Ovation Acoustic Bass

The blues is a river with tributaries that flow into virtually every channel of American music. Dan Auerbach’s Nashville-based label Easy Eye Sound — Billboard’s Blues Label of the Year in 2022 — is charting a new course in “21st century juke joint blues.” The label’s new anthology Tell Everybody! is a bracing compilation, produced by Auerbach — winner of the GRAMMY Award as 2013 Producer of the Year, Non-Classical — featuring all new, exclusive recordings cut at Easy Eye Sound’s eponymous Nashville studio. From old masters to brilliant youngbloods, acoustic blues to roiling blues-rock, the collection is a fully realized survey of the blues tradition.

Essential: a masterpiece of progressive rock music
Originally a two-LP set, this 70-minute concert CD recorded on April 16, 1981 in San Francisco features the core of the band that appeared on The Enchanted Garden.

This is Billy Cobham's third solo recording under his own name and is a fine follow-up to Crosswinds. The mini-suite "Solarization" not only showcases the band's technical abilities, but also Cobham's strong compositional skills. It also features a schizophrenic piano solo ("Second Phase") from the underrated pianist Milcho Leviev, who sounds like a mutation of Cecil Taylor and Bill Evans. The funky "Moon Germs," on which John Abercrombie is pushed to inspiring new heights, became a Cobham classic. "The Moon Ain't Made of Green Cheese" is a beautiful flugelhorn solo by Randy Brecker backed by Cobham's debut on piano. The band stretches out on the lengthy "Sea of Tranquility," while "Last Frontier" is a gratuitous drum solo. This recording is highly recommended as Cobham still sounds inspired.

Subtitled "A Pythagorean Theory Tale," Numbers was a concept album relating to a faraway galaxy, a planet called Polygor, a palace, and its people, the Polygons. So one learned from the album's accompanying booklet