2023 Mfsl

Companion was recorded in a special three-night series of shows in July, 1999 at Chicago's famed Green Mill jazz club — an unusually short amount of time to produce a live album. To mine as much material as possible from those nights the performances were run more like recording sessions than live shows, with the crowd reverently hushed. Patricia Barber is in her element and the only thing that seems to have suffered for the recording circumstances is the album's length — at seven songs and 40 minutes, it walks the line between standard EP and full-length size. One surmises that it might have been longer had there been more album-quality material from the performances. Recalling the energy that was present on her critically worshipped Cafe Blue album, there is an ease and creativity on Companion which makes her fans' devotion understandable.

For roughly half a decade, from 1968 through 1975, the Band was one of the most popular and influential rock groups in the world, their music embraced by critics (and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the public) as seriously as the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Their albums were analyzed and reviewed as intensely as any records by their one-time employer and sometime mentor Bob Dylan. Although the Band retired from touring after The Last Waltz and disbanded several years later, their legacy thrived for decades, perpetuated by the bandmates' respective solo careers as well as the enduring strength of the Band's catalog…

Sourced from the Original Analog Master Tapes for Audiophile Sonics. Originally intended as a clever poke at the era's trends that critics maintained were making the band irrelevant, the title of and music on The Long Run continue to prove the Eagles got the last laugh. Created in the wake of the group's demanding tour for the blockbuster Hotel California, the 1979 record ultimately became the final record the Eagles would create for nearly three decades. Stacked with first-rate material and three mammoth singles, the seven-times-platinum effort ensured the Eagles never drifted far from the public's consciousness.

Bob Dylan and the Band both needed the celebrated reunion tour of 1974, since Dylan's fortunes had been floundering since Self Portrait and the Band stumbled with 1971's Cahoots. The tour, with its attendant publicity, definitely returned both artists to center stage, and it definitely succeeded, breaking box office records and earning great reviews. Before the Flood, a double-album souvenir of the tour, suggests that these were generally dynamic shows, but not because they were reveling in the past, but because Dylan was fighting the nostalgia of his audience - nostalgia, it must be noted, that was promoted as the very reason behind these shows. Yet that's what gives this music such kick - Dylan reworks, rearranges, reinterprets these songs in ways that are still disarming, years after its initial release…

Stevie Ray Vaughan and his band Double Trouble formed the most impressive blues act of the 1980s, which made Vaughan's death in a helicopter crash at the start of the '90s all the more tragic. He grew up in Dallas, the younger brother of Jimmie Vaughan (cofounder of the Fabulous Thunderbirds). Stevie began playing in clubs at 12, and by 17 had dropped out of high school and moved to Austin. There followed years of struggling until April 23, 1982, when Vaughan and his group, Double Trouble, played a private audition for the Rolling Stones in New York. The gig led to an invitation to appear at the Montreux Jazz Festival, at which Vaughan was seen by David Bowie, who hired him to play guitar on his Let's Dance album, and Jackson Browne, who offered the free use of his recording studio. Vaughan took up that offer after being signed by legendary talent scout John Hammond to Epic, recording his debut album, Texas Flood, in the fall of 1982…

A White Sport Coat And A Pink Crustacean (1973). While it still lies much closer to Nashville than Key West (like in the boisterous slide guitar solo that lights up "The Great Filling Station Holdup"), Jimmy Buffett's A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean does begin to delineate the blowsy, good-timin' Key West persona that would lead him to summer tour stardom and the adoration of millions of drinking buddies everywhere. "Why Don't We Get Drunk," "Railroad Lady," and "Grapefruit - Juicy Fruit" rightly became crowd pleasers. But Buffett reveals himself a storyteller with the touching sigh of "He Went to Paris," where a slide guitar appears again to lend a subtle gleam to the arrangement, or in the gorgeous, sweetly sad tale of a passed-away poet's unlikely posthumous success…

Gram Parsons - GP (1973). GP is American singer-songwriter Gram Parsons' debut solo album. Working with a crack band of L.A. and Nashville's finest (including James Burton on guitar, Ronnie Tutt on drums, Byron Berline on fiddle, and Glen D. Hardin on piano), he drew from them a sound that merged breezy confidence with deeply felt Southern soul, and he in turn pulled off some of his most subtle and finely detailed vocal performances; "She" and "A Song for You," in particular, are masterful examples of passion finding balance with understatement. Parsons also discovered that rare artist with whom he can be said to have genuinely collaborated (rather than played beside), Emmylou Harris; Gram and Harris' spot-on harmonies and exchanged verses on "We'll Sweep out the Ashes in the Morning" and "That's All It Took" are achingly beautiful and instantly established her as one country music's most gifted vocalists…

The Genius of Ray Charles is a 1959 album by Ray Charles. In 2003, the album was ranked number 263 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Some players from Ray Charles' big band are joined by many ringers from the Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands for the first half of this program, featuring Charles belting out six songs arranged by Quincy Jones. "Let the Good Times Roll" and "Deed I Do" are highlights, and there are solos by tenorman David "Fathead" Newman, trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, and (on "Two Years of Torture") tenor Paul Gonsalves. The remaining six numbers are ballads, with Charles backed by a string orchestra arranged by Ralph Burns. Charles' voice is heard throughout in peak form, giving soul to even the veteran standards.