Woman's Weekly From 3 June 2014

The "5" Royales - Soul & Swagger: The Complete "5" Royales 1951-1967 (2014) {5CD Set RockBeat Records ROC-CD 3101}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 1.58 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 888 Mb
Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 20 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1951-67, 2014 S'more Ent. / RockBeat Records ROC-CD 3101
Rhythm & Blues / Rock & Roll / Soul / Gospel / Early R&B / Doo Wop / Jump Blues

One of the finest and most influential rhythm & blues acts of the '50s, the "5" Royales began their career as a gospel group called the Royal Sons Quintet before crossing over to secular music in 1952. The "5" Royales initially recorded for Apollo Records, where they scored hits like "Baby Don't Do It" and "Laundromat Blues," but they enjoyed greater success when they signed with King Records in 1954 and stormed the R&B charts with tunes like "Monkey Hips and Rice," "Think" (later covered by James Brown and Aretha Franklin), and "Dedicated to the One I Love" (which both the Shirelles and the Mamas & the Papas took to the upper reaches of the pop charts).

A very special deluxe edition of the 1969 recorded debut of guitar legend Tommy Bolin performing with his first major act, the blues rock outfit Zephyr!
Newly remixed and remastered audio created under the supervision of founding member David Givens and with 2 bonus discs of never-before-heard live material and studio improvisations!…

Released by Legacy in the U.K., this compact box set contains 20 albums – inside adequate LP replica sleeves – released by Philadelphia International. When it was issued, it retailed at a price that was roughly equivalent to the sum of three or four full-price titles, which made it a significant bargain. These albums don't represent the absolute best that PIR had to offer; instead, the box offers an assortment of commercial hits and misses, creative masterpieces and not-quite-failures, and showcases a significant portion of the label's roster.

Wes Montgomery - In The Beginning: Early Recordings from 1949-1958 (2014) {2CD Set Resonance Records HCD-2014}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 759 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 325 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 224 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1949-58, 2014 Resonance Records | HCD-2014
Jazz / Bop / Hard Bop / Guitar

Rare Wes Montgomery material is hard to come by. Not counting Willow Weep for Me, the posthumous LP Verve issued in 1968 not long after the guitarist's passing, there was Resonance's 2012 set Echoes of Indiana Avenue, which contained largely live performances from 1957 and 1958. In the Beginning, released three years after Echoes, draws from a similar well of unreleased recordings, offering a heavy dose of live material along with five sides produced by Quincy Jones at Columbia Studios in 1955, plus three tracks a session at Spire Records in Fresno, California in 1949.

SEON (Studio Erichson) is a period music label by the legendary producer Wolf Erichson. Erichson founded the label in 1969 as one of the first labels dedicated only to authentic music. The recordings were made with the best available recording techniques of the time and still deliver a high quality product in line with today's standards. This special boxset offers all SEON CD reissues from the late 90s on 85 CDs in a limited edition boxset.

Guitarist Joe Bonamassa was opening for B.B. King when he was only eight years old and was a veteran of the road and gigging by the time he was 12, so it’s tempting to toss him in the all-flash-but-no-soul prodigy trash bin that has been filling up pretty well since the great Stevie Ray Vaughan shuffled off to blues heaven - but that would be a big mistake. Bonamassa has soul, plenty of it, and he plays guitar with a reverent grace, and sometimes lost in all this is the fact that he’s a pretty good singer, too, sounding more than a little bit like a reconstituted Paul Rodgers. This two-disc set is drawn from a show Bonamassa delivered in 2013 at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London and features the guitarist and singer accompanied by a full horn section.

Quasi Parlando is an important addition to ECM's documentation of the work of Tigran Mansurian, an often breathtaking account of highly original contemporary chamber orchestra music. Issued in the wake of his 75th birthday, the album presents four works for soloists and strings, and marks the ECM debut of the Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, winner of the 2013 Gramophone Awards 'Record of the Year'. It opens with the Armenian composer's fiercely-concentrated Double Concerto for Violin, Cello and String Orchestra, and proceeds to new music performed by its dedicatees: the lyrical Romance, dedicated to Patricia Kopatchinskaja, and the intensely expressive Quasi Parlando, dedicated to German cellist Anja Lechner. Both are world premiere recordings, as is the Violin Concerto No 2, subtitled Four Serious Songs, which concludes the programme. Throughout, the soloists deliver committed performances, as does the Amsterdam Sinfonietta under the direction of Candida Thompson.