Zox

The repertoire of this January 1977 Paris session consists entirely of Dupree originals. Typical of his cheeky humour and bubbling good spirits (Hamhock And Lima Beans, Let Me In, I'm Drunk, Phone Calf), it nevertheless reveals the natural sadness of the blues, never far from the surface in any of his work (Who Do You Love ?, Let's Try Over Again). Indeed, Jack's personal life weighed more heavily in his songs than, because of the fun aspect, is generally realised. At this time, just recently divorced and separated from his young children, he was a lonely man, and destined to remain so.
Like all blues singers of his time, Jack also loved the occasional wallow in sentimentality. When I was due to visit him in Sweden in the summer of 1989 - where he was convalescing after drastic surgery - he made a particular point of asking me to bring him a cassette copy of a side he had recorded in Paris in January 1977. When I got there, he played it all week long, almost non-stop. It was-his Real Combination For Love. Knowing that he liked it so much, why not now listen to it with him ?
We have rounded out the present CD with five titles from a 1983 session on which Champion Jack Dupree is accompanied by singer Brenda Bell and guitarist Louisiana Red. - Don Waterhouse

Empire was originally intended to be a new line-up of Flash. The nucleus of the band were guitarist Peter Banks and singer Sydney Foxx. The band never got a record deal and cd's were released in 1995-1996 by One Way Records. The music was recorded in the seventies. Recorded in 1974, this has a few fillers, and it occasionally falls into the prog habit of going six minutes when four would do, but it's still mystifying that this perfectly solid collection would go missing for so long. Empire's sound bridges the West Coast funk of Cold Blood and the jazzy guitar of early Yes, and it works surprisingly well. The charging "Out of Our Hands" has some clever guitar effects thrown in, and a startling moment where Foxx's vocals rise up like a kettle on the boil.