• Quartarone, Andrea - 2003 - "Two Sides of Music"
• Queen - 1975 - "A Night at the Opera"
• Queensryche - 1988 - "Operation: Mindcrime"
• Queensryche - 1999 - "Q2"
• Qui - 2006 - "Prelude"

Andrea Quartarone's debut album "Two Sides of Music", consists of two CDs, each of which has its own title and subtitle: The Power Side - "A New Breath" (Disc 1) and The World Side - "In a Latin Game" (Disc 2). Quartarone is a very masterful guitar player, and his compositions are original and don't contain any obvious influences. There are only two tracks on The Power Side, the music on which is really power and represents a blend of Prog-Metal and Jazz-Fusion of a moderate complexity. All four of the other tracks on Disc 1 are about Classic Jazz-Fusion where highly virtuosi and inventive solos of electric guitar are mostly at the forefront of arrangements, though a role that the parts of piano and, sometimes, those of sax play here is also important. Most of the contents of The World Side are about the same Classic Jazz-Fusion as is presented on the first three tracks of Disc 1, though here, Andrea plays an acoustic, and not electric guitar. And while motifs of the so-called World music in general and those of Latin American music in particular are present on each composition here, only two out of the six pieces that Disc 2 consists of are filled with them. Overall, "Two Sides of Music" is an excellent album, though I can highly recommend it only to the Jazz-Fusion lovers.

Queen (UK) - 1975 - "A Night at the Opera"

Doubtless, "A Night at the Opera" by the legendary Queen is one of the greatest Progressive Hard Rock albums ever created in the history of Rock. More than the half of the songs contain real Progressive arrangements, and two of these songs I can call as full progressive compositions (incidentally, most prog-heads know it well, and I hope, will agree with my opinion). The both gem-pieces were placed on the LP's side B - the first and the pre-last. The Prophet's Song and A Bohemian's Rhapsody are unique proto-prog-metallic pieces based on high energy complex hard rock with lots of shifts, very good lyrics, and great varied polymorphic opera-like vocal harmonies.

Queensryche (USA) - 1988 - "Operation: Mindcrime"

Another excellent album from Prog-metal genre, which in the second half of the '80s gave to Prog-heads a lot more profound musical information than Sympho-Prog and Jazz-Fusion taken together, since the two were depressed by the overall crisis. Although "Operation..." was not so quirky as "No Exit" of Fates Warning, the dilogy "Them" & "Conspiracy" of King Diamond and the debut of Dream Theater, it remains one of the strongest Prog-metal albums with a unified conception (say, in the vein of Pink Floyd's "The Wall") and various themes disclosing lots of beautiful acoustic pieces. Well composed, sung and played, this album is positioned up to now as one of the most important works of the maturity of Progressive Metal genre, and it filled more or less the "Prog-vacuum" of those years. Released by "EMI-Manhattan" label (one of US divisions of "EMI").

Queensryche - 1999 - "Q2"

And they were once regarded, together with Fates Warning, nearly the leaders of prog- metal? Ha! These residents of Seattle, twin city of Tashkent, have come to terms with their in-born "garage" essence. Second album in a row with light songs of pop-grundge content, this seems to be the end.

Qui - 2006 - "Prelude"
(35 min, Vital Records)

Three Japanese musicians have united their efforts under the name of QUI, namely guitarist Takashi Hayashi (who additionally plays synthesizer), bassist Kanji Sugano and drummer Yukihiro Fujimoto. "Prelude" is their debut release. Although the keyboards take commonly a back seat in the overall sound, they are usually lush enough to help the group sound richer than a traditional guitar trio. The recording is made up of eight instrumentals, most of which range from two to four-and-a-half minutes, the only exception to that rule, Astrato Live, being a solid, expanded version of the opening track of the same name, thus raising some doubts about the necessity of its studio counterpart's inclusion. The music is either Allan Holdsworth-style Jazz-Fusion with occasional ambient landscapes or swingy Jazz-Rock. Of course, tunes created without resorting to such conventional methods as those typical of the latter genre basically offer the trio much more room to show, say, their progressive possibilities, and thankfully these are larger in number (no matter that they are derivative). All in all, Qui is a group of technically well-prepared musicians who, however, must perfect their compositional skill to impart more identity to their sound.