The Professor: Tai Chi's Journey West

Six weeks before the Allman Brothers Band played the shows immortalized on At Fillmore East, they played three gigs at Bill Graham's left coast venue, the Fillmore West, in San Francisco in January of 1971. They were slotted between openers the Trinidad Tripoli Steel Band and Hot Tuna. These three shows are presented in their entirety in a four-disc set. Sourced from original two-track, reel-to-reel soundboard masters, they were held in ABB crew members Twiggs Lyndon's, Joe Dan Petty's, and Mike Callahan's closets for nearly five decades. They were then acquired by archivist Kirk West, who set the painstaking restoration process in motion. The quality here, while very good throughout, is muddy in some spots (mostly on disc two). In addition to the complete shows, West added a 45-minute "Mountain Jam" from March of 1970 at the Warehouse in New Orleans to disc four to fill it out.

The rhumba-rocking rhythms of Roy "Professor Longhair" Byrd live on throughout Rhino's 40-track retrospective of the New Orleans icon's amazing legacy. Most of the seminal stuff arrives early on: "Bald Head," the rollicking ode cut for Mercury in 1950, is followed by a raft of classics from his 1949 and 1953 Atlantic dates ("Tipitina," "Ball the Wall," "Who's Been Fooling You"), the storming 1957 "No Buts, No Maybes," and "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand" for Ebb, and his beloved "Go to the Mardi Gras" as waxed for Ron in 1959. The second disc is a hodgepodge of material from the Professor's '70s comeback, all of it wonderful in its own way but not as essential as the early work.