American Japanese Breakfast

The Band was a Canadian-American roots rock group including Rick Danko (bass guitar, vocals, fiddle), Garth Hudson (keyboards, accordion, saxophone), Richard Manuel (keyboards, drums, vocals), Robbie Robertson (guitar, vocals), and Levon Helm (drums, vocals, mandolin, guitar). Their time backing Bob Dylan was when they first reached prominence (as well as providing The Band their name), but they were originally formed as The Hawks, a backing band for rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins…

During a long and uncommonly productive career, Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida achieved a ubiquity in popular music that has yet to be fully recognized. Largely responsible for the Brazilian/North American "samba jazz" that would eventually catch on in the form of a musical trend known as bossa nova, he played behind dozens of well-known pop vocalists and improved the overall texture of many a studio production ensemble. One credible estimate states that Almeida contributed to no less than 800 film soundtracks (among them The Old Man and the Sea, How the West Was Won, and Breakfast at Tiffany's), as well as countless TV scores. He also authored a series of guitar instruction books that are still in use worldwide…

Collection includes: Pump Up The Jam (1989); Body To Body (1991); The Best Remixes (1991); Recall (1995). Of the many studio-based dance music projects that dominated the charts during the early '90s, few were so popular, or such an improbable success story, as Technotronic. Emerging from Belgium, the multicultural group helped push the deep bass grooves and insistent beats of house music out of the club scene and into the pop mainstream; ironically, they did so largely by hiding behind the photogenic visage of an African-born fashion model who, it was later revealed, did not even perform on their records. In reality, Technotronic was the brainchild of Jo Bogaert (real name Thomas de Quincy), an American-born philosophy teacher who relocated to Belgium in the late '80s in the hopes of mounting a career as a record producer. Bogaert's intent was to fuse house with hip-hop, and toward that aim he sent demos of his work to a variety of rappers, including the Welsh-born MC Eric and a Zairean-born teenager named Ya Kid K (aka Manuela Kamosi), at the time a member of the Belgian rap group Fresh Beat Productions.