Guitar School

A rare and important discovery: 2 quartets (one for guitar and strings, the other featuring the flute) by Ferdinand Rebay, a Viennese composer of the first half of the 20th century. Rebay’s music (unlike his contemporaries of the Second Viennese School) remained in the Late Romantic idiom.The fact that he composed for guitar doesn’t mean his music is light- weight, on the contrary, these are serious and complex masterworks, in which the guitar is explored as an equal and independent instrument.

Chuck Berry's debut LP is fairly strong musically, as well as having a really cool cover (a still shot of Berry, guitar slung in front of him, from the movie Rock, Rock, Rock!). After School Session was just the second long-player ever issued by Chess - only the soundtrack to the movie Rock, Rock, Rock! preceded it. This May 1957 release made Berry something of a late-bloomer among rock & roll's foundation performers - he'd had his first recording session two years earlier, in May of 1955, and by the spring of 1957, Bill Haley already had a handful of LPs to his credit, Elvis Presley was gaining on him, and Clyde McPhatter's version of the Drifters was represented on album, with numerous others soon to join their ranks. Berry had actually enjoyed only two major pop (i.e. rock as opposed to R&B) chart hits at the time: "Maybellene" in the summer of 1955, and "Roll Over Beethoven," which had just made the Top 30 in the summer of 1956…