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Various Artists: The Very Best of Christmas
by Jeff Winbush
Christmas albums are the Valentine's Day and Halloween cards of the recording industry: a simple and short-term product that is featured for public consumption for a limited time and then put away until next year. There's no rule that says you can't listen to and enjoy an album of holiday-themed music whenever the urge strikes. It just tends to provoke a double take from passersby and motorists when you pull up to the red light blasting “Santa Claus Is Coming ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Jazz Around The World
by Raul d'Gama Rose
Putumayo World Music is a unique record label. It is a label of “various artists" projects, but what sets it apart from other labels that produce compilations of music is that Putumayo compilations are well off even the road less travelled. First of all, the label compiles not so much songs by artists, but music that provides a glimpse of a cultural ethos. Secondly, Putumayo has designed the “musical-cultural" encounters to be almost like a meaningful huddle ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Contemporary Ragtime Guitar
by David Rickert
Most people's knowledge of ragtime doesn't go past a few classic Scott Joplin compositions, and practitioners of the style today (not to mention composers) are few and far between. However, there has always been a small cadre of guitarists devoted to playing traditional and original ragtime tunes, and most of them are quite good at adapting the highly syncopated musical form to an unlikely instrument. Contemporary Ragtime Guitar is one of the few compilations devoted entirely to ragtime guitar and, ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Rocksteady: The Roots Of Reggae
by Chris May
The lovingly conceived, brilliantly executed, multi-platform Rocksteady: The Roots Of Reggae aims to achieve the same sort of museum piece-to-modernity transformation for Jamaican rocksteady that Buena Vista Social Club (World Circuit, 1996) created for Cuban music of an earlier era. As with Buena Vista, there's a CD, a movie and a package tour. The CD features eight surviving rocksteady vocal stars of the late 1960s revoicing some of their biggest hits of the era (or those of departed contemporaries), accompanied ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Love Train - The Sound Of Philadelphia
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Various ArtistsLove Train--The Sound of PhiladelphiaLegacy/Philadelphia International Records2008 Love Train, 71 songs sprawled across four CDs, brings together a mass of music that has already been anthologized in a variety of forms over the years, though not as exhaustively or attractively. The package accomplishes two things. First, it successfully situates the classic Philly sound as an integral link in the chain of soul music's development, particularly in the interim between the flowering ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Creative Outlaws: UK Underground 1965-71
by Nic Jones
Although the title might be a little misleading--there are enough acts here with eyes on the financial prize, as opposed to the wholesale reconstruction of society after all--this is still a compilation that encapsulates a vibrant and diverse moment in the history of popular culture and indeed British social history. The underground, through the prism of this album, comes across as a thing which, though it might inevitably have lacked focus, played to natural human curiosity in a way which ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Mahavishnu Redefined: A Tribute to John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra
by John Kelman
With guitar icon John McLaughlin's greater visibility, thanks to recent tours with his 4th Dimension group and Five Peace Band collaboration with pianist Chick Corea, there's been a flurry of reassessment of his vast and vital output as a repertory source. Drummer Gregg Bendian's Mahavishnu Project delivered first-time performances with Return to the Emerald Beyond (Cuneiform, 2007), guitarist Jeff Richman's Visions of an Inner Mounting Apocalypse (Tone Center, 2005) recruited name guitarists to rework classic Mahavishnu Orchestra (MO) material, 4th ...
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