The Woman King

Of the three blues Kings, Freddie King often gets overshadowed by B.B. and Albert, so he's in need of a collection like Real Gone's The Complete King & Federal Singles, a two-disc set that rounds up all his greatest work. Sitting alongside these classics, songs so firmly embedded in our consciousness he sometimes doesn't get the credit he deserves - songs like "Have You Ever Loved a Woman," "Hideaway," "San-Ho-Zay!," "The Stumble," "I'm Tore Down" - there are singles where Freddie rode the wave of what was popular. He tried to dance "The Bossa Nova Watusi Twist," he flirted with a bit of funk, he got slick and greasy toward the end of the '60s, never winding up with chart success but never embarrassing himself…

This Japanese box set contains three consecutive entries in King Crimson's live and studio archival releases. The specific volumes in question are the tenth, 11th, and 13th from Discipline Global Mobile's Collectors' Club mail-order-only series covering Live in Central Park, NYC '74, the pre-Krim Discipline: Live at Moles Club, 1981, and the last gasp of the '90s double-trio incarnation on the Nashville Rehearsals, 1997. The July 1, 1974, concert in Central Park was the final King Crimson performance by the '70s quartet. While the recording is very good - not great - the group's spirited musical antics more than make up for any lack of audio fidelity. With the notable exception of "21st Century Schizoid Man," the band draws primarily from material on the Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black, and Red albums, respectively…

‘Deborah contains some of the most glorious music Handel ever wrote. Even if many of the numbers have been recycled from earlier works, the invention is still staggering. Handel devotees can thus amuse themselves spotting the tunes while everyone else can revel in the sumptuous scoring and the sheer vitality and humanity of the piece, all superbly conveyed in Robert King's recording’.

This impressive, impeccably packaged four-CD box set focuses solely on B.B. King's 1950s and 1960s recordings for the Modern family of labels. That was a period that basically encompassed the vast majority of his work prior to 1962, though he did a few non-Modern sides before signing with ABC Paramount in early 1962 and did a few other sides for Modern in the mid-'60s. So this is basically a box-set overview of King's early career, one that saw him score many R&B hits and build a career as a blues legend, even as the blues were falling out of fashion in favor of rock and soul. As many tracks as there are here - 106 in all, four of them previously unreleased - this isn't a catchall roundup of everything the prolific King did for the label…

Universal's 2012 box set Ladies & Gentlemen…Mr. B.B. King is hardly the first B.B. King box set – MCA assembled a similar four-disc set called King of the Blues in 1992, Ace had a tremendous four-CD box called The Vintage Years in 2002 that covered his pre-ABC/Paramount recordings (apparently every ten years it's time for a new B.B. box) – but it certainly is the most ambitious, arriving in two separate career-spanning incarnations…

Double-CD compilation that includes all three of the albums King recorded for Leon Russell's Shelter label in the early 1970s, as well as some other cuts (half a dozen of which were previously unissued) recorded around the same period. King's vocal and guitar-playing skills remained intact when he joined Shelter, but these recordings aren't among his best. That's partially because he was playing with rock-oriented sidemen, and partially because the material - divided between covers of blues standards, contemporary rock and soul items, and songs written by Leon Russell - wasn't especially exciting or sympathetic. Most crucial was the near-total absence of material from the pen of King himself. Although this set isn't bad, when you want to turn to classic King, you'll go elsewhere, particularly to the sides he recorded for the King label in the '60s.