What It Is!

The entire album was recorded at the Blue Front Café, the oldest juke joint in Mississippi. The record purposefully allows its cinderblock acoustics to be Jimmy’s accompaniment compelling the listener to close their eyes and experience pulling up a chair in the old juke joint and listening to him play. Those same walls have absorbed the haunting music of Skip James, Jack Owens, Henry Stuckey, Bud Spires, Cornelius Bright, Tommy West and others over the years and provided the perfect feedback to Jimmy’s stark and dissonant blues.

Above the album worked the Ace Records 'What It Is! Celebrating 50 Years of Westbound Jazz and Funky Grooves ', and his release took place on 2020. The album has got 15 songs with a total duration of more than an hour. A compilation is a compilation of original music.

Multiple award winner for Best Rock Album (NAMMY, ISMA, CAMA). Star-studded lineup includes Matt Sorum (Guns `n' Roses, Velvet Revolver), Dave Abruzzese (Pearl Jam), Juan Alderete (Mars Volta), Matt Sherrod (Crowded House, Beck), and Brian Tichy (Billy Idol, Ozzy Osbourne).

Mike Stern is one of the more creative fusion guitarists, playing with the power of rock but often taking sophisticated improvisations. On this passionate set (which consists of nine of his originals), Stern is joined by the keyboards of Jim Beard, bassist Will Lee, Dennis Chambers or Ben Perowsky on drums and (on three songs apiece) the tenors of Michael Brecker and Bob Malach. Overall this is one of Mike Stern's better recordings.

Guitarist Melvin Sparks keeps 1970s-style funky soul-jazz alive on this set, which is filled with catchy grooves, fine ensemble playing, and soulful solos. Heading a quartet that features tenor saxophonist Joe Herbek (Cochemea Gastalim takes his place on "Charlie Brown"), organist Jeremy Baum (replaced by Adam Scone on two numbers), and drummer Eric Kalb, Sparks performs likable and very danceable music. The one fault to the date is the sameness of much of the R&B-ish material (the guitarist wrote five of the nine selections), but this CD is excellent for parties and as infectious background music. –Scott Yanow

UK three CD set. In 1964, The Staple Singers signed with Epic Records after leaving jazz/blues/folk label Riverside Records. From then until the middle of 1968, they recorded six albums for the label, all of which are featured in this box. Three of these classic albums, Pray On, For What It's Worth and What The World Needs Now Is Love, are making their CD debut and this now makes virtually all of their recorded work available on CD. During the years with Epic, The Staple Singers' sound developed into the soul/folk sub-genre that came to a commercial peak at Stax Records during the 1970s.

You Are What You Is was another of Frank Zappa's periodic post-Over-Nite Sensation efforts that concentrated on tight songwriting supported by satirical lyrics. Originally a two-record set featuring 20 songs, You Are What You Is skewered a variety of targets, from teenagers, punk rock, disco, and country music to the media, yuppies, the beauty-and-fitness industry, upper-class vice, religious hypocrisy, suicide, and the military draft – all the trappings of Reagan-era America. You Are What You Is is quite ambitious in scope and in general one of Zappa's most accessible later-period efforts. This is the much-vaunted Spence Chrislu remaster from 1998 that fixes a lot of EQ/dropout/editing issues with the previous releases and offers a much improved sound overall.