The Summer Fair

The Kinks were one of the most influential bands of the British Invasion. Early singles "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night" were brutal, three-chord ravers that paved the way for punk and metal while inspiring peers like the Who. In the mid-'60s, frontman Ray Davies came into his own as a songwriter, developing a wry wit and an eye for social commentary that culminated in a pair of conceptual LPs, The Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), that proved enormously influential over the years.

This 5-DVD Collector's set features all 26 uncut, original broacast episodes from the second season of the Monkees. DVD speial features incude 5.1 Audio, commentary tracks with all four Monkees, an exclusive interview and vintage TV commercials. Includes episodes 33-58 and the bonus "33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee".

Carlo Maria Giulini was born in Barletta, Southern Italy in May 1914 with what appears to have been an instinctive love of music. As the town band rehearsed he could be seen peering through the ironwork of the balcony of his parents’ home, immovable and intent. The itinerant fiddlers who roamed the countryside during the lean years of the First World War also caught his ear. In 1919, the family moved to the South Tyrol, where the five-year-old Carlo asked his parents for "one of those things the street musicians play". Signor Giulini acquired a three-quarter size violin, setting in train a process which would take his son from private lessons with a kindly nun to violin studies with Remy Principe at Rome’s Academy of St Cecilia at the age of 16.

This compilation has all of the music formerly on singer June Christy's two 1957 Capitol LPs, Fair and Warmer! and Gone for the Day, both of which have Pete Rugolo arrangements. The former set (which is actually programmed second) finds Christy joined by a 12-piece group of mostly West Coast all-stars. The backup players include trumpeter Don Fagerquist, trombonist Frank Rosolino, altoist Bud Shank, and Bob Cooper on tenor, but they are mostly restricted to short statements. Christy is in excellent form on such numbers as a definitive (but very brief) "I Want to Be Happy," "When Sunny Gets Blue," and "It's Always You." Three different groups are used on the Gone for the Day set, two of which have string sections, while the other uses five trombones.