Ian Anderson

What's another holiday season without a slew of new yuletide recordings to provide the soundtrack? Diversity reigns once again, except perhaps for the absence of a good death-metal Christmas collection. * * * 1/2 Blind Boys of Alabama Go Tell It on the Mountain Realworld One of those rare seasonal recordings you wouldn't mind hearing in March, or July.

Environmentalists say the dozens of turbines that rise more than 300 feet over wheat fields and herds of sheep here represent the future of wind energy -- and a model for overcoming the shortcomings that have kept wind from threatening the dominance of fossil fuels.

When is going to a heavy-metal concert like having a big Sunday brunch? When it's halfway through 1997 and nobody except Metallica really knows what heavy metal means anymore (and purists would even dispute that), and the band playing is Queensryche (which always seemed like an exception to the heavy-metal rules), and its set is a two-hour banquet table laden with a little of this and a little of that, some of it identifiably heavy and metal and some not.

*** AMANDA JONES, "Amanda Jones"; Bomp! Records Jeff Drake has been serving up trashy but tasty rock since the early '80s, when he debuted on the Orange County scene as the lead singer of the Joneses. Now he's digging in a slightly different sector of rock's great municipal dump, but he and his new band mates are still coming up with tasty trash.

Dave Pegg has never heard of Bo Jackson. That's understandable. Pegg is an English musician who knows little of the American sports world. But Pegg's current double duty as bassist for both Jethro Tull and Fairport Convention is something of the rock equivalent of Jackson's twin tenure with both the football Raiders and the baseball Royals.

The past has always been good to Jethro Tull. Even back in the progressive rock days of the 1970s, the band's heavy blend of rock, blues, jazz, classical and Celtic flavors made it a peculiar anachronism, more old England than classic rock. Both timeless and hopelessly dated, challenging and pretentious, Jethro Tull has spent three decades in a strange musical dialogue with the ancients.

The federal moratorium on exploratory drilling for oil in deep-sea waters is tantamount to an attack on Louisiana's way of life, politicians and business leaders said Wednesday at an oil-industry-sponsored rally here. The political event at the nearly packed Cajundome stadium demonstrated the influence of the oil industry over Louisiana, and the belief that the moratorium could be so hurtful to the state's economy that drilling is worth the risk. "I think the risk to the local economy is greater than the risk to the environment right now," said machinist Andy Fuquay, 27, dressed in dark blue coveralls.

The catch phrase of Jethro Tull's biggest American hit some 21 years ago was "Let's go living in the past." Ian Anderson, the British band's leader, evidently meant what he said. The past is Tull's present agenda, as it brings its tour celebrating the band's 25th anniversary to Irvine Meadows on Saturday. There always has been something antiquarian about Tull, even in its early days, when it was forging a distinctive musical style that placed it in rock's "progressive" sector.