Chain Toward The Blues (30th Anniversary Edition) (2001) [fest Mush 333972]

Maurice Jarre wrote the central musical motif of his score for Doctor Zhivago, "Lara's Theme," in a few minutes in a hotel, amid a frantic five-week rush to score the 197-minute movie. That theme made the Doctor Zhivago soundtrack album one of the biggest selling soundtrack of the 1960s, a considerable feat when one reckons in the competition from A Hard Day's Night, Never on Sunday, A Man and a Woman, Exodus, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The rest of Jarre's score is more in the realm of lushly textured Russian-themed mood music, filled with dark male choruses, folk and folk-like themes, and dense orchestrations, sort of faux-Tchaikovsky. The stereo separation is used to good effect, and the music as a whole forms a kind of romantic/exotic travelogue as much as a dramatic sketch of the movie's action.

The Go-Go's were the most popular all-female band to emerge from the punk/new wave explosion of the late '70s and early '80s, becoming one of the first commercially successful female groups who weren't controlled by male producers or managers.

Three decades ago Bruce Iglauer founded Alligator Records, selling his hero Hound Dog Taylor's records out of his car trunk. Since then, Alligator has become America's best-known and most prolific blues label, and many of the reasons for its success appear on this two-disc 30th anniversary collection. Much of the material, including Marcia Ball's "Louella" and Shemekia Copeland's "Turn the Heat Up," comes from relatively recent recordings, since the label also released anthologies honoring its 20th and 25th anniversaries.
But the 30th holds its own, presenting guitar greats like Lonnie Mack ("Stop"), Johnny Winter ("My Time After Awhile"), and Lonnie Brooks ("Two-Headed Man"), as well as harmonica heroes James Cotton ("When It Rains It Pours"), Junior Wells ("Keep Your Hands Out of My Pockets"), and William Clarke ("Broke and Hungry")…