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Jesse Ed Davis: Tomorrow May Not Be Your Day: The Unissued Atco Recordings 1970-1971
by Doug Collette
Originally reissued in November 2024 as a limited-edition vinyl set, the seventy-four-some minutes of The Unissued Atco Recordings 1970-1971 derives from sessions for Jesse Ed Davis' debut LP Jesse Davis (Atco Records,1971) and its followup of a year later, Ululu (Atco Records, 1972). One of the most unheralded musicians of his time, Jesse Ed Davis' appearance is nevertheless virtually as recognizable as the tone of his guitar: the shock of black hair over his face brings focus to the close ...
Continue ReadingOrnette Coleman: Ornette At 12 / Crisis
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 ...
Continue ReadingBooker T & the MG's: The Complete Stax Singles: Volume 1 (1962-1967)
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 ...
Continue ReadingAlice Coltrane: Spiritual Eternal: The Complete Warner Bros Studio Recordings
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 ...
Continue ReadingMotel Shot: Expanded Edition
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, ...
Continue ReadingSouthside Johnny and The Asbury Jukes: The Fever: The Remastered Epic Recordings
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 ...
Continue ReadingThe Rascals: The Complete Singles A's & B's
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 ...
Continue ReadingThe Paul Butterfield Blues Band: Got A Mind to Give Up Living: Live 1966
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 ...
Continue ReadingDick's Pick's Volume One: Tampa, Florida 12/19/73
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 ...
Continue ReadingGrateful Dead: Dick's Picks Volume Two: Columbus, Ohio 10/31/1971
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 ...
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