Reissue with the latest 24bit/192kHz remastering. Features original cover artwork. Comes with a descripton in Japanese. Great work from John Lee and Gerry Brown – a pair of fusion stalwarts who added key help to a number of classic 70s sessions for other artists – and got to make a rare few albums like this on their own! Lee's on bass and Brown's on drums, and the pair are in perfect time throughout – working with Skip Drinkwater production, which helps them find even more focus than before, and shake off some of the more jamming aspects of their rock-fusion performances with others – a move that helps them come up with a wonderfully soulful sound in the process – very much in the best Drinkwater soul jazz style of the time!
The blues recording industry began in New York City and for most of the 1920s, musicians travelled from all parts of the country to make their mark in the recording studio. Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey were amongst the most popular female singers but they were soon rivaled by the likes of Lonnie Johnson, Robert ‘Barbecue Bob’ Hicks, Texas Alexander and Mississippi John Hurt. Kansas Joe McCoy cut ‘When The Levee Breaks’, justly famous in its Led Zeppelin incarnation, in the city.
Together with Mary Wilson, Florence Ballard, and then Ballard’s replacement, Cindy Birdsong, Diana Ross helped sculpt The Sound Of Young America. By 1967 she’d been singled out as the trio’s leader, despite the fact her vocal delivery was not the most soulful, powerful or even beautiful of the three. But with the batting of her heavily mascara-ed eyelashes and coy poise, Ross attracted the pop crowd and, more importantly at Motown, label boss Berry Gordy.
If you know the great orchestral works of English modernist composer Gerald Finzi – his cello and clarinet concertos, his Eclogue, and Grand Fantasia & Toccata for piano and orchestra – you don't know the half of Finzi. And even if you know his great setting of Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" for tenor, chorus, and orchestra, you still don't know the best of Finzi. For the best of Finzi, try this two-disc set of his five-song cycle to poems by Thomas Hardy. Like Schubert with Müller, Finzi had a particular affinity for Hardy and his special brand of pantheistic pastoral pessimism and his settings have a depth of understanding and an authenticity of utterance that make them especially effective and affecting.