2016 3-CD set. The 60s Summer Album features 60 summertime sounds of the sixties in a sleek and summery digipak design. Featuring Fleetwood Mac, Nina Simone, Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, Santana, The Lovin' Spoonful, Andy Williams, Neil Sedaka, The Fifth Dimension, Sly & The Family Stone, Harry Nilsson, The Box Tops, Johnny Nash and many others.
50 songs special selection. Howard Roberts (1929-1992) has had one of the most multi-facted and colorful careers in guitar history. A true Renaissance Man of the guitar, he was a brilliant jazz artist, a studio pro par excellence, a profound and insightful educator, an imaginative inventor, prolific author and deep thinker. The story of his musical journey is one the most inspiring in guitarlore.
Few jazz pianists could honestly claim to be more eclectic than the late Jaki Byard. Depending on the mood he was in, the Bostonian could acknowledge anyone from Dave Brubeck to James P. Johnson to Cecil Taylor. Byard wasn't afraid to take chances, and his open-mindedness served him well. The pianist's eclectic nature is impossible to miss on Solo/Strings, which is the 2000 reissue of his Prestige dates Jaki Byard with Strings (1968) and Solo Piano (1969) on a single 78-minute CD (minus, unfortunately, "Hello, Young Lovers" from Solo Piano). While Solo Piano is exactly that – an album of unaccompanied solo piano – Jaki Byard With Strings is somewhat misleading.
Though incredibly busy running RCA Victor's Nashville operation, Chet Atkins still found some time and enterprise to perform some musical experiments on his own. It was a simple idea, really, replacing the two lower strings on his electric guitar with the E and A strings from an electric bass, thus lowering the tone by an octave and creating a fuller balance. With this idea, Atkins' disarmingly easygoing fingerpicking facility threatened to put every bass player in Nashville out of business, but the so-called "Octabass Guitar" evidently wasn't pursued much further. Indeed, only on side one of this LP do listeners hear the new instrument on a series of mostly jazz and pop standards – including the newly minted Joe Zawinul soul/jazz vehicle "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy."
Howard Roberts was a talented guitarist on the level of a Barney Kessel or Herb Ellis, who spent most of his career playing commercial music in the studios. Shortly after he moved to Los Angeles in 1950, Roberts was firmly established in the studios, although on occasion he recorded jazz (most notably twice for Verve during 1956-1959, a Concord session from 1977, and one for Discovery in 1979); however, most of his other output (particularly for Capitol in the 1960s) is of lesser interest. The co-founder of the Guitar Institute of Technology in Hollywood, Roberts was an enthusiastic and talented educator, and wrote a regular instructional column for Guitar Player.