One of the biggest complaints about contemporary jazz is that it's too commercially minded to
be truly unique and creative. R&B guitarist Paul Jackson, Jr. has figured out a way to combine the two in fresh ways which offer treats ...
Recorded in 1967 after the first flush of back-to-back successes with Respect and I Never
Loved a Man, this captures Aretha Franklin in peak form. Lady Soul provides her own piano accompaniment on the majority of tracks here, and the ...
Atlantic's Jerry Wexler once said that this concert album was an embarrassment to him, criticizing
the inferior band (actually they're the musicians who usually accompanied Aretha Franklin live in the late '60s). It isn't that bad; composed of her first ...
Rhino's Aretha's Best is notable for attempting to squeeze highlights of every era of Aretha's
career onto one disc. Unfortunately, the compilers threw logic and chronology out the window, preferring to vacillate between classic Atlantic recordings and very good latter-day ...
Recorded live at Paris in 1967, when the Stax-Volt Revue was touring Europe. This is
just about exactly what you'd expect: solid, straight-ahead live versions of the instrumental group's best-known tunes, in good sound. Booker T. & the MG's take ...
The success of the title track, featured in Saturday Night Fever, likely overshadowed the remainder
of the album. Disco Inferno, the second full-length the Trammps released in 1976, features five other cuts, all of which are laced with the kind ...
Otis Redding quickly became one of the biggest stars in R&B after scoring a hit
in 1962 with These Arms of Mine, but as the decade wore on, his creative ambitions began to shift. Redding had absorbed the influences of ...
This 21-song compilation covers the six-year history of one of history's most important R&B groups
at Atlantic Records. All of the Clovers' charting singles are represented (albeit not in release order), along with notes indicating their chart history. For the ...