Playhouse Sessions

Sessions is Union Square Music’s 2CD urban and dance music range. Aimed at both the hardened dance music fan and the impulse purchaser, each Sessions title is packed full of hit singles, big club tracks and a choice selection of forgotten gems and underground classics picked out by our expert crate-digging compilers. Strong generic packaging including an outer slipcase, informative sleeve notes and a low price in the shops have made Sessions one of our most popular labels.

This is not quite a live album. The selections are from four different BBC in-studio performances. So, even though the tracks were performed by the band as a whole, as opposed to multi-tracked, they are not in front of a live audience, other than the radio personnel…

Free jazz has not produced many notable guitarists. Experimental musicians drawn to the guitar have had few jazz role models; consequently, they've typically looked to rock-based players for inspiration. James "Blood" Ulmer is one of the few exceptions an outside guitarist who has forged a style based largely on the traditions of African-American vernacular music. Ulmer is an adherent of saxophonist/composer Ornette Coleman's vaguely defined Harmolodic theory, which essentially subverts jazz's harmonic component in favor of freely improvised, non-tonal, or quasi-modal counterpoint.

9-disc box set released on the Great Dane label, Italy, 1993. Contains every existing Beatles performance on BBC radio, from March 1962 through their final set in June 1965. Only a relatively small portion of these performances, all recorded exclusively for BBC broadcast (and thus different from the familiar LP studio versions), are otherwise available. Sound quality varies, particularly on the earlier discs, with much of the material derived from personal collections when it could not be located in the BBC archives.