Artas Sam 8

Brown's third studio album, 43 Minutes…, was made around the same time that her mother was dying from breast cancer. A&M, Brown's record label at the time were not satisfied with the album and wanted some potential hit singles recorded and added to the track listing. Brown, unwilling to compromise and after a protracted legal battle, bought back the master recordings of the album and released them in 1992 on her own label Pod Music, a year after the death of her mother. The album has become a firm favourite with fans who cite it as her strongest album in her portfolio.

This set is near essential to fans of Sam Cooke, despite the fact that it contains none of his gospel recordings for Specialty Records or any of the work from the final year of his career (owned by ABKCO Records). Scattered every few minutes across this four-disc collection are reminders of just how far ahead of all existing musical forms Cooke was, creating sounds that stretched the definitions of song genres as they were understood and created completely new categories…

The ten 1963-1964 sides that make up the majority of this set have sort of fallen through the historical cracks over the years. They didn't deserve such shoddy treatment - Sam didn't record "Back Door Friend" or "Hi-Heel Sneakers" anywhere else, and he's in top shape throughout The Late Great Magic Sam. Two live tracks at the set's close from 1969 don't add much to the overall package.

The Avant Garde was a coffeehouse in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that played host to a variety of rock, blues, and folk performers in the '60s, and Windy City guitar wizard Magic Sam (aka Sam Maghett) rolled in to play a few sets in June 1968. A local kid with an interest in recording named Jim Charne showed up with a reel-to-reel machine and a couple of microphones, and he captured Magic Sam's show on tape; 45 years later, those tapes have finally been made public on the album Live at the Avant Garde, and given the relatively small amount of material that's surfaced on the late blues legend (who succumbed to a heart attack when he was just 32), this set is a very welcome find. Live at the Avant Garde has a decidedly different feel than Magic Sam Live, which preserved radio broadcasts from 1963 and 1964 and a 1969 appearance at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival; while those recordings blazed with intensity, this captures Magic Sam and his band in more laid-back form, playing a small, booze-free venue rather than a rowdy bar or a festival audience in the thousands.

Sam Brown first shot to fame with the massive UK No. 4 hit "Stop" in 1989. The album of the same name went on to sell over 2.5 million copies worldwide. It also spawned the UK Top 15 hit "Can I Get A Witness?". Her follow-up album "April Moon" yielded the single "Kissing Gate", charting at No. 23. Above all, Brown is an outstanding musician with a voice so distinct and powerful that it didn't take long for fellow musicians to recognize. She was a backing singer on Pink Floyd's "The Division Bell" album and worked with David Gilmour on his 2003 acoustic concert tour throughout the UK & Europe. In 1994, she was a guest with future husband Jools Holland's Rhythm & Blues Orchestra and became their vocalist in 2000. The Very Best of Sam Brown is the compilation album from the UK singer-songwriter, Sam Brown. It was released worldwide in 2005. Includes the previously unreleased demo version of ‘Stop!’

To call West Side Soul one of the great blues albums, one of the key albums (if not the key album) of modern electric blues is all true, but it tends to diminish and academicize Magic Sam's debut album. This is the inevitable side effect of time, when an album that is decades old enters the history books, but this isn't an album that should be preserved in amber, seen only as an important record. Because this is a record that is exploding with life, a record with so much energy, it doesn't sound old. Of course, part of the reason it sounds so modern is because this is the template for most modern blues, whether it comes from Chicago or elsewhere. Magic Sam may not have been the first to blend uptown soul and urban blues, but he was the first to capture not just the passion of soul, but also its subtle elegance, while retaining the firepower of an after-hours blues joint…

Although Chess didn't bother to anthologize these sides into album form until the early '60s, this marvelous collection actually dates from 1953. Broonzy and Sam are both in great form here, sharing the vocals throughout and recalling their earlier days as Bluebird label and session mates. The sound is fleshed out by the addition of guitarist Lee Cooper (who at times almost sounds a bit too modern for the genre being explored here, throwing in what can only be described as Chuck Berry licks) and Big Crawford on upright bass.