Born in 1964 in Chiswick, England, the only son of a world-famous guitar legend, Juergen Richard “J.R.” Blackmore began his musical career in Germany. When he was just five years old, his parents separated and J.R. left the United Kingdom together with his mother to live in her birthplace Hamburg. It was the early years of modern-day Hamburg, which had seen legends to be like The Beatles play in the Star-Club before their heyday. Just like his father, Ritchie Blackmore, who made a name for himself and later became world-famous as a founding member of Deep Purple and later Rainbow. If you were going to be somebody in the music business, Hamburg was the place to be and was a gateway into stardom for a plethora of bands.
Following on from and designed along the same lines as the Guide to Period Instruments, this boxed set includes an exhaustive introductory text as well as a great quantity of music excerpts on the set’s eight CDs. These extracts have been taken from the extensive repertoire recorded by Ricercar over many years, with excerpts from recordings kindly provided by our colleagues from Harmonia Mundi, Gimell, Accent, Alpha and Sony supplementing our programme where necessary. The Lutheran repertoire of the Renaissance has remained for all intents and purposes unrecorded up until now; the tracks illustrating this repertoire together with other excerpts have been recorded specially for this compilation by Vox Luminis.
An original-art 1' x 2' tour poster designed exclusively for these sets by Dennis Loren (who created album covers, concert posters, and print ads for Jimi Hendrix, Muddy Waters, Paul McCartney, The Velvet Underground, Rick James and many others) comes in each box, as does a luxurious LP-sized 28-page booklet featuring extensive liner notes by Richie Unterberger, rare photos, memorabilia and a reproduction of the original LP artwork in 12 inch; format. For sound, look and luxury, these sets have it all…so have at it! It must have been a blast (not just a blast from the past) for the designers at Culture Factory USA to work on these new Jefferson Airplane reissues. Not only are these seminal albums of the psychedelic era, but these painstaking reproductions celebrate the band s groundbreaking graphics and feats in elaborately configured packaging.