Heralded as one of the great performers of the world, Liza Minnelli sang, acted, and lived her way into the hearts of millions with her heartfelt vocals, personal style, charismatic flair, and with the ups and downs of her personal life. The Best of Liza Minnelli: twentieth century Masters – The Millennium Collection features Minnelli at the most emotionally potent moments and dramatic peaks of her career as a singer and performer. From her sexy, musky vocals on "The Man I Love" to the sad, give-it-her-all tune "Come Saturday Morning," the collection features Minnelli at her finest, capturing her most powerful moments on stage and in the studio.
Even though he came from the theater himself, Bob Fosse, when he came to make a film of Harold Prince's musical Cabaret, did what most movie directors do, taking the 15-song score and cutting two-thirds of it to leave five songs – "Wilkommen," "Two Ladies," "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," "If You Could See Her," and "Cabaret." (In addition, "Sitting Pretty" was performed instrumentally and "Married" in German.) He then allowed the show's songwriters, John Kander and Fred Ebb, to add material to emphasize the film's two musical stars, "Mein Herr" and "Maybe This Time" for Liza Minnelli and "Money, Money" for Minnelli and Joel Grey.
Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes were one of the very first groups to achieve global success for Philadelphia International Records within its first year as a CBS-distributed label. The 1972 release of two consecutive ‘tell-it-like-it-is’ ballads – ‘I Miss You’ and ‘If You Don’t Know Me By Now’ – marked the start of a four-year association that yielded some of the most enduring recordings in contemporary soul music, in the process creating – with label founders Kenny Gamble & Leon Huff and a burgeoning coterie of talented songwriters, arrangers and musicians – a handful of timeless dance music classics including ‘The Love I Lost’, ‘Bad Luck’ and ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’.
Although she's one of the great performance dynamos of American pop music, Liza Minnelli's recording career has always functioned in a supporting role to her appearances in dramatic roles, concerts, and specials. (The same was true for her mother, Judy Garland, and Sammy Davis, Jr.) Liza fans know that hearing her sing "Some People" (from Gypsy) is nothing compared to the total experience – sound and vision – when she performs it live. For those who can't afford golden-circle tickets to her next appearance, the Columbia collection The Best of Liza Minnelli functions as the next best thing.
Within the first track of their debut album – the crisp, minimal pounder "Wonder Girl," featuring Russell Mael's falsetto already engaged in swooping acrobatics and Ron Mael's sparkling piano work to the fore, singing ever-so-slightly-weird lyrics about love that couldn't quite be taken at face value – Sparks established themselves so perfectly that arguably the rest of the brothers' long career has been a continual refinement from that basic formula…
School's Out catapulted Alice Cooper into the hard rock stratosphere, largely due to its timeless, all-time classic title track. But while the song became Alice's highest-charting single ever (reaching number seven on the U.S. charts) and recalled the brash, three-and-a-half-minute garage rock of yore, the majority of the album signaled a more complex compositional directional for the band. Unlike Cooper's previous releases (Love It to Death, Killer), which contained several instantly identifiable hard rock classics, School's Out appears to be a concept album, and aside from the aforementioned title track anthem, few of the other tracks have ever popped up in concert.