Maly Modelarz (1968 04) From Krazownik Rajmondo Montecuccoli

In celebration of the 50th Anniversary of The Band’s landmark debut album, Music From Big Pink is released in a limited edition of two pink vinyl LPs that feature a new stereo mix of the album, produced by Bob Clearmountain from the original four-track analog master…

The non-LP single "Scene Through the Eye of a Lens" b/w "Gypsy Woman" not withstanding, Music in a Doll's House (1968) is the debut full-length release from the earliest incarnation of Family, featuring Roger Chapman (harmonica/tenor sax/vocals), Rick Grech (violin/ cello/bass guitar/vocals), Rob Townsend (percussion/drums), John "Charlie" Whitney (guitar/pedal steel guitar/keyboards), and Jim King (harmonica/keyboards/soprano sax/tenor sax/vocals). Their highly original sound has often been compared to Traffic, which may be in part due to the production skills of Jimmy Miller and Dave Mason, the latter also contributing the organic and rootsy rocker "Never Like This."

Who could ever have thought, going back to the Pretty Things' first recording session in 1965 – which started out so disastrously that their original producer quit in frustration – that it would come to this? The Pretty Things' early history in the studio featured the band with its amps seemingly turned up to 11, but for much of S.F. Sorrow the band is turned down to seven or four, or even two, or not amplified at all (except for Wally Allen's bass – natch), and they're doing all kinds of folkish things here that are still bluesy enough so you never forget who they are, amid weird little digressions on percussion and chorus; harmony vocals that are spooky, trippy, strange, and delightful; sitars included in the array of stringed instruments; and an organ trying hard to sound like a Mellotron…

One of the forgotten classics of the late-'60s American blues scene, the Colwell-Winfield Blues Band once opened for Led Zeppelin, and that would appear to be their greatest claim to fame - until you play the group's debut album, a hulking slab of blistered fusion that packs some of the most intriguing arrangements of the age. It features some of the most surreal imagery as well: "Paper bags hold degenerate dreams, fill my world with unnatural scenes," bellows the aptly named Moose Sorrento during the opening "Free Will Fantasy." And so the Colwell-Winfield Blues Band get on with proving what a lot of people had been saying all year long - that the best jazz-rock-blues band of 1968 was only getting better…