B'z The Best XXV 1988-1998 is a compilation album by the Japanese hard rock duo B'z. It was released on June 12, 2013, simultaneously with B'z The Best XXV 1999-2012, and it is part of their 25th anniversary celebration. It reached #1 at Oricon charts and Billboard Japan Top Albums…
Joanne Shaw Taylor embodies all the elements of modern blues, even if she sings with a distinctively British accent. Given her extraordinary dexterity as a guitarist and well-developed vocal chops, Taylor was already a sensation on the blues festival circuit in both the U.S. and Great Britain. Songs From The Road embodies the life and soul Taylor and band put into their music. It has the deep contrast of vibrancy and tenderness that sums up her career to date. It is a performance to be proud of.
Del Shannon’s formidable hit list qualifies him as one of the truly great artists of the 1960s. Del made #1 on both sides of the Atlantic with his first 45, ‘Runaway’, and for the next few years he delivered the chart goods again and again with some of the best singles ever made – most of which he wrote or co-wrote. This new Ace set is, we believe, the first to present Del’s UK 45s, as released between 1960 and 1966, in the order they appeared here and in the same couplings used on the original London and Stateside pressings (which often differed from their US counterparts).
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.