Beyond Entrepreneurship Collins 1992

For her first five albums, Judy Collins' work resided in the world of traditional folk music, even when she covered contemporary compositions by the likes of Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, et. al. Then she began delving into what was essentially art song aimed at a popular audience, with ever more elaborate accompaniments and arrangements, and her audience grew accordingly, until her hit rendition of "Both Sides Now" – one of the more straightforward pop moments on the elaborately produced Wildflowers album – made her a familiar name to AM radio listeners. Her label, Elektra Records, was happy enough about this, but apparently didn't want her early work to be forgotten amid the flurry of activity surrounding her new music.

Collins is never far in spirit from the 1940s and 1950s gin mills of his youth, where he soaked up blues, R&B, country and western, jazz, and all their various amalgams. On this 1983 date he impressively revitalizes his old Texas hit "Don't Lose Your Cool," turns the heat up on Guitar Slim's "Quicksand," and adds newfangled vocal and guitar insinuations to Big Walter Price's "Get to Gettin'."

In Concert features the Iceman, guitarist Albert Collins, live on Germany's 'Ohne Filter - Musik Pur' TV music program taped on October 27th, 1988. The man they call the Master of the Telecaster, or the Iceman, was already one of the biggest US blues stars in the sixties with his funky, jangly guitar sounds. Albert Collins was one of Jimi Hendrix' idols and has since been asked to collaborate in the studio with John Lee Hooker and Gary Moore. On stage, the Texan delighted his audiences with his famed guitar walks.

Albert Collins, "The Master of the Telecaster," "The Iceman," and "The Razor Blade" was robbed of his best years as a blues performer by a bout with liver cancer that ended with his premature death on November 24, 1993. He was just 61 years old. The highly influential, totally original Collins, like the late John Campbell, was on the cusp of a much wider worldwide following via his deal with Virgin Records' Pointblank subsidiary. However, unlike Campbell, Collins had performed for many more years, in obscurity, before finally finding a following in the mid-'80s.

Filmed just a year before his untimely death from cancer, this 1992 concert from Montreux finds the great Albert Collins still at the top of his game. With his trademark Fender Telecaster and distinctive finger picking style well to the fore "The Iceman" delivers a set that runs from his early million selling single "Frosty" right up to songs from his final studio album "Iceman".

Hearing Albert Collins' icy guitar sound on disc is exciting, but watching the "master of the Telecaster" burn through a typically blistering set adds a whole other level of appreciation to the experience. He was a consummate showman whose crowd-roaming with a 150-foot guitar cord – before the advent of wireless gear – made him as famous for his live sets as his studio ones. This generous DVD delivers a two-for-one bargain, as it features Collins' first 40-minute show at Montreux in 1979 in addition to the hourlong titular set, the latter also available as a companion audio CD. He is on fire for both shows, although perhaps moving a bit more slowly in 1992, which preceded his untimely death by just a year. As was his norm, Collins stretched songs to their breaking point on-stage, and three of the seven tunes he performed in 1992 break the ten-minute mark. But his playing was so inventive and his stage presence so rousing that nothing seems overly extended or drawn out…….