Stephen Albert

Slowhand at 70 – Live at the Royal Albert Hall is a concert film released by the British pop-rock musician Eric Clapton. It features a selection of songs, Clapton performed on May 21, 2015 while he played during his "70th Birthday Celebration" tour at London's iconic Royal Albert Hall. While on tour in London, Clapton broke the 200th concert mark, making him the act, who has most performed at the British venue…

For one reason or another, Cream reunited in the spring of 2005, setting aside nearly 40 years of acrimony for a series of gigs at the Royal Albert Hall in May, which was later followed by a few shows at Madison Square Garden about a month after souvenirs of the London shows – a double-CD set and a double-DVD set – were released…

Eric Clapton booked a series of shows at his beloved venue the Royal Albert Hall in May of 2015, choosing to document this stint via a concert film and an accompanying album, both called Slowhand at 70: Live at the Royal Albert Hall…

The title of The Real Royal Albert Hall 1966 Concert is a nod to the fact that the famous bootleg known as The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert was actually recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall on May 17, 1966. The historical record was corrected when the concert was released as the second installment in Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series in 1998 (it's labeled the fourth volume, but the first three editions were all rounded up in a 1991 box), so when it came to release a sampler album from the mammoth 36-disc set The 1966 Live Recordings, the only option was to release The Real Royal Albert Hall 1966 Concert, a show given on May 26, 1996. This double-disc set follows the same contours of the Manchester Free Trade Hall show, offering the acoustic set on the first disc and the electric on the second.

When American composers began writing symphonies around the mid-1800s, their works were very much in the European tradition. During the first half of the 20th century, the great innovator Charles Ives injected a recognizably American sound into the genre, however, and since then the American symphonic legacy has been both wide and varied. With the present disc, conductor Lance Friedel strikes a blow for three fellow American composers, with the help of the eminent London Symphony Orchestra.

Albert King recorded a lot in the early '60s, including some classic sides, but they never quite hit the mark. They never gained a large audience, nor did they really capture the ferocity of his single-string leads. Then he signed with Stax in 1966 and recorded a number of sessions with the house band, Booker T. & the MG's, and everything just clicked…

Albert King recorded a lot in the early '60s, including some classic sides, but they never quite hit the mark. They never gained a large audience, nor did they really capture the ferocity of his single-string leads. Then he signed with Stax in 1966 and recorded a number of sessions with the house band, Booker T. & the MG's, and everything just clicked. The MG's gave King supple Southern support, providing an excellent contrast to his tightly wound lead guitar, allowing to him to unleash a torrent of blistering guitar runs that were profoundly influential, not just in blues, but in rock & roll (witness Eric Clapton's unabashed copping of King throughout Cream's Disraeli Gears). Initially, these sessions were just released as singles, but they were soon compiled as King's Stax debut, Born Under a Bad Sign.