This is a comprehensive collection with countless pivotal sessions. It features 203 separate recordings on seven CDs and collects both the sessions led by Chu Berry and other sessions where he contributed significantly as a sideman. You can study his remarkable surefootedness as a soloist; remember an era where evolution in the music was running rampant and Chu Berry's tenor saxophone was one of the things making it run.
The first three volumes of the Fats Domino Imperial Singles series (CDCHD 597, 649 and 689) saw New Orleans’ finest ascend from neophyte blues and boogie-woogie stylist to bona fide rock’n’roll star. With gold-plated hits of the calibre of ‘Ain’t That A Shame’, ‘Blueberry Hill’, ‘Blue Monday’ and ‘I’m Walkin’’ receding into history, it was assumed that Fats had peaked artistically. Wrong: One spin of this release will dispel that notion handsomely.
The Muffins are Canterbury influenced quartet formed in Washington D.C. in the year of 1973 by Dave Newhouse (keyboards, reeds), Billy Swan (bass) and Michael Zenterner (guitar, violin). Their sound is strongly influenced by the Jazz-Rock tendencies of Soft Machine, the improvisational techniques of Henry Cow and the quirky song structures of Hatfield and the North and The Mothers of Invention.
The new group remains nameless until one day, while the trio are discussing upon potential names, a friend of there's enters the house and shouts "The muffins are hear!" and conveying a tray of blueberry muffins, thus the band is born! A number of drummers are recruited off and on during the next few months…
Michael d'Abo first rose to prominence in British rock through his assumption of a most unenviable task, succeeding Paul Jones as lead singer in Manfred Mann – the group's own record label, EMI, was so persuaded of the unlikelihood that anyone could replace him, that they dropped the band from the roster. He proved up to the challenge, however, and across the four decades since, has remained a busy and well-known musical figure, in rock and in music in general.
As Sergio Mendes reached the peak of his first A&M period with Brasil '66, his old company, Atlantic, continued to release new instrumental Mendes albums, of which this was the last. As on the Brasil '66 recordings of the time, Mendes exposes fresh material from the '60s bumper crop of great Brazilian songwriters: Edú Lobo, Dori Caymmi, Baden Powell, Chico Buarque, and Caetano Veloso. Dave Grusin returns with his swirling, ambitious orchestral arrangements; John Pisano is back on rhythm guitar (along with a lounge-like bossa nova take of his "So What's New"); and Mendes continues to toy with the Fender Rhodes electric piano and electric harpsichord on a number of cuts. Yet this album has an entirely different sound than Mendes' A&Ms, with a typically trebly Nesuhi Ertegun production and more varied rhythm tracks (only on the title track does the rhythm section sound like that of Brasil '66).
The Radio-télévision belge de la Communauté française (RTBF, Belgian Radio-television of the French Community) is a public service broadcaster delivering radio and television services to the French-speaking Community of Belgium, in Wallonia and Brussels. Its counterpart in the Flemish Community is the Dutch-language VRT (Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie), and in the German-speaking Community it is BRF (Belgischer Rundfunk).