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.

This is Joe Brown’s first ever box set, which celebrates his prolific 60-year career playing music. It contains six albums of music drawn from across his entire career from the very beginning, through the folk/rock combo Brown’s Home Brew, right up to the present day. Many of the numbers will be little known while hitherto unreleased material also features. The package also contains a live DVD, three card inserts of early posters, a multi-coloured patch and a Joe Brown plectrum. The very special collection pays tribute to a musician’s life well lived. It demonstrates both Joe’s versatility (he plays many instruments) and the range of his music. He is equally at home with Leadbelly standards, Golden Gate Quartet gospel songs,1930s’ classics and instrumentals, real hoe down country music and country blues. Not to mention klezmer, pop and absolutely authentic rock ‘n’ roll… Joe Brown’s skill set is diverse and his appeal all-embracing.

On August 21, Joe Strummer would have turned 70 years old. On the occasion of his birthday, a boxset will be released to celebrate his work with the Mescaleros. It contains unreleased songs, demos and outtakes. "Joe Strummer 002: The Mescaleros Years" will be released on September 16.

Call Joe Simon the reluctant soul star. Despite his countless hits in the 1960s and '70s, his heart just wasn't in it, though the sound proved otherwise. Thankfully, that's not a bit apparent on this collection, which consists of his fabulous, hit-laden discography from 1966-1970 with producer Richbourg at the helm for Sound Stage 7 Records.

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.

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.

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.