Mayfield Four

This box set is a companion piece to the 8CD set From Sacred To Secular: A Soul Awakening, which traced the history of soul music from its earliest antecedents in 1927 right up to the first true soul records released in 1962. Here we continue the story from 1962 up to the end of the decade, covering a large portion of soul music’s Golden Age with 100 tracks by soul’s greatest 60s superstars (from Aretha Franklin to Stevie Wonder) and a whole host of “lesser” names whose contribution to the musical genre shouldn’t be overlooked. The CDs cover all of soul’s many styles from early doo-wop and R&B influenced music to the funk grooves which were to prove so popular in the 70s. Other harbingers of the coming decade can be found here in the first sweet-soul Philly sounds from the Delfonics and Intruders, early funk rock (Sly & The Family Stone) and Chicago’s renaissance via Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions.

The Impressions/The Never Ending Impressions is a kind of odd pairing of two LPs on one CD, covering four years of releases by the group in completely different idioms and with partly different lineups – it's also a good overview of their early history on ABC Records…

At four discs and 55 tracks, Hip-O's Funk Box seems to want to be the last word on funk, and while it's a pretty good set, it ends up more representative than definitive of its chosen genre. Virtually all of funk's most important artists are featured, but not always by their most significant singles – sometimes the collection gets it right…

Bob Dylan & The Band - The Bootleg Series, Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes - Complete (2014) [6CD] {Columbia}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 2.11 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 944 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 78 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2014 Columbia / Legacy / Sony Music | 8875016122
Rock / Folk Rock / Roots Rock / Songwriter

Preserving newly written Bob Dylan songs for copyright is the reason why the Band's Garth Hudson rolled tape at Big Pink but The Basement Tapes were something much more than songwriting demos. Greil Marcus dubbed it a celebration of the "Old, Weird America" in his 1997 book Invisible Republic, connecting these songs to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, adding an extra layer of myth to tapes that were shrouded in mystery from the moment bootlegs started to circulate. The Basement Tapes Complete strengthens portions of that legend while simultaneously puncturing it. Certainly, the six-disc box – its first five discs assembled according to Hudson's numbering system, with the sixth disc collecting sessions discovered later – feels substantially different from the LP released in 1975, where the overall picture was distorted by Robbie Robertson adding sometimes significant overdubs and including Band recordings that weren't cut during those seven months in 1967.

OUTTA SIGHT in association with The Modern Soul Collective presents a modern soul fest spanning 40 incredible years of upbeat feel-good club soul.