One of the great things about Bo Diddley, something that often goes unmentioned, is that he was a home-recording pioneer, building his own studio years before any other rocker. The full fruits of this labor can be heard on Ride On: The Chess Masters, Vol. 3 – 1960-1961, Hip-O Select's third installment in their complete Bo Chess/Checker masters and easily the weirdest set yet. All 54 songs here were recorded over the course of 13 months: a whopping 17 them have never been released (an additional seven have never seen release in the U.S.), every one of them was cut in his home studio in Washington DC, and not a one reached the charts.
Road Runner, the second volume of Hip-O Select's ongoing chronicle of Bo Diddley's complete Chess/Checker master recordings, covers roughly one calendar year whereas its predecessor, I'm a Man, spanned four — a good indication that 1959 was an eventful year for Bo. During this one year, he had his biggest pop hit in the jive-talking "Say Man" and had another sizable R&B hit with "Crackin' Up," but both these sides were cut in 1958 and released as a single in 1959.
Charly Records presents The Chess Story, Vol. 3: From R&B to Soul. Jan Bradley, Sonny Boy Williamson, Tony Clarke, Little Milton, Ramsey Lewis, Etta James and many others.
Massimo Faraò studied with Maestro Flavio Crivelli and began his career collaborating with musicians from the Genoa Area, especially with the bassist Piero Leveratto. In 1993, he was invited to the US to play with Red Holloway and Albert “Tootie” Heath on a West Coast tour. In the same year, he founded the “We love Jazz” workshop, now one of the biggest events in Europe for jazz teaching.