Essential Blues

This five-disc box collects as many complete concerts by Irish blues-rock guitarist Gary Moore, recorded in 1990, 1995, 1997, 1999, and 2001 at the Montreux Jazz Festival…

Roomful of Blues is an American blues and swing revival big band based in Rhode Island. With a recording career that spans over 50 years, they have toured worldwide and recorded many albums. Roomful of Blues, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, "Swagger, sway and swing with energy and precision". Since 1967, the group’s blend of swing, rock and roll, jump blues, boogie-woogie and soul has earned it five Grammy Award nominations and many other accolades, including seven Blues Music Awards (with a victory as Blues Band Of The Year in 2005). Billboard called the band "a tour de force of horn-fried blues…Roomful is so tight and so right." The Down Beat International Critics Poll has twice selected Roomful of Blues as Best Blues Band.

Various Artists - Essential Mississippi Blues (2012) {2CD Not Now Music NOT2CD459}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 468 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 358 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 24 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2012 Not Now Music | NOT2CD459
Blues / Traditional Blues / Delta Blues

The Mississippi Delta has some of the most fertile soil in the world and became one of the richest cotton growing areas in the world which, before the American Civil War, was worker exclusively by black slaves brought over from Africa. The blues was forged on the anvil of poverty and hardship the black sharecroppers and tenant farmers had to endure. Born of the harsh, brutal conditions of life in the South, and full of pain, frustration and anger, the passionate, soulful sounds of the Delta revolutionised the sound of 20th-century music. This compilation celebrates some of its greatest exponents.

This double-CD set may well mislead listeners on two counts. On the one hand, there will be some neophyte listeners expecting to hear the silky pop/rock strains of the Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks-era Fleetwood Mac. This is, indeed, the original version of the band organized in 1967 by virtuoso blues guitarist/singer Peter Green, in which the latter shared the spotlight with fellow guitarist Jeremy Spencer, and they got no closer to pop/rock than renditions of Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King material.

The Fab T-Birds were considered the best bar band to come out of Austin, Texas, in the late '70s. Which is saying a lot, since we're talking about a musical hotbed. Frontman and harmonica player Kim Wilson and Stevie Ray Vaughan's older brother, Jimmie Vaughan, melded together two of Austin's favorite sounds–blues and rock–scoring a major-label deal and eventually becoming the only band to be produced, at separate times, by both Rockpile leaders, Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe. You won't find the Edmunds stuff here, nor "Tough Enough," their one Top 40 hit. Still, these tracks are taken from the group's first three Chrysalis LPs as well as their Tacoma indie-label debut, the albums most aficionados still consider their best.

Epic's The Essential Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble gathers two discs' worth of the late blues guitarist's work, including many live performances and a few tracks with the Vaughan Brothers. The collection presents Vaughan's material in roughly chronological order, from the 1980 live recording "Shake for Me" to 1989's "Life by the Drop." It also touches on most of Vaughan's definitive songs and performances, including "Tightrope," "Wall of Denial," "Couldn't Stand the Weather," and "Cold Shot," and live versions of "The Sky Is Crying," "Superstition," and "Rude Mood/Hide Away." Though this album doesn't offer anything that hasn't already been released in some form or another, it does go into slightly more depth than several of the other Stevie Ray Vaughan retrospectives by presenting both his greatest studio hits and some of his best live work.

A gentle blues songster with an impressive acoustic guitar style, Mississippi John Hurt made a handful of wonderful recordings for OKeh Records over a pair of sessions in 1928, but he never developed a professional career and dropped from sight shortly afterwards. Hurt was rediscovered in 1965 during the folk and blues revival, and the considerable guitar skills and gentle vocal approach that highlighted his 1928 recordings were still very much intact. He recorded four albums for Vanguard (one of them was actually a concert recording made at Oberlin College in 1965) in the mid-'60s, each of them a pure delight. This brief sampler of his rediscovery recordings includes fine versions of such traditional country blues fare as "Candy Man," "Louis Collins," and "Spike Driver Blues" as well as Hurt's personal calling card, "Avalon Blues"…