To celebrate 50 years of Thin Lizzy Universal Music are releasing Rock Legends, a 6CD+DVD box set that features an astonishing 74 unreleased tracks. This box covers the band’s whole career with audio newly mastered by Andy Pearce. The content encompasses a raft of unreleased material including demos, radio sessions, live recordings and rare single edits. The track listing has been compiled by Thin Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham and Lizzy expert Nick Sharp from a collection of newly discovered tapes most of which have never been heard before.
The resulting 2 box set, unlike any other available today, groups together the main vocalists in the story of jazz from the first half of the 20th century. Each of these 20 CDs offers in more or less the same proportion, the purest of African-American song with gospel and blues singers, from truculent Ma Rainey to majestic Bessie Smith, sophisticated Sarah Vaughan to popular Louis Prima, the folk-related tones of Charlie Patton to the honeyed voice of Frank Sinatra.
Each box contains 25 slipcase CDs, a booklet (up to 186 pages) and an index. The booklets contain extensive notes (Eng/Fr) with recording dates and line-ups. 31 hours of music in each box, totalling 1677 tracks Each track has been restored and mastered from original sources. The only reason I can think of for there not yet being a review of these four boxed sets, is that those who own them are just too busy having one hell of a blast listening to them. Some people moan about the 50 year copyright law for audio recordings in Europe, but without it this highly entertaining, eye-opening and educational undertaking could never have taken place. These 100 discs (spread over four boxed sets of 25 discs) tell the story of jazz from 1898 to 1959.
Celebrating 40 years since her first release, Full Moon – the Complete Collection is a strictly limited edition and brings together all of Judie's releases since that time for the very first time along with an exclusive 24th CD that contains outtakes, alternative versions and live tracks.
Two of singer Chris Connor's finest Atlantic albums are reissued in full on this single CD. The laid-back yet coolly emotional jazz singer is heard backed by top-notch rhythm sections (with either Ralph Sharon or Stan Free being the pianist/arranger) and occasional horns (trumpeter Joe Wilder, flutist Sam Most, tenors Al Cohn and Lucky Thompson, flutist Bobby Jaspar and Al Epstein on English horn and bass clarinet) adding some short solos. Connor (then around 30) was in her prime, and her renditions of such songs as "Poor Little Rich Girl," "Lonely Town," "I'm Shooting High," "Moonlight in Vermont," and even "Johnny One Note" are memorable and sometimes haunting.
This is a great collection of Doo Wop tunes from back in the day! 587 tracks total. Lots of rare tunes from lots of groups. If you like Doo Wop and you don't have this series, you will want these. As I once read on a Doo Wop site, "Rock and Roll may be here to stay but Doo Wop never left". This series consists of 20 volumes and it is long out of print.