Funk Essential

The first 2cd collection to span herbie hancock's entire career, from 1962 debut lp to 2000 collaboration with stevie wonder. Includes previously unreleased 1978 live concert duet with joni mitchell on "goodbye pork pie hat" from mingus plus appearances with dexter gordon, freddie hubbard, sonny rollins, ron carter, tony williams, miles davis, wayne shorter, joe henderson, harvey mason, bill laswell, and more!

Paris born guitar virtuoso Emmanuel “U-Nam” Abiteboul is showing his generous side again. With fifteen tracks on his new album Future Love he provides us with plenty of good music. Future Love is U-Nam's positive view of things. A large number of top-notch musicians have participated in this gigantic project. U-Nam performs guitars, bass, keyboards, synth bass, Vocoder and also made programming and editing. Further musicians are Alex Al, Dwayne "Smitty" Smith (bass), Denis Benarrosh (percussion), Fran Merante, Michael White (drums), Christian Martinez (trumpet & flugelhorn), Andrey Chmut (sax), Valeriy Stepanov, Mathias Roos, Bill Steinway (Rhodes), Frank Sitborn (Rhodes and Clavinet), Maria Grig (viola and violin), Kim Hansen (B3 organ), Tim "Tio" Owens, Kim Chandler (vocals), and Shannon Abiteboul (sax and flute).

With some 800 songs in his repertoire, James Brown influenced countless contemporary artists from virtually every popular music genre –rock, funk, soul, jazz, R&B, hip hop and rap. His polyrhythmic funk vamps reshaped dance music, and Brown was by far the most sampled artist during the early days of hip hop. Though he would be dogged by legal troubles and controversy in later life, he was a principled artist, adamantly refusing to conform to anyone’s vision. This 3-D set presents five of his best albums, along with 8 bonus tracks from the same period.

The Essential George Duke is a double-disc, 31-track set documenting George Duke's years with Epic between 1977 and 1984 that netted an astonishing 11 albums, and the third Stanley Clarke/Duke project disc recorded in 1990. These were the years that Duke – never a jazz purist anyway – decided to take a tough swing at the R&B charts. He succeeded.