L'iniziazione (1999)

This 25-track collection brings together some of the most inspiring blues harp performances on record. With the exception of John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson's "Bring Me Another Half a Pint" (what's better known as Jimmy Rogers' "Sloppy Drunk" and originally penned even earlier by Lucille Bogan) from 1948, everything on here was recorded in the '50s to the late '60s at the height of the electric blues boom. Representative and sometimes definitive performances from Big Walter Horton ("Easy," "Need My Baby" and the solo on Jimmy Rogers' "Walkin' By Myself"), Little Walter ("Roller Coaster"), Jimmy Reed ("Found Love"), Snooky Pryor ("Boogie Twist"), Sonny Boy Williamson ("99"), Jerry McCain (the rare, alternate take of "Steady") and Little Junior Parker ("Sweet Home Chicago") pepper this set…

This is a great album, with some great ballads, bebop, Latin and Eugene's unique fusion style. He is a world talent, and certainly the most respected to come out of Hong-Kong. I've been fortunate to see him play live many times, and never been disappointed. Here though some of his best his brought out of him, playing with truly world class musicians.

Big Joe Turner went through record companies like some people go through cigarettes, one after another, cutting sides for anybody who waved a dollar in his face. This installment of the Big Joe story focuses on an eight-month period that found him recording for National, Savoy, EmArcy, RPM, and Downbeat, usually in the company of longtime piano-playing partner Pete Johnson. A mixture of live and studio tracks, it's the usual blend of blues and boogie, with Big Joe hammering the notes flat by the sheer strength of his voice alone. Another excellent entry in this series.

Following a notorious flirtation with alternative rock, Moby returned to the electronic dance mainstream on the 1997 album I Like to Score. With 1999's Play, he made yet another leap back toward the electronica base that had passed him by during the mid-'90s. The first two tracks, "Honey" and "Find My Baby," weave short blues or gospel vocal samples around rather disinterested breakbeat techno. This version of blues-meets-electronica is undoubtedly intriguing to the all-important NPR crowd, but it is more than just a bit gimmicky to any techno fans who know their Carl Craig from Carl Cox. Fortunately, Moby redeems himself in a big way over the rest of the album with a spate of tracks that return him to the evocative, melancholy techno that's been a specialty since his early days…

All America City is presented as the music from the soundtrack of the motion picture Yu Gakusei, a screenplay written by James Grigsby, the man behind Motor Totemist Guild. The story seems to involve Internet communication and beautiful Asian women, both themes also found in the Grigsby novella serving as a canvas for U Totem's album Strange Attractors (U Totem was another Grigsby project). The Motor Totemist Guild line-up is very different than on the previous album, City of Mirrors. Billed as the Guild are Grigsby (computer, samplers, composition), Rod Poole (acoustic guitar), Bridget Convey (piano), Hannes Giger (contrabass), and David Kerman (drums). Old-time Totemist friends Lynn Johnston and Sanjay Kumar are found in the list of "unwitting accomplices."

The bounciness of the Pale Fountains went penalized in the days of Echo and the Bunnymen and the Smiths. “Optimism—yuck.” Michael Head’s stylistic hopscotch and wide-eyed sunnyness might have translated better in the late ’90s, had he stuck with that program for his later band, Shack. If the band had set their sights on one or two areas of their record collections for inspiration instead of darn near everything, Pacific Street might not have been so out of place when it was released.