Kliller Joe

Big Joe Williams was a Delta blues singer, songwriter and guitarist famous for the distinctive sound of his unique nine-string guitar, as well as for recording classic songs like Baby Please Don't Go and Crawling King Snake. His career was remarkable for the fact that he recorded through every decade from the mid-1930s into the'70s, although his periods of active recording were somewhat erratic, while he maintained a constant round of 'live' performing. This great-value 115-track 5-CD set comprises most of the A & B sides of his releases on the Bluebird, Columbia, Bullet, Trumpet & VeeJay labels from 1935 to 1957, plus EP titles and the titles from his albums Piney Woods Blues, A Man Sings The Blues, Tough Times, Blues On Highway 69, Nine-String Guitar Blues and Mississippi's Big Joe Williams & his Nine-String Guitar from 1957 through to 1962. It includes recordings where he is accompanied by noted contemporaries like Sonny Boy Williamson, Ransom Knowling, Robert Lee McCoy, Judge Riley and others. He was one of the most impressive blues performers of his era who inspired many artists of later years like Bob Dylan, and this substantial collection offers an entertaining showcase for a highly original and influential artist.

Sunnyside Records presents the second boxed set of recordings from the archive of pianist Joe Castro, a diverse collection featuring incredible and never heard performances from legends like Paul Bley, Paul Motian, Leroy Vinnegar, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones and many more.

Joe Turner Though endlessly confused with the singer Big Joe Turner, pianist Joe Turner came from a completely different direction, following the James P. Johnson/Fats Waller stride tradition, armed with a superb technique and a fine sense of swing. Born in Baltimore, he started to learn the piano from his mother at age five and began to make a name for himself in Harlem as a teenager shortly after his move to New York in 1925. He was an accompanist to Adelaide Hall in a duo, first with Alex Hill and then Francis Carter, the latter with whom he and Hall toured Europe in 1931. He remained in Europe through 1939 when war broke out, upon which he returned to the U.S. to work as a singer. After playing with Sy Oliver's army band in 1944-1945 and Rex Stewart in 1946, Turner returned to the continent, residing in Hungary in 1948 and then Switzerland from 1949 to 1962. He settled in Paris in 1962 in a residency at La Calvados, continued to play engagements elsewhere in Europe and occasionally the U.S., and eventually survived to became the last major active stride pianist of his era. Among his few available albums is a 1984 project with Knocky Parker and his Houserockers on Southland.

This "two-fer" reissue pairs up two of Joe Tex's classic Atlantic Records albums on one CD, "Hold What You've Got" and "The New Boss". Stylistically, both albums were just a bit off the beaten path from the bulk of Tex's mid-1960's work; his sense of humor (always bubbling beneath the surface) came into the forefront on "Hold What You've Got", while "The New Boss" focused new emphasis on Tex's obvious fondness for country music. The CD helps to play up the C&W leanings of "The New Boss" with four additional bonus tracks in a decidedly twangy mode, including fine versions of "Make The World Go Away" and "Just Out Of Reach". The remastering is clear and bright, making the most of Buddy Killen's fine production, and while these two albums each have a decidedly different mood, they compliment each other well, and this is a fine presentation of material from Tex's first era of hits; well worth a spin.

This 77-minute CD is close to an ideal compilation, reaching back to before the band's beginnings for the original 1965 recording of "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" and across seven of the better cuts off of Electric Music for the Mind and Body, up through the Woodstock Festival and the band's farewell concert that same year at the Fillmore West. It reels in most of the notable album cuts in between, all in surprisingly good sound (not usually a strong point on Vanguard CDs of the late '80s). The 19 songs, which don't follow a strict chronological order, encompass some of the band's most celebrated experimental material, as well as more traditionally structured songs such as the fiery double-lead guitar workout "Death Sound Blues," the catchy, folk-rock-style "Sing Sing Sing," and the counterculture singalong "Marijuana" and works of serious personal significance (and intimately focused genius), including "Grace" and "Janis." The disc offers a good balance between the various sides of the group's sound and includes several notable live tracks, including the November 1968 Fillmore East performance of "Superbird," an anti-Lyndon Johnson song that dated back to 1965 and which is adapted here to include an attack on president-elect Richard Nixon. The sound is amazingly good and consistent throughout, and the track order, as well as the music itself, is downright spellbinding at times; the annotation is minimal, but this CD really has only a single flaw – apparently, between the 1965 original version of "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" and the 1969 Woodstock performance, there was no room for the standard studio version off of the band's second LP.

1967 marked an era of creative expression, political rebellion and experimentation, climaxing in The Summer of Love; and no other location on Earth was quite as synonymous with this period as San Francisco – the center of the counterculture movement. Perhaps one of the best musical representations of this time, place and environment came from a rock band across the Bay, who married progressive protest with groundbreaking, experimental music: Country Joe & the Fish. In that one year, the Berkeley musicians rose to prominence, releasing two albums which would go on to influence some of the biggest psychedelic acts of the decade: their debut LP, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, and I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die.