Evil Ways

When Carlos Santana made a guest appearance with Eric Clapton at a festival in Hyde Park in July 2018, it marked a special celebration for both guitarists. It was almost fifty years since Santana had made his historic breakthrough at the 1969 U.S. Woodstock Festival, and as many years since Clapton launched Blind Faith at a free concert. The unifying power of rock enables artists from different backgrounds to join forces in the quest to perform exciting, satisfying music together. Santana and Clapton were old friends and it was the blues that formed the basis of their joint passion. The genre was certainly an early influence on the young man who began his career south of the border, down Mexico way, en route to becoming a global superstar.

The fourth volume in Verve's Verve Remixed series was a long time in coming considering how quickly the label spit out the first three. Nonetheless, it is a welcome addition to that shelf if remixes are your personal thang. This set concentrates, once more, on vocalists, and the array is rather startling on the surface, though it's sequenced beautifully. As with any of these packages some cuts work better than others, but there are some true highlights here. Marlena Shaw's reading of Ashford & Simpson's "California Soul" is given a killer treatment by Diplo and Mad Decent, keeping the entire thing rooted in its source material and stretching it with judiciously added bits of early funk, Ramsey Lewis-style soul-jazz, and hip-hop…

Evil Masquerade was founded 2003 in Copenhagen by Swedish guitarist Henrik Flyman (Lacrimosa, ex-Wuthering Heights, ex-Moahni Moahna, ex-ZooL). Together with drummer Dennis Buhl (ex-Hatesphere), bass player Kasper Gram and vocalist Henrik Brockmann (ex-Royal Hunt) they set off to record the band's debut album that was released early 2004 under the name Welcome to the Show. It almost immediately received worldwide recognition and made the charts in Japan at # 8. One year later it was followed up with their second album Theatrical Madness…

Everyone agrees that Deep Purple is one of founders of hard-rock and one of the bands that made a name for themselves in the most wonderful era of music, the 70's. At the time, 1990, Deep Purple already were an icon lead by the guitar genius Ritchie Blackmore. Slaves And Masters was the only album with Joe Lynn Turner, and definitely one of the most controversial and criticized albums of all time in the history of Deep Purple…