Großer Mann im Seidenen Rock

Using the texts of playwright Heiner Muller and collecting a wide range of imaginative musicians, Heiner Goebbels constructed a fascinating music-theater piece that mixes languages and musical styles. The text, read and sung by Arto Lindsay, concerns the thoughts and fears of an employee summoned to his boss' office and has something of a Brazil-like aura about it. Perhaps coincidentally, Lindsay interjects some Brazilian songs into the proceedings. But the highlight is the performance by this stellar ensemble, ranging from free to punkishly tinged jazz-rock to quasi-African. There are outstanding contributions from guitarist Fred Frith, trombonist George Lewis, and the late Don Cherry on trumpet, voice, and the African hunter's guitar known as the doussn'gouni. Goebbels brews a rich stew of overlapping languages and styles in a dense matrix that creates an appropriate feeling of angst, but never loses a sly sense of humor…

After a very successful period in the 60's with the pop group named after him and a much less successful intermezzo in Jazz with Chapter Three, the South-African born keyboardist Manfred Mann turned towards Rock music. In 1971 he formed Manf

Manfred Mann released two albums while signed to EMI in the early 1960s but used the EP format to showcase new material, especially tracks which were not considered as singles. These Eps, featuring vocalist Paul Jones, proved so popular that three of them hit the No 1 spot of the EP charts, while 'The One In The Middle' also reached No 10 in the UK singles chart a remarkable achievement for an EP at that time…

The Best Of Manfred Mann's Earth Band is a compilation album released in 1993 by Manfred Mann's Earth Band. After a very successful period in the 60's with the pop group named after him and a much less successful intermezzo in Jazz with Chapter Three, the South-African born keyboardist Manfred Mann turned towards Rock music. In 1971 he formed Manfred Mann's Earth Band (MMEB). Mann's use of the Moog synthesizer was key to the sound of this band. MMEB had a very successful area during the mid 70's and early 80's but was disbanded by Mann in 1987 after being fed up with trying to produce hit records. He started a project which was based mostly on the music of Native American Indians named Manfred Mann's Plain Music and which released one album. After this Mann reformed the MMEB in 1991 and was starting again to release records with them occasionally but also to be a regular live band with extensive tours mostly in Europe until today.

This 24-song collection of tracks recorded for the BBC from 1964-1966 sounds very good, thanks to the Paul Jones-fronted lineup (although a few of the songs are instrumentals). Of most interest are four tunes the band never released in the 1960s, including a version of "Parchman Farm" that features only Jones and his harmonica, and the obscure, mediocre Barry-Greenwich composition "That's the Way I Feel." More unexpected are a couple of Jones originals the band never did in the studio, the bluesy and derivative "I Need You" and "It Took a Little While." There's no "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy," but most of the other big mid-'60s hits are played ("Sha La La," "Come Tomorrow," "Pretty Flamingo," "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"), as well as some of their better LP and EP cuts. This is recommended a little above the usual BBC archive compilation, because Manfred Mann played extremely well live, and because there are actually some notable changes from the familiar studio arrangements from time to time. That's especially evident on "Machines," which is decisively better than the studio version; this take, powered by a great bass riff, even sounds strong enough to have been an off-the-wall hit single.