It goes without saying that 1968 doesn't have the same kind of cachet as 1967 - a year that, in musical terms, will always be indelibly associated with the Summer of Love, Sgt Pepper and the emergence of psychedelia. But although the major players turned away from the excesses of the previous year in favour of a back-to-basics musical approach, there were arguably a greater number of psychedelic records made in 1968 than during the preceding twelve months. Vital, lysergically-inclined 45s emerged from a whole host of younger groups, with The Factory, Mike Stuart Span, Fleur de Lys, The Fire, The Barrier, Boeing Duveen, Rupert's People and numerous others all releasing singles that have long been widely regarded by psychedelic collectors as genre classics.
Celebrating sixty years since the launch of one of the most successful independent record labels in US Popular music. Received wisdom would have us believe that before Motown, no black-owned record company had made a significant impact on the US mainstream. However, the actuality is something else entirely. Way back in the early 50s, long before Berry Gordy had written his first song, VEE-JAY RECORDS - a black, family owned and run, Chicago-based label - was establishing itself via a steady stream of Blues, R&B, DooWop and Gospel hits.
There have been previous attempts to marshal a lot of British psychedelia into one compilation, but Real Life Permanent Dreams is a little different from those. This four-CD, 99-song box set isn't a best-of, but more like an attempt to assemble a very wide (though still representative) cross section of material, most of it pretty obscure to the average listener. For the most part, it succeeds in delivering a high-quality anthology that manages to offer a lot to both the collector and the less intense psychedelic fan, though it's by no means the cream of British psychedelia.
This incredible box sets collects 35 early Jazz albums released on the legendary French Jazz labels: Disques Vogue founded in 1947 and its subsidiary Swing, which was originally established in Paris in 1937 by Charles Delaunay and passed to Vogue in 1948. The music was recorded during the first post WWII decade (1947-1957) and features both American Jazz artists, who visited France or lived in France at the time as well as European Jazz artists. Paris was at the time the European Jazz center, which corresponded splendidly with its status as the European intellectual center, which produced dramatic and groundbreaking developments in European Philosophy, Plastic Arts, Cinema, Literature and of course music. Most of these albums were originally released on 10-inch LPs, which had a time limit under half an hour, and therefore they are arranged here to span over 20 CDs, each well over an hour long. The music was beautifully remastered and sounds remarkably fresh and vibrant.