Albert Hushman

Compared to Frozen Alive!, Live in Japan is a little more drawn-out and funky, featuring extended jamming on several songs. That isn't necessarily a bad thing - Collins and his bandmates can work a groove pretty damn well. Of course, the main reason to listen to an Albert Collins album is to hear the man play. And play he does throughout Live in Japan, spitting out piercing leads with glee. On the whole, it's not quite as consistent as Frozen Alive!, but that's only by a slight margin.

Ice Pickin' is the album that brought Albert Collins directly back into the limelight, and for good reason, too. The record captures the wild, unrestrained side of his playing that had never quite been documented before. Though his singing doesn't quite have the fire or power of his playing, the album doesn't suffer at all because of that - he simply burns throughout the album. Ice Pickin' was his first release for Alligator Records and it set the pace for all the albums that followed. No matter how much he tried, Collins never completely regained the pure energy that made Ice Pickin' such a revelation.

Albert Hammond has been writing hit songs for over fifty years. This is not to just to say that it has been fifty years since his first hit. This is to say that there has not been a single decade in which Albert has not written multiple hits songs since he scored his first hit with “Little Arrows” at the age of 24. His songs have been responsible for the sale of over 360 million records worldwide including over 30 chart-topping hits. Many of his most beloved songs, like “The Air That I Breathe” and “When I Need You,” have become hits multiple times with various artists, decade after decade.

Albert Marcœur is a French composer, singer and songwriter. He began his career in the early 1970s. His body of work mixes melodic, rhythmic and sonic experimentations with fancy nursery rhymes, humorous and offbeat lyrics. In France he has been called "the French Frank Zappa". Albert Marcœur was born on December 12 1947, in Dijon, France. During his formal education of clarinet at the National Academy of Music and Dance of Dijon, Marcoeur actively participated in many straightforward college rock 'n roll bands. Closing an end to his formal training Marcoeur's musical visions had gravitated towards the experimental facets of music, wishing "to do nothing else but make my own music".

It's not as if Albert King hadn't tasted success in his first decade and a half as a performer, but his late-'60s/early-'70s recordings for Stax did win him a substantially larger audience. During those years, the label began earning significant clout amongst rock fans through events like Otis Redding's appearance at the Monterey International Pop Festival and a seemingly endless string of classic singles. When King signed to the label in 1966, he was immediately paired with the Stax session team Booker T. & the MG's. The results were impressive: "Crosscut Saw," "Laundromat Blues," and the singles collection Born Under a Bad Sign were all hits. Though 1972's I'll Play the Blues for You followed a slightly different formula, the combination of King, members of the legendary Bar-Kays, the Isaac Hayes Movement, and the sparkling Memphis Horns was hardly a risky endeavor. The result was a trim, funk-infused blues sound that provided ample space for King's oft-imitated guitar playing.

Albert Hammond is one of the more successful pop/rock songwriters to come out of England during the 1960s and 1970s, and has also enjoyed a long career as a recording artist, his work popular in two languages on three continents across four decades. Hammond was born in London in 1944 – his family actually came from the British colony on Gibraltar, but wartime considerations caused his mother to be evacuated to London, where she gave birth. He spent his childhood and youth on Gibraltar, where he became fluent in both English and Spanish – that bilingual ability would serve him well in his later career. His family lived modestly on his father's fireman's pay, and one of his early diversions was music – he sang in church and became head choir boy. He also became interested in popular music, sang for his own enjoyment, and also took up the guitar.

The release is an important jazz event: While Ayler’s freewheeling performances at the Fondation Maeght on July 25 and 27, 1970, were excerpted on the albums Nuits de la Fondation Maeght (Shandar Records) and Live on the Riviera (ESP-Disc), presented in inferior sound, they have never been released in their entirety until now. Remastered audio by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, transferred directly from the original OrtF stereo tape reels, including over 2 hours of previously unreleased music. The is an official release by Elemental Music Records in partnership with the Albert Ayler Estate & INA France.

Cray found himself in some pretty intimidating company for this Grammy-winning blues guitar summit meeting, but he wasn't deterred, holding his own alongside his idol Albert Collins and Texas great Johnny Copeland. Cray's delivery of Muddy Waters' rhumba-rocking "She's into Something" was one of the set's many highlights.

Originally titled King Does the King's Thing, here's Albert King adding his own touch to a batch of Elvis Presley tunes. Because King's style is so irreducible, the concept actually works, as he fills this album with his traditional, high-voltage guitar work and strong vocals. That isn't surprising, since four of the nine tunes on here originally started as R&B hits covered by Presley, including an instrumental version of Smiley Lewis' "One Night." No matter what the original sources may be, though, this is a strong showing in King's catalog.