John “Bootsie” Wilson, lead-singer for the ’50s/’60s R&B group The Silhouettes, has died. Best known singing The Silhouettes classic 1958 hit “Get a Job”, Wilson died Sept. 21 at his home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, after struggling with cancer and a kidney problems. He was 69. [HollywoodReporter.com]

Wolfgang’s Vault, the largest collection of licensed streaming live recordings on the Internet is set to make its catalog available for downloading on Nov. 3. The site is adding over 1,000 titles from 919 artists to the already 500 titles available for purchase including live recordings by such artists as The Grateful Dead, Miles Davis, Hall & Oates and others. Leading up to the Nov. 3 “Cracking the Vault” blowout, the site will make a handful of these recordings available twice a week. [Billboard.com]

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Thom Yorke has assembled an all-star backing band for his solo shows next week. Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, production collaborators Nigel Godrich and Joey Waronker, and multi-instrumentalist Mauro Refosco will all join Yorke at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, where they will play tracks from Yorke’s 2006 album, The Eraser, as well as new material. [Billboard.com]

The Shins’ frontman James Mercer and Gnarls Barkley’s Danger Mouse have teamed up for a new project, tentatively called Broken Bells. Although no material has been released, the two previously worked together on Sparklehorse’s Dark Night of the Soul. Fans can expect Broken Bells’ debut album to arrive early next year on Columbia Records; in the meantime, the duo’s website offers occasional updates. [Pitchfork.com]

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Lady Sovereign spent an evening in Australian jail this weekend. Her detainment came after a visit to a gay nightclub in Brisbane, where an argument with the venue’s bouncer ended with Sovereign spitting at the doorman. Police later arrested the singer for assault and disorderly conduct, two charges that she later disputed via Twitter. [NME.com]

Robbie Williams reportedly spent his weekend in a New York City studio alongside his former band, Take That. Williams originally left the group in 1995 and embarked on a lucrative solo career, although his recent work has paled in comparison to Take That’s past two releases. Williams’ newest solo album will hit stores in November, prompting some to wonder whether his weekend recording session with Take That was motivated by nostalgia or headline-hungry business savvy. [Guardian.co.uk]

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No jokey intro this week — we’re just not in the mood. Instead we want to dedicate the HDJs to the Scotland Yard Gospel Choir as they recover from a horrible van accident that left members of the band in various degrees of injury. Please head over to their label’s website to see what you can do to help out. They’ve set up a recovery fund to help the band members get back on their feet. (http://www.bloodshotrecords.com/news/sygc-van-accident) Only after you’ve done that should you listen to this week’s selection of jamz.

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Once again, we take a short break from covering current releases by looking back at a year from this nearly-complete decade and compiling lists of our personal favorites. Five years on from 2004, it’s easy to forget what a good year it was for almost every kind of music. Some of the decade’s biggest indie-rock acts, including TV on the Radio, the Fiery Furnaces, the Arcade Fire and Deerhoof, asserted themselves with definitive albums. Madvillain, MF Doom, Diplo and Dizzee Rascal kept rap’s cutting edge sharp. The year’s finest electronic music spanned Annie, Junior Boys, Fennesz and Mouse on Mars, while pop ranged from Kelly Clarkson to the Scissor Sisters, and country ran the gamut from Big & Rich to Loretta Lynn. Last but not least, Green Day’s American Idiot summed up the year’s political tenor. There aren’t many overlapping picks on our lists, which only goes to show how strong and eclectic the year’s music was. If you’re posting a list of your own in the comments, try limiting yourself to 20 picks for albums and singles (like we had to) for an extra challenge!

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In the wake of the French Revolution, the passage of Classical style into the Romantic around 1800 was one of the most pivotal and cataclysmic events in the history of Western music, and dozens of composers were deep in the thick of its development. By putting the weight of this entire historic period on the broad shoulders of Ludwig van Beethoven, music history has had only a weak grasp of what really happened at the time and who else was involved. This has been due partly to the attitudes of those scholars and experts whose opinions mattered most, such as Charles Rosen, who commented in his respected 1971 study, The Classical Style, that any composer from the Classical Era outside of the big three — Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Beethoven — was “not worth discussion.” Since that time, significant progress has been made in advancing some other figures. Key pre-Romantic Classicists such as Jan Ladislav Dussek, Hyacinthe Jadin, Anton Reicha, and Etienne-Nicolas Méhul have stepped forward from the shadows, and certain composers of the era previously branded as conservatives, such as Muzio Clementi and Luigi Cherubini, have had their status upgraded to pioneers of Romantic style.

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Pearl Jam is likely to earn the top spot on the Billboard 200 with Backspacer, which will make it the group’s first number one album in 13 years, when No Code topped the chart. However, Backspacer’s estimated sales of 175,000 to 200,000 copies are less than their 2006 self-titled album, which peaked at number two with 279,000 copies sold its first week of release. Albums from Three Days Grace, David Gray, Five Finger Death Punch and Mika are also set to debut high on the Billboard 200. [Billboard.com]

The Beatles are still breaking chart records: The remastered versions of the Fab Four’s catalog sold over 2.25 million copies in North America, Japan and the U.K. in the five days after they were released on September 9. On the Billboard pop catalog chart, the band had 16 titles in the top 50, including all 14 remastered CDs and two box sets. [Associated Press]

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Justin Timberlake has purportedly signed on to star in an upcoming movie about Facebook. Timberlake will tackle the role of Napster co-founder Sean Parker, who advised Facebook’s creators before becoming the company’s first president in 2004. Titled The Social Network, the film was scribed by Aaron Sorkin, produced by Kevin Spacey, and also stars The Squid And The Whale actor Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg . [NME.com]

The Toronto-based hardcore band F*#ed Up has won this year’s Polaris Music Prize. The band took the award (along with a $20,000 check) for their sophomore release, The Chemistry of Common Life, which beat out albums by fellow Canadian bands like Metric, Great Lakes Swimmers, and Malajube. [Billboard.com]

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