Caravan Best OF

By all outward appearances, The Best of Caravan Live seems to fit the description and packaging of a budget release. Indeed, this is what all but the most inquisitive enthusiasts must surely have thought when passing up the French two-LP set in 1980. In actuality, the music contained within these grooves is a performance by Caravan from the Fairfield Halls in Croydon, September 1, 1974. The band used this gig to prepare for their inaugural North American tour. Additionally, the performance was documented in hopes of using the best bits as a promotional tool for their upcoming shows. However, the tapes remained dormant for nearly two years. Then in 1976, the epic "For Richard" was judiciously extracted and subsequently included as an unreleased bonus on the double LP Canterbury Tales retrospective…

This title was initially issued in 1976 as a two-LP compilation of the Canterbury progressive rockers' output between the years 1970 and 1974. Additionally, as a "value for money" enticement for those who had already purchased Caravan's back catalog, the set also included a previously vaulted live version of "For Richard" taken from the band's U.S. tour warmup gig on September 1, 1974, at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon, U.K. Fast-forward nearly two decades to the advent and subsequent proliferation of the extended and sonically superior compact disc medium. In those early days, the band was haphazardly represented by only a few difficult-to-locate and sonically disappointing European best-of titles that not only poorly characterized the band's work, but in a few cases were actually mastered from vinyl…

Presented on TWO DVD's is footage from the 2019 edition of Italy's Veruno Prog Festival. Participating bands included Iron Butterfly, Caravan, Arena, Il Balletto di Bronzo, Lazuli, Alan Simon's Excalibur, Acqua Fragile and others.

This collection of Ellington's Thirties recordings is generous in that it offers 95 selections and meagre in that there is no discographical information at all (no recording dates, no personel, no matrix numbers). The liner notes give some information but leave one pining for more too. There the criticism ends. Audio restoration by Dutchman Harry Coster (who is attached to the Dutch Jazz Archive and has an outstanding reputation for painstaking restoration of old material) is beyond reproach and the recordings never sounded so good before. And of course there is the music itself, which is formidable, both in musical content and in execution by that peerless group of proud individuals that constituted the Duke Ellington orchestra…

A more succinct and straightforward anthology of the Housemartins than 1988's Now That's What I Call Quite Good!, 2004's The Best of the Housemartins is a 14-track overview that sticks to the basics. While it does not contain the significant BBC sessions, B-sides, and album cuts featured on Quite Good!, it does feature superior sound and all the material (such as "Happy Hour," "Sheep," "The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death," and their cover of the Isley Brothers' "Caravan of Love") that casual fans truly need. Most of the band's biggest fans will tell you, of course, that the two studio albums are absolutely necessary.

Bart&Baker will release their first ever Remix collection, simply titled Bart&Baker Remixed. Fuelled with killer versions taken from their first EPs, it contains brand new remixes from the likes of KeX, DJ Mibor and Skeewiff, as well as the brand new track, a glorious cover of a Ray Charles “Swingnova” classic from the sixties. The German-Israeli singer Maya Saban and her Band are Jewdyssee. They have devoted themselves to revitalising the pearls of Jewish/Yiddish culture bringing back to life what was once considered to be virtually extinct.