Bob Florence Friends, Treasures, Heroes (2005)

Two CD 34 track compilation by Jamaica's best known son, whose fame has grown to enormous proportions since his death over 20 years ago. Reggae has never seen anyone quite like him and probably never will again. Like Elvis, Lennon and other music legends, his legacy continues to reach out and touch the listener with a power that is hard to describe. This collection features the best of his early years before he finally broke through and became a global superstar. Includes 'Freedom Time', 'How Many Times', 'Mellow Mood', 'Small Axe', 'Feel Alright', 'African Herbsman', 'Kaya', 'Lively Up Yourself' and many more.

Digitally remastered two CD set offers either a complete career overview or extensive selections from the artist's most important years & will feature key hits, album tracks, extensive liner notes, credits, period photos, & more.

For her second album, Sue Raney teams with a quartet headed by modern jazz player Bob Florence. Raney has a marvelous, sparkling voice that she applies to a play list of both familiar and unfamiliar up-tempo material and ballads. This singer is equipped with outstanding range and excellent diction, along with an ability to make subtle adjustments in the spacing and timing of lyrical phases, giving each tune a unique interpretation.

Bob Corritore is one of the most active and highly regarded blues harmonica players on the scene today. His style passionately carries forward the old school of playing that Corritore learned as a young man directly from many of original pioneers of Chicago Blues. His sympathetic, yet fiery harmonica playing is featured on over 50 releases to date, on labels such as HighTone, HMG, Blue Witch, Blind Pig, Earwig, Ruf, Putumayo, Random Chance, and the VizzTone Label Group and the great Delta Groove label, which he is currently signed to. Many of Bob’s acclaimed releases have been nominated or winners for various Handy, Grammy, and Blues Music Awards and Blues Blast Music Awards. Bob is also widely recognized for his many roles in the blues, as band leader, club owner, record producer, radio show host, arts foundation founder, and occasional writer. His amazing website bobcorritore.com and his weekly e-newsletter reflect a life thoroughly invested in the blues.

An infamous album by London scene maker Screaming Lord Sutch, who, among other things, claimed to be a genuine Earl and to have started the long hair craze of the '60s, and ran for Parliament on the youth ticket. His infamy bought him some heavy friends indeed for his first LP. Jimmy Page (who produced and played), John Bonham, Jeff Beck, Nicky Hopkins and Noel Redding are all on hand to support Sutch's R&B retreads ("Baby Come Back" is a steal of Roy Head's "Treat Her Right"). The album is regarded as a kind of Plan 9 from Outer Space of rock LPs: it's bad, but endearingly so, with Sutch's growling vocals providing the laughs. Many Led Zeppelin fans – who bought this album when it was released on the heels of the first two Zep records – have never forgiven Page for it.

For marketing purposes, Bob Marley, the Wailers, and Bob Marley & the Wailers have become interchangeable names, used indiscriminately to refer to recordings actually made by separate entities. So, it is worth recalling the distinctions that existed at the times these entities performed and recorded. The Wailers, formed in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1963, was a vocal group consisting of Junior Braithwaite, Beverley Kelso, Bunny Livingston, Bob Marley, Peter McIntosh, and Cherry Smith; they were called variously the Teenagers, the Wailing Rudeboys, the Wailing Wailers, and finally the Wailers. Braithwaite, Kelso, and Smith had departed by 1966, leaving the trio of Livingston, Marley, and McIntosh. By the early '70s, they had begun playing musical instruments and added a rhythm section consisting of brothers Aston "Family Man" Barrett (bass) and Carlton (Carlie) Barrett (drums). After recording extensively in Jamaica, this unit was signed to Great Britain's Island Records, which issued its label debut, Catch a Fire, in April 1973, followed by Burnin' in November. These albums attracted critical attention but did not chart at first.

One of the greatest figures of the 20th century, Bob Dylan helped shape the sound and form of popular music in the rock & roll era. Dylan emerged from the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s, earning a reputation as a perceptive, powerful songwriter, equally capable of penning a protest anthem or a romantic love song. His flair for impressionistic, stream-of-conscious lyrics marked a shift within folk music, an evolution Dylan also introduced to rock & roll when he picked up an electric guitar in 1965. Over the course of 18 months, he released Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, a trio of records that broadened the vocabulary of rock & roll, placing Dylan at the cutting edge of popular culture. Although he subsequently stepped away from the zeitgeist, his restless, occasionally messy work of the '70s and the '80s expanded his formidable songbook through a combination of classic albums (Blood on the Tracks) and intriguing detours (Empire Burlesque).