I See Red

Not a bad compilation - 13 songs cut by Bull City Red over a four-year stretch, which include gospel-tinged songs as well as country blues in the Blind Boy Fuller mode. The sound is reasonably good throughout, given the rarity of some of the records, and the analog-to-digital transfer fairly clean given the age of the source material - Red's guitar comes through in startling clarity, and surface noise is generally held in check, or at least to manageable levels. Among the highlights here is Red's version of "I Saw the Light," and which, in another form, entered the repertory of Hank Williams, among others…

7 February 2009 will forever be known as Black Saturday. On this day the worst bushfires in the history of Australia caused devastation across Victoria like never seen before. The effect this terrible tragedy had was felt not only here, but worldwide. Almost simultaneously Queensland was undergoing its own tragedy, with the state experiencing widespread flooding. In response to our nation's greatest ever natural disasters, Australia's music community, along with some of the biggest music names internationally, banded together for two stadium benefit concerts that ran simultaneously in both Melbourne and Sydney under the unified banner SOUND RELIEF. 9 hours of footage over 4 discs featuring every artist, documenting the biggest concerts in Australian music history.

The seminal quartet recordings compiled on this collection were made during a transitional period in John Coltrane's musical career. He had first joined the Miles Davis Quintet in 1955 and would form his own celebrated quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones in 1960. In the intervening years, he overcame his narcotics addiction and began to expand on his own musical ideas while experimenting with both the Thelonious Monk Quartet and the Miles Davis Sextet (featuring Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley). Although Trane belonged to both the Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk groups, he also recorded studio sessions with other musicians and presented his own albums during this period. Among them were many quartet sides, all of them featuring Red Garland on piano and Paul Chambers on bass (both of whom he had known from the Miles Davis Quintet).