Test 2019

It has been 25 years since the first Café del Mar Volume was released. To celebrate this milestone we have carefully selected a mix of classics & brand new tracks to reflect the essence of Café del Mar. The double CD release features brand new tracks & remixes by Quantic, The Cinematic Orchestra, Zero 7, Peggu Gou, BadBadNotGood and timeless classics by Chicane, A Man Called Adam, Trio Mocoto, Planet Funk, just to name but a few.

It has been 25 years since the first Café del Mar Volume was released. To celebrate this milestone we have carefully selected a mix of classics & brand new tracks to reflect the essence of Café del Mar. The double CD release features brand new tracks & remixes by Quantic, The Cinematic Orchestra, Zero 7, Peggu Gou, BadBadNotGood and timeless classics by Chicane, A Man Called Adam, Trio Mocoto, Planet Funk, just to name but a few.

Am I Blue? Offers a marvellous cross-section from the best of one of the finest of all jazz-styled vocalists, the pioneering Ethel Waters (1896-1977). Starting out as a blues/vaudeville singer (known as “Sweet Mama Stringbean”), the black American singer, entertainer, and later accomplished actress on stage and screen, became one of the era’s most accomplished and sensitive interpreters of popular songs…

Recorded in the same year as the Brothers and Sisters album, this solo debut release is a beautiful amalgam of R&B, folk, and gospel sounds, with the best singing on any of Gregg Allman's solo releases. He covers his own "Midnight Rider" in a more mournful, dirge-like manner, and Jackson Browne's "These Days" gets its most touching and tragic-sounding rendition as well. Although Chuck Leavell and Jaimoe are here, there's very little that sounds like the Allman Brothers Band – prominent guitars, apart from a few licks by Tommy Talton (Cowboy, ex-We the People), are overlooked in favor of gospel-tinged organ and choruses behind Allman's soulful singing.

The Hammond organ, named after its inventor Laurens Hammond, debuted in 1935 as a cost-effective electro-acoustic alternative to the gigantic pipe organs mainly installed in churches. Among Hammond’s first customers were George Gershwin and Count Basie. Jazz pianists like Basie, Fats Waller, Wild Bill Davis and Milt Buckner were the founding fathers of the instrument’s international conquest, which led across all styles of popular music, from jazz to progressive rock, with its heyday in the 1960s and '70s…

Conventional wisdom holds that the Beatles intended Abbey Road as a grand farewell, a suspicion seemingly confirmed by the elegiac note Paul McCartney strikes at the conclusion of its closing suite. It’s hard not to interpret “And in the end / the love you take / is equal to the love you make” as a summation not only of Abbey Road but perhaps of the group’s entire career, a lovely final sentiment. The truth is perhaps a bit messier than this. The Beatles had tentative plans to move forward after the September 1969 release of Abbey Road, plans that quickly fell apart at the dawn of the new decade, and while the existence of that goal calls into question the intentionality of the album as a finale, it changes not a thing about what a remarkable goodbye the record is.