Made in America is the third album by The Blues Brothers. The second live album by the band, it was released in December 1980 as a followup to their hit film released that year, The Blues Brothers. Commercially and critically it did not fare as well as their previous two albums, 1978's Briefcase Full of Blues and The Blues Brothers: Music from the Soundtrack. It was the band's last album with lead singer "Joliet" Jake Blues (John Belushi, who died in 1982).
With the Compact Jazz series offering plenty of fine single-artist starter discs, there should be no hesitation in picking up this multi-artist overview for that jazz neophyte friend. As usual, the price is right and the selection generous. Covering the '50s, '60s, and '70s, the disc includes both vocal and instrumental tracks from the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Bill Evans, Dinah Washington, Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday.
Prior to the early Sixties, folk and pop musicians inhabited largely different worlds. There were folk records that had become crossover pop hits, but in essence there was little or no common ground in terms of instrumentation or ideologies. But in the wake of the British beat/R&B boom (or, if you were in America, the British Invasion) and the emergence of Bob Dylan, such barriers were broken down for good. With British acts making music that, for the first time in nascent pop history, matched the quality of their American counterparts, suddenly everything was grist to the mill and musical cross-pollination was almost de rigueur.