Little Walter Confessin' The Blues

]This release is a little confusing, coming out as it does more than a year after the release of MCA-Chess' Little Walter rarities collection Blues with a Feeling, and two years after the double-CD anthology set that contains most of the best parts of this collection. Still, this disc, coupled with the two best-of volumes, and the other Walter compilations, fills in some holes that are well worth filling. Made up of songs cut between 1953 and 1959 – none of which had ever appeared on LP before the original 1974 release of this collection – the selection features Walter in his prime, playing alongside Robert Lockwood, Jr. and Louis Myers or Luther Tucker on guitar (with Muddy Waters present on slide on one indispensable track, "Rock Bottom"), mostly Willie Dixon on bass, and Fred Below on the drums, with Lafayette Leake or Otis Spann on piano.

The Jazz Club series is an attractive addition to the Verve catalogue. With it's modern design and popular choice of repertoire, the Jazz Club is not only opened for Jazz fans, but for everyone that loves good music.

The Jazz Club series is an attractive addition to the Verve catalogue. With it's modern design and popular choice of repertoire, the Jazz Club is not only opened for Jazz fans, but for everyone that loves good music.

The Rolling Stones have always been the biggest champions of the blues, even taking their name from the Muddy Waters’ track ‘Rollin’ Stone’ – so who better to have hand-picked a special compilation album of the music that has inspired them throughout their career. Confessin’ The Blues collects together the greatest ever bluesmen, such as Chuck Berry, B.B King, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James and Muddy Waters and provides a perfect education to the genre. The tracklisting on the various formats has been chosen by The Rolling Stones, in collaboration with BMG & Universal and will be released on November 9th 2018.

It is no exaggeration to call Little Walter the Jimi Hendrix of the electric harp: he redefined what the instrument was and what it could do, pushing the instrument so far into the future that his music still sounds modern decades after it was recorded. Little Walter wasn't the first musician to amplify the harmonica but he arguably was the first to make the harp sound electric, twisting twitching, vibrant runs out of his instrument; nearly stealing the show from Muddy Waters on his earliest Chess recordings; and so impressing Leonard Chess that he made Muddy keep Walter as his harpist even after Waters broke up his band. Chess also made Walter into his studio's house harpist and started to release Little Walter solo records with the instrumental "Juke" in 1952. "Juke" became a smash hit and turned Little Walter into a star, making him a steady presence on the '50s R&B charts.

As MCA reconfigures their Chess catalog, this 20-track single-disc compilation now takes the place of their original 12-track Best of Little Walter collection, a landmark blues album which had remained in print for over three decades. His Best (Chess 50th Anniversary Collection) reprises ten of those seminal tracks (leaving off the echoey "Blue Light" and "You Better Watch Yourself," the latter being available on the two-disc anthology The Essential Little Walter) and brings ten others cherry-picked from the catalog to the mix. If you've never experienced the innovative instrumental genius of Little Walter, classics like "Juke," "Off the Wall," "Mean Old World," "Sad Hours," "Blues with a Feeling," "My Babe," "Boom Out Goes the Light," "Last Night," "Mellow Down Easy" and "Roller Coaster" (written by Bo Diddley, who also guests on guitar) will come as a major revelation.

The fact that a comprehensive collection like this one can exist well into the twenty-first century gives testament to both the staying power of the blues and to the wide influence it has had on other areas of popular music. Whilst few of these have ever been major worldwide hits in the conventional sense, so many of them have provided the roots to rock music that is enjoyed by millions today. This is, we hope, a collection that makes you seek out more, and our Not Now catalogue can offer you very many fine albums to take you further.