Bertice Reading

Bertice grasps and captivates each member of the audience in this album which was recorded in 1974, in a jazz club with no footlights to lend formality and distance. She was better known in England where she was based for most of her career, than in her native USA although she earned a Tony Award nomination for her Broadway performance in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun and appeared in the movie version of Little Shop of Horror. Adept at a whole range of musical styles, from gospel to blues to musical comedy, in addition to her talent, Reading also had a striking appearance and a renowned sense of humour.

Groove Records was a subsidiary of RCA Victor records, founded by Billboard writer Bob Rolontz in 1953 as a rhythm and blues label. The label tried hard to break into the R&B market. Piano Red had its first hit but Mickey & Sylvia was its first big seller. The label also recorded King Curtis, Arthur Crudup, Brook Benton and George Benson. Following Mickey & Sylvia's big hit "Love Is Strange" in 1957, Groove was deactivated and its remaining artists switched over to RCA's Vik subsidiary.

Two CD collection. In 1948, the Empire Windrush famously docked at Tilbury, carrying 493 pengers from Jamaica and Trinidad (plus, by all accounts, one stowaway!). Pathe News were among the media gathered there to meet them, and a remarkable piece of newsreel footage survives in which the freshly disembarked King of Calypso, Lord Kitchener, serenades everyone with impromptu version of 'London Belongs to Me'. And although this by no means marked the birth of black music in the UK (it wasn't even the first boat-load of migrants from the West Indies - a smaller vessel, the Almazora, had delivered some 200 Jamaican pengers to Southampton six months earlier), the symbolic landing of the Windrush is very much seen as a rallying point for much of what would follow, socially, artistically and musically.

Putumayo World Music Presents Putumayo Presents Broadway Jazz album 10 original hits and the original artists genre Jazz, Blues. Includes tracks by Kermit Ruffins, Maxine Sullivan, Coleman Hawkins and more.

Compiled by R&B and rock & roll authority Dave Penny, the 90-track 3CD set Voodoo Voodoo pays tribute to the distaff side of 1950s R&B music that would inform the rock ’n’ roll explosion of the latter half of the decade, from the last shout of the 1940s big band “thrushes” such as Ella Johnson and Dinah Washington, through the fearsome vocal power of the likes of R&B trailblazers such as Big Maybelle, Ruth Brown, LaVern Baker and Big Mama Thornton, to the early experiments of the mainstream pop singers such as Ella Mae Morse, Kay Starr, Peggy Lee, Lillian Briggs and Jaye P. Morgan.