Like the title says, there's more of the same as the first volume, including The Staples Singers, the Original Gospel Harmonettes, Prof. Alex Bradford, the Harmonizing Four, Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers, and more.
R&B singer Lorraine Ellison had exactly three entries in the R&B charts, but she was far more prolific than that would indicate. In addition to two 1965 Mercury singles, she recorded 48 sides and three albums for Warner Bros. Records between 1966 and 1973. With an incredible vocal power, range, and intensity that was perhaps too heavy for the record-buying masses, Ellison never made it big, except of course in the hearts of committed soul fans-and the occasional rock and pop buyer.
Kevin Volans is probably most famous for the 1984 Kronos reworking of White Man Sleeps. His beginnings in South Africa to the Neue Einfacheit (in English, New Simplicity) of West Germany with the theorist Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose seminal sine-waves and soundscapes shaped the landscape we understand in electronic music today, are well-documented. The Man With Footsoles of Wind, an opera about the enterprise of the influential poet Arthur Rimbaud in Ethiopia, remains very much on my ‘listening wishlist’. Volans is obviously a musicologist. He is undoubtedly a modernist. This is 2022. He has offered us Études, a collection of his own previously unreleased solo piano works performed by Jill Richards and a second-half where he performs Liszt. The listener has been invited into “a sound world” with “extremely complex and challenging arrangements”.