I Have Everything

John Hammond's latest album marks a major departure in one respect – for the first time in anyone's memory, he sings, but plays nothing on one of his records, while Little Charlie & the Nightcats, led by guitarist Charlie Baty, handle the guitars and everything else. The difference is very subtle, the playing maybe a little less flashy than Hammond's already restrained work – think of how good Muddy Waters sounded on the early-'60s records where he sang and didn't play. And that comparison is an apt one – even more than 35 years after he started, Hammond inevitably ends up sounding like its 1961 and he's working at Chess studios in Chicago, cutting songs between Muddy Waters sessions. Harpist Rick Estrin also contributes a smooth and eminently enjoyable original amid a brace of covers of blues standards. There is not a weak number here, and this band is a kick to listen to, sounding more naturally authentic than anybody in the 1990's has a right to (Baty's quiet pyrotechnics on "Lookin' for Trouble" would make this record worth owning, even if Hammond's singing and the rest of the songs weren't as good as they are).

David Bowie - I Dig Everything: The 1966 Pye Singles (1966) {Sanctuary Records CMRCD1471 Mini-CD 2006 Re-issue}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 104 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 37 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (png) -> 129 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1966, 2006 Castle Music / Sanctuary Records | CMRCD1471
Rock / Pop / British Invasion / Mod

In 1972, at the height of David Bowie's newly ignited fame, former label Pye unlocked the vault and produced an EP, the aptly subtitled "For the Collector – Early David Bowie," reprising four of the six songs Bowie recorded during 1965-1966. Since that time, those four (plus their two companions) have established themselves among the most frequently revisited songs in his entire catalog, reissued so frequently, and in so many different formats, that there truly cannot be a single Bowie fan left out there who doesn't own them at least three times over.

I Have Dreamed (1961). "The mood of these songs is dreamy," writes annotator Pete Martin, thus defining the theme of Doris Day's second LP of 1961. As usual, someone - Day herself, her conductor, a Columbia Records A&R person - had chosen a theme for her album and picked a group of songs, most of them interwar standards that derived from stage musicals or movies. Dreaminess was a concept familiar to any band singer of the 1940s, and Day was such a singer, so she certainly knew her way around "I'll Buy That Dream," even if the hit versions of the 1945 song were by such competitors as Helen Forrest (with Dick Haymes) and Kitty Kallen (as vocalist with Harry James' band)…