Breakdown (1997)

On their third album, Lucifer's Friend took a new tack: instead of being a progressive band or a hard rock band, they decided to incorporate both styles into a more ambitious sound that also worked in elements of soul and jazz. The resulting album, I'm Just a Rock 'n' Roll Singer, lacks the coherent flow that defines a good album but offers an array of tuneful, well-crafted tracks nonetheless. By this time, the band had learned to make their songwriting the focus of each track and tamed the instrumental soloing that overwhelmed Where the Groupies Killed the Blues.

Bill Evans - The Complete Bill Evans On Verve (1997) {18 CD Set Verve 314 527 953-2 rec 1962-1969}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 6.92 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 2.96 Gb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 151 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1962-69, 1997 Verve / PolyGram | 314 527 953-2
Jazz / Post Bop / Modal Music / Piano

THE COMPLETE BILL EVANS ON VERVE is an 18-disc, 269-track box set featuring every track that Bill Evans recorded for Verve between 1962 and 1969, including 98 previously-unreleased tracks. It includes a 160-page, full-color book. THE COMPLETE BILL EVANS ON VERVE was nominated for a 1998 Grammy Award for Best Recording Package - Boxed and for Best Historical Album. The 18 CDs in this exhaustive set provide a comprehensive picture of Bill Evans from 1962 to 1969, a period when the pianist was both consolidating his fame and sometimes taking his music into untested waters, from unaccompanied piano to symphony orchestra. His work with multitracked solo piano, originally released as Conversations with Myself and the later Further Conversations with Myself, was the most remarkable new format for his introspective music. It gave Evans a way to be all the pianists he could be at once–combining densely chordal, harmonically oblique parts with surprising, rhythmic punctuation and darting, exploratory runs.

Led Zeppelin's BBC sessions were among the most popular bootleg items of the rock & roll era, appearing on a myriad of illegal records and CDs. They were all the more popular because of the lack of official Led Zeppelin live albums, especially since The Song Remains the Same failed to capture the essence of the band. For anyone who hadn't heard the recordings, the mystique of Zeppelin's BBC sessions was somewhat mystifying, but the official 1997 release of the double-disc BBC Sessions offered revelations for any fan who hadn't yet heard this music…

Steve Wynn went from the lower reaches of the Los Angeles underground music scene to major critical acclaim practically overnight with the release of the Dream Syndicate's debut album, The Days of Wine and Roses, in 1982. It proved to be the first act in a long and fascinating career in which Wynn matured into one of the canniest songwriters in rock, penning smart, flinty lyrics that told perceptive tales of human behavior both noble and otherwise, married to tough, engaging melodies full of muscular guitar work…

These are the first recordings to appear under the name of Gerald Wilson. Schooled at Cass Technical College in Detroit and seasoned on the road with Jimmie Lunceford, Wilson started leading his own excellent big band in 1944, employing many of the most promising young musicians in the Los Angeles area at that time. Wilson may be heard blowing his trumpet along with Hobart Dotson, Emmett Berry, Fred Trainor, and Snooky Young. During a lovely version of Duke Ellington's "Come Sunday," trombonist Melba Liston takes her very first solo on record. Saxophone soloists include Eddie Davis (not "Lockjaw"), Floyd Turnham, and beefy-toned tenor Vernon Slater. All nine instrumentals are exceptionally fine big-band swing performances…

Use Your Illusion II is more serious and ambitious than I, but it's also considerably more pretentious. Featuring no less than four songs that run over six minutes, II is heavy on epics, whether it's the charging funk metal of "Locomotive," the antiwar "Civil War," or the multipart "Estranged." As if an attempt to balance the grandiose epics, the record is loaded with an extraordinary amount of filler…