Three Minutes For a Dog

This three-CD box set, in producer and then label Boss' weirdly wired brain, encompasses two different sides of Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Discs one and two represent sporadic live recordings of Kirk from 1962 to 1972, all of them previously unreleased and issued courtesy of a Kirk collector named George Bonafacio. These two discs contain Kirk classics such as "Domino," "Blacknuss," and an excerpt from "Three for the Festival," as well as singular Kirk interpretations of "I Say a Little Prayer," "Freddie Freeloader," "Lester Leaps In," "Giant Steps," "Sister Sadie," and more. These two discs are chock-full of stellar performances that are well-recorded despite being fan tapes. The musicians on these dates range from bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pederson to Hilton Ruiz, Jerome Cooper, Tete Montoliu, and many others…

Since Three Dog Night's albums were typically short, single-disc compilations that pair two of them together are not only logical but a good value, too. Case in point: this one, with 19 tracks from two of the band's releases from 1970, it clocks at just over 68 minutes. The sequencing of It Ain't Easy has been changed from the American edition that led off with the disc's biggest hit, "Mama Told Me Not to Come." That song appears here buried in the programming at cut seven, which changes the feel of the finished product. The easy rolling version of Paul Williams' "Out in the Country" was the only other charting nugget, although the first appearance of Elton John's "Your Song," which predated John's own version on his debut by a few months, proves how sharp the group's knack for finding great tunes was…