Lowell Green

Though there are thousands of languages and countless political differences across the world, people tend to come together through equally endless forms of music and dance.

Blues Masters at the Crossroads. A global audience returns year-after-year to worship the blues at Blue Heaven Studios in Salina, Kansas. For the first time Analogue Productions presenting six sets recorded live in 2014 at Blues Masters at the Crossroads October 17-18. And it's the first live blues concert recorded entirely in Direct Stream Digital. Includes the sets by Rip Lee Pryor, Moreland & Arbuckle, Joe Beard+Lazy Lester, George Brock, Marquise Knox and his band, Sonny Green, and none-other than the soul-blues belter Mighty Sam McClain.

Aside from the experimental side project Lumpy Gravy, Hot Rats was the first album Frank Zappa recorded as a solo artist sans the Mothers, though he continued to employ previous musical collaborators, most notably multi-instrumentalist Ian Underwood.

GOT THE BLUES is a historic and iconic collection of the best of the American Blues. 80 tracks from the hallowed names of Muddy Waters, Booker T, Etta James, Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker, BB King, Howlin Wolf and many more. America is the home of the blues, born in the wilderness, the deltas of Mississippi, the stoops of the deep South, under the searing sun. The Blues of all shades are here, from its mythical roots, to its full bloodied crescendo – the horns, the keys, the steel guitar. It’s the story of the soul of America.

Conceived as music for listening behind the wheel or at home, this triple album echoes the “American Way of Life” back in the days when the automobile was a striking symbol. This anthology featuring rock, jazz, western swing, blues and country music is a landmark audio-collection illustrating the car-myth in American popular music. The 28-page booklet contains detailed notes by Bruno Blum, and these remarkable titles were all chosen for their quality: compositions, lyrics, performance… and, wherever possible, great sound, the kind you need wherever you take the music.

Following 2011's highly-successful Jumping The Shuffle Blues, Fantastic Voyage takes another dip into the bubbling cauldron of R&B which sewed the seeds for ska on Jamaica's sound systems in the 1940s and 50s, lashing together 85 sizzling biscuits from that formative, feet-finding era. It's well established that the US R&B which started bombarding the island through radio after World War II was picked up by sound systems such as Clement Coxsone Dodd and Prince Buster, germinating into ska after mating with the Caribbean's own calypso and other local musical strains.

Rarely has the primal excitement of the electric blues guitar been so voraciously and expertly illustrated on one compilation than on Screaming And Crying, renowned British blues buff Neil Slaven s monumental homage to the music which shaped both his life and a whole generation. Over three discs and 75 tracks, the set straddles the spectrum of the electrified blues which fuelled the British R&B boom of the 1960s and beyond, mixing much-feted names such as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley with more deliciously obscure outings by the likes of Doctor Ross and Guitar Shorty. Slaven s liner notes outline the story behind the roughshod classics which bust out of the set, whether screaming with the joy of musical release, or crying in a pool of despair, both amplified through jacked-up guitar strings.