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Liner Notes

Ornette Coleman: Ornette At 12 / Crisis

Read "Ornette Coleman: Ornette At 12 / Crisis" reviewed by Howard Mandel


Ornette Coleman, the musical savant who freed jazz and every other art form that cared to dispense with stifling conventions and stultifying pretense, recorded Ornette at 12 and Crisis at the height of the 1960s' countercultural creative promise and world-wide unrest. It was an era of citizens claiming hard-won freedoms as civil rights, of youthful energies fueling fast changes and expressive artistic innovations--but also of backlash, assassinations, inequalities, riots and war. The music Coleman and his band of ...

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Album Review

Booker T & the MG's: The Complete Stax Singles: Volume 1 (1962-1967)

Read "The Complete Stax Singles: Volume 1 (1962-1967)" reviewed by Doug Collette


There have been other, more wide-ranging collections of the music of Booker T & the MG's—the three-CD, sixty-five track Time Is Tight (Stax,1998) most prominently—but The Complete Stax Singles Volume 1 (1962-1967) is comprehensive on its own terms. As is Real Gone Music's custom, the label has gone to great lengths to make sure the vintage packaging matches the enhanced audio content and also invoked the services of writer Ed Osborne, whose historical essay does studious and scholarly justice to ...

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Album Review

Alice Coltrane: Spiritual Eternal: The Complete Warner Bros Studio Recordings

Read "Spiritual Eternal: The Complete Warner Bros Studio Recordings" reviewed by Chris May


The most arcane albums in Alice Coltrane's catalogue are not, as is widely supposed, the post-Impulse! mid-1970s discs collected on Spiritual Eternal: The Complete Warner Bros Studio Recordings. They are instead a series of cassettes Coltrane released in limited editions on her Avatar label during the 1980s and early 1990s, when she had retired from the public arena and was focusing on devotional music and leading a meditation centre in California. Unlike the Avatar recordings, the three ...

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Extended Analysis

Motel Shot: Expanded Edition

Read "Motel Shot: Expanded Edition" reviewed by Doug Collette


With the passage of time, Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, are unfortunately becoming more and more the unsung heroes of a Seventies rock and roll. The Southern couple not only acknowledged, but built upon roots of blues, folk and country, as well as the soul and r&b influences at the very heart of their style, aided and abetted by a rotating cast of accompanists that, at various points included George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Just prior to the purposefully-conceived Motel Shot, ...

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Album Review

Southside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes: The Fever: The Remastered Epic Recordings

Read "The Fever: The Remastered Epic Recordings" reviewed by Doug Collette


Unless a musiclover becomes fully-versed in the full career trajectory of Southside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes via their latter-day work with Barry Beckett, Nile Rodgers, et.al., as compiled on All I Want Is Everything (Rhino 1993), it's difficult if not impossible to avoid seeing the group as a novelty act at best or worse, a near shameless cash-in on the burgeoning success of Born to Run (Columbia, 1975) era Bruce Springsteen, all of which was occurring around the time ...

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Extended Analysis

The Rascals: The Complete Singles A's & B's

Read "The Rascals: The Complete Singles A's & B's" reviewed by Doug Collette


The career trajectory of the 'Young' Rascals took them from a point in music culture where singles were the focal point of both art and commerce to a point where the album was a work unto itself rather than a collection of singles. As much as it's aimed at a true devotee of the band, The Complete Singles also holds great attraction for the musiclover who wants to delve into this particular period of contemporary rock and pop: in that ...

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Album Review

The Paul Butterfield Blues Band: Got A Mind to Give Up Living: Live 1966

Read "Got A Mind to Give Up Living: Live 1966" reviewed by Doug Collette


Real Gone Music's release of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band's Live 1966 is a godsend for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it reminds, if that's indeed necessary, of what a vital influence on contemporary blues was (and is) this sextet. Forget for a moment the profundity of an integrated group of musicians bonded together at the time of civil rights upheaval in the United States--that's for sociologists. Better instead to focus instead ...

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Extended Analysis

Dick's Pick's Volume One: Tampa, Florida 12/19/73

Read "Dick's Pick's Volume One: Tampa, Florida 12/19/73" reviewed by Doug Collette


Concluding a reissue program begun in 2011, the Real Gone Music release of Grateful Dead Dick's Picks Volume One brings fitting perspective to a series that, in more ways than one, created a template for archiving an artist's work. And in an unusual approach that is peculiarly appropriate to the mindset of the iconoclastic band and its followers, to begin at the end of the thirty-six volumes and end with the beginning, informs the individual titles and the sequence as ...

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Album Review

Grateful Dead: Dick's Picks Volume Two: Columbus, Ohio 10/31/1971

Read "Dick's Picks Volume Two: Columbus, Ohio 10/31/1971" reviewed by Doug Collette


As Real Gone Music winds down its the four-year long reissue campaign devoted to the Grateful Dead's 'Dick's Picks' o the label presents one of the most distinctive titles in the archive series. recorded on Halloween night in 1971 at the Ohio Theatre in Columbus, Ohio. In a single cd, the only one of its kind the late Latvala curated, the album consists of the second set of the concert, comprising of a remarkable cross section of material culled from ...

1
Album Review

Grateful Dead: Dick's Pick's Volume Three: Pembroke Pines, Florida 5/22/77

Read "Dick's Pick's Volume Three: Pembroke Pines, Florida 5/22/77" reviewed by Doug Collette


Given what's ensued--beyond the scope of the band itself-in the wake of the Grateful Dead's very first archive series, 'Dick's Picks,' it's hard to believe but well to remember this ongoing project had comparatively modest, humble beginnings. An offhanded conversation between bassist Phil Lesh and ultra-fan Dick Latvala let to an eventual total of thirty-six titles, this installment, Volume 3, taken from the now-historic spring 1977 tour. Minimal and generic graphics, a la bootlegs of the time, combined ...


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