, too, not to mention a diamantine brilliance about his guitar-playing - so virtuosic that Stones guitarist Keith Richards confessed he initially thought two men were behind it. Johnson was haunted by the restless ambition to transcend his time and place: how profoundly he achieved that dream. Maddy Costa

Daniel Johnston
1990 (1990)
There's an uncomfortable voyeurism in listening to music borne of mental illness, but 1990 is a strong argument in favour of so-called "outsider music". Alternately terrifying and terrified, deeply moving and plaintively beautiful, Johnston's songs are perhaps the solitary positive aspect of their creator's anguish: great art made in the most desperate of circumstances.

George Jones
The Essential George Jones: The Spirit of Country Music (1998)
Like his idol, Hank Williams, Jones is the bloodied but unbowed heart of country. As famous for his temper, battles with booze and fondness for driving lawnmowers as for his voice, he flies the flag for old-fashioned country and timeless misery.

Grace Jones
Nightclubbing (1981)
After her camp disco beginnings, Jones pitched up in the Bahamas with Chris Blackwell for this, an album of dub-soaked pop propelled by the super salacious Pull Up to the Bumper and the Sting-penned Demolition Man. In keeping with reggae's fondness for cover versions, Jones betters Iggy Pop's Nightclubbing.

Janis Joplin
Pearl (1971)
The tragic Texan's final album is still the benchmark for blues-sodden, emotional female vocalists. Raw songs of abandonment such as Me and Bobby McGee and A Woman Left Lonely are delivered with gut-wrenching honesty. The 27-year-old's drug overdose during sessions meant Buried Alive in the Blues remained a chillingly titled instrumental.

Josef K
Entomology (2006)
With their name taken from Kafka, it's somehow apt that Josef K's definitive album shouldn't appear until 25 years after the band's demise. Entomology cherry-picks from an unreleased debut, its bona fide successor plus singles and Peel sessions, successfully spearing the influential Edinburgh quartet's spiky art-pop and existential jive.

Joy Division
Closer (1980)
The arrival of Joy Division's second album in the aftermath of Ian Curtis's suicide brought with it a shadow of death that disguised Closer's expressions of life: the clattering energy of Atrocity Exhibition, the metallic pop of Isolation and the virtuosity of Curtis's baritone. Still, its final songs, The Eternal and Decades, are untouchable in their manifestations of abject despair.

Joyce
Just a Little Bit Crazy (2003)
Brazilian songwriter Joyce has hardly put a foot wrong in her long career. This brilliant but atypical album draws on Scandinavian nu-jazz (courtesy of Bugge Wesseltoft) to spice up an exemplary home team, including husband Tutty Moreno on drums.

Judas Priest
British Steel (1980)
Heavy metal existed before 1980, but British Steel, released just as British metal was rising, codified it. Priest brought the leather and studs (contributed by their gay singer, Rob Halford), the combination of brute riffs with big hooks (exemplified on Living After Midnight), and the pride in being heavy. Not for nothing was there a song entitled Metal Gods.

Junior Boys
Last Exit (2004)
Last Exit is a cocoon of an album, one to play on loop when feeling at a loss. Beats click, whirr and settle into gentle grooves, basslines provide aural comfort and the melodies are rich with mood and heart. Meanwhile, Jeremy Greenspan's voice - tremulous and fragile, but never ineffectual - slips in and out of the electronic fuzz like a ghost.

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