Linda Ronstadt Complete

Just in time for David Sanborn's 75th birthday, England's Soul Music label delivers the goods with a remastered, three-disc, 46-track overview of the saxophonist's iconic Warner Bros./Elektra period, which netted no less than 17 charting albums – in a row. While the vast majority made the upper rungs of the jazz and/or smooth jazz charts, some attained places in the higher reaches of the Top 200. None of this material is unreleased, but this collection goes far deeper, given its length and scope, than any other Sanborn compilation. Further, it was curated aesthetically rather than chronologically by Los Angeles-based musicologist and set producer and annotator A. Scott Galloway. He carefully and judiciously offers radio edits of singles alongside full versions.

Compilation CD's. Those Classic Golden Years - An Essential collection the second half of the sixties and the early seventies…

Rhino Records asked producer Brian Ahern to select his favorite tracks from the Emmylou Harris albums he helmed – he produced her first 11 studio offerings for Reprise Records. That's quite a daunting task when you consider that some of those recordings were Elite Hotel, Luxury Liner, Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town, and Pieces of the Sky, just to name a few. But Ahern rose to the task and put together a solid, aesthetically perfect set here, highlighting many different aspects of Harris' career at the time: from her trademark, utterly pure singing voice, to her song selection, to the sound of her band and the studio she recorded in, this is a top-notch set from start to finish and serves as an excellent introduction to her early work for the newcomer…

With the arrival of Delta Lady: The Rita Coolidge Anthology, one can only remark: what took so long? No other singer – not Maria Muldaur, Bette Midler, Bonnie Bramlett, Carly Simon, or Linda Ronstadt – more perfectly embodied the wide range of changes that popular music underwent from the late '60s through the mid-'80s, and continues to seek new means of expression today. This two-disc anthology on Hip-O offers the first complete portrait of this complex and multivalent talent on CD (though a box set would have been nice). Rita Coolidge scored her first chart hit with friend Donna Weiss' "Turn Around and Love You" in 1969. That song earned her a studio spot where she fell in with Delaney & Bonnie, Leon Russell, and a huge cast of musicians. Being a background vocalist on Delaney & Bonnie's classic Accept No Substitute earned her a place on Russell and Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs & Englishmen revue and the rest is history, including a handful of chart hits and guest appearances that stagger the mind.