Rising Sun

Known to music fans around the world as the "King of the Boogie," John Lee Hooker endures as one of the true superstars of the blues genre: the ultimate beholder of cool. His work is widely recognized for its impact on modern music – his simple, yet deeply effective songs transcend borders and languages around the globe. "Recorded at the Rising Sun Celebrity Jazz Club in Montreal, Quebec, on May 5, 1977, Black Night Is Falling finds John Lee Hooker in fine voice and backed by a driving band composed of John Garcia on guitar, Steve Jones on bass, and Larry 'Wild Man' Martin on drums, with the end result being an excellent example of Hooker at his best. Highlights include impressive romps through Hooker's signature tunes, 'Boom Boom,' which simply blazes with raw energy here, and 'One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,' which is delivered as a wonderfully paced barroom cautionary tale. This is what the live Hooker sounded like with a sympathetic band behind him, a band that luckily wasn't afraid to push him a little."

If Wacken shows Deep Purple's performance in front of a huge rock audience, playing as if they had to leave all their habits behind, the Tokyo show is presenting Deep Purple completely at ease with their history and themselves. On the very same venue where the band has written rock history with the album “Made In Japan”, Deep Purple went on stage without nostalgia and with the attitude of a band that is physically led by the music, making playing a perfect show look as the most natural thing one could do. Song after song, Purple play a flawless show going back and forth in time…

Landing in Tokyo just 6 months after Fukushima, Aerosmith began the Japanese leg of their world tour in devastating circumstances. This film directed by Casey Patrick Tebo, documents both the performances and the band’s relationship with Japan…

Posthumous reconstructions of unfinished works are inherently dangerous, principally because even the most capable scholar or producer can only make, at best, an educated guess as to how the work in question would have been completed. Indeed, in dealing with some such pieces, you're sometimes lucky to get the work of the artist claimed (the Mozart Symphony No. 37 is a case in point – it doesn't exist; the piece once labeled Symphony No. 37 and attributed to Mozart is now known to have been authored by Michael Haydn); and while there's no question that the songs on this CD were recorded by Jimi Hendrix, even the people who worked on the sides with him can't say which songs would have ended up on the finished version of First Rays of the New Rising Sun (assuming that he even ended up using that title for the album), or what embellishments he would have added to any of them in the course of completing them, or even if he might not have totally reconsidered such matters as tempo and approach to any of them…

If Wacken shows Deep Purple's performance in front of a huge rock audience, playing as if they had to leave all their habits behind, the Tokyo show is presenting Deep Purple completely at ease with their history and themselves. On the very same venue where the band has written rock history with the album “Made In Japan”, Deep Purple went on stage without nostalgia and with the attitude of a band that is physically led by the music, making playing a perfect show look as the most natural thing one could do. Song after song, Purple play a flawless show going back and forth in time…