The widely-acclaimed Sister Rosetta Tharpe is among the greatest Sanctified gospel singers of her generation; a flamboyant performer whose music often flirted with the blues and swing, she was also one of the most controversial talents of her day, shocking purists with her leap into the secular market. Playing nightclubs and theaters, she pushed spiritual music into the mainstream and helped pioneer the rise of pop-gospel. Tharpe was born March 20, 1915, in Cotton Plant, Arkansas; the daughter of Katie Bell Nubin, a traveling missionary and shouter in the classic gospel tradition known throughout the circuit as "Mother Bell," she was a prodigy, mastering the guitar by the age of six. At the same time, she attended Holiness conventions alongside her mother, performing renditions of songs including "The Day Is Past and Gone" and "I Looked Down the Line."

Anybody who has cut a standard like "Drift Away" can hardly be called unappreciated, but a hit of that magnitude can tend to overshadow the rest of an artist's career. Such is the case with Dobie Gray, who not only had a huge number five hit with "Drift Away" in 1973, but had a number 11 hit eight years earlier with "The 'In' Crowd." Two big hits, both widely known, which is more than most artists get, and Gray continued to chart throughout the '70s, albeit in the lower reaches of the R&B charts. All of this suggests that Gray was a minor talent, but that's misleading, as Hip-O Select's excellent four-disc box set Drift Away: A Decade of Dobie (1969-1979) proves. Chronicling the music Gray made after "The 'In' Crowd," it illustrates that Gray wasn't just a powerful yet nuanced soul singer, but that he restlessly tried different sounds and styles. The first tracks on this set collect his singles for the L.A. soft pop label White Whale, where he cut versions of Joe South's "Rose Garden" and Paul Williams' "Do You Really Have a Heart" that perfectly fit the label's breezy, lazy style while retaining a soulful edge. After that, it moves to his Drift Away album, recorded for Decca in 1973.

An iconic Kent vinyl album expanded to CD format with bonus soul necessities.
Over the years we have been asked to issue CDs versions some of the most popular Kent LPs we put out in the 1980s. With the exception of “Slow’n’Moody, Black & Bluesy”, a few releases in our Hip Pocket series and some solo collections, we have held off until now. “On The Soul Side” is a good place to start, as it was our first compilation drawn from a catalogue other than Kent/Modern. A superb collection of mainly big budget 60s soul sides sourced from the Capitol, Liberty, Minit, Imperial and United Artists family of labels, only a quarter of the tracks on the LP have since appeared on Kent CDs. With an extra 10 like-minded soul songs added, it means that no more than 15.3846% (approx) are likely to be in even the most avid Kent fan’s collection.

Much of modern hip hop has its roots in the adventurous recordings made at Westbound in the early to mid-70s. “Super Breaks” pays homage to some of their greatest sampled tracks. Available on CD and 2LP formats. It’s one of those “Why didn’t we do this before”-type compilations. “Super Breaks” has been a successful series for nearly 20 years and Ace’s relationship with Detroit’s Westbound Records goes back even further. Add the fact that on a per-record-released basis Westbound is probably the most sampled label ever, then we’ve probably missed a trick. But with Westbound celebrating its 50th anniversary, maybe there couldn’t be a better time than now after all.

Against The Wind is the eleventh album by American rock singer Bob Seger and his fourth with the Silver Bullet Band. Against The Wind was an immediate commercial success, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart in its third week and remaining there for five weeks behind Pink Floyd's The Wall before reaching No. 1 and holding the top position for six weeks. By late 1981 the album sold 3.7 million copies in the United States and was certified 5x platinum in 2003. Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band won the 1980 Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for the album Against The Wind.

I Fagiolini explore the dazzling multi-choir soundworld of Orazio Benevoli - a crucial figure in 17th-century Italian music. As maestro of the papal choir and providing four-choir masses for special occasions, Benevoli invigorated the multi-choir style with vocal lines full of cross-rhythms, and voluptuous tutti sections with unexpected dissonances. Despite its beauty and historical importance, there have been few attempts to record Benevoli's music. His Missa Tu es Petrus - recorded here for the first time - was based on Palestrina's famous motet and perhaps written for the newly finished basilica of St Peter in Rome. It appears here alongside four delightful solo-voice motets by his contemporary Bonifazio Graziani, each of them premiere recordings.

Janis Joplin's Greatest Hits is a 1973 collection of hit songs by American singer-songwriter Janis Joplin, who died in 1970. It features live versions of Down On Me and Ball and Chain which were included on the In Concert album the previous year. This reissue includes two bonus tracks.

“For this recording we have created an imaginary ‘battle of the bows’ between Vivaldi, Veracini, Tartini and Locatelli, the ‘four musketeers’ of the violin in Venice during the first half of the 18th century”, said Chouchane Siranossian and Andrea Marcon. “Corelli died in 1713 and passed the torch on to his heirs… Venice then became the setting for merciless rivalries. The violin became an instrument of confrontation, an ideal weapon for demonstrating virtuosity and technical prowess. The player’s ultimate goal was to astonish the listener and to demonstrate his own bravura, to the point that certain narcissistic tendencies of the player were often exaggerated.”

After a fine Handel recital CD, not to mention taking part in a dozen other major recordings, countertenor David Daniels has hit the jackpot. This fascinating, handsomely recorded CD offers us arias from Mitridate and Ascanio in Alba, and a concert aria by Mozart (the only one he composed for male alto), as well as some Handel and Gluck arias. With them, Daniels takes us through every quality a classically trained singer should have and comes through with flying colors. The arias are about vengeance, sorrow, love–the usual–but within baroque strictures that means that some require lush, limpid singing, others ferocious coloratura and exclamatory heft, and some all of these.

Pioneering progressive rock group Beggars Opera from Glasgow released several splendid albums for the Vertigo label in the early Seventies. The line up included vocalist Martin Griffiths, guitarist Ricky Gardiner and keyboard player Alan Park, who ensured a strong classical influence. ‘Waters Of Change’ was the group’s second effort, first released in 1971. It follows the pattern set by debut album ‘Act One’, and features highlight tracks ‘Time Machine’, ‘Silver Peacock’ and ‘The Fox’, given greater depth by the addition of Mellotron player Virginia Scott.

Richard Strauss and the Viennese Trumpet is the latest in Jonathan Freeman-Attwood’s imaginative series of musical reinventions for trumpet and piano. Works by Fux, Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler, Bruckner, Webern and Zemlinsky complement the core work: a newly imagined Strauss trumpet sonata. Building on his highly successful transcriptions of sonatas by Fauré, Grieg, Mendelssohn and Schumann, Freeman-Attwood pushes the boundaries further delivering a fully realised trumpet sonata which Strauss did not write. This innovative approach embraces various levels of transcription, transformation, realignment and composition to create a significant new contribution to the trumpet repertoire, full of the gloriously idiomatic writing for which Strauss is renowned.

Collection includes: 'Fresh Cream' (1966); 'Disraeli Gears' (1967); 'Wheels of Fire' (1968); 'Goodbye' (1969); 'Live Cream' (1970) and 'Live Cream II' (1972).

Coming after the highly acclaimed Marcus Garvey (1975), Burning Spear's fourth album, Man in the Hills (1976), had a lot to live up to. It is generally conceded that they did not craft an equally impressive follow-up, but Man in the Hills has its charms nevertheless. Lead singer and main songwriter Winston Rodney turns back to reflections on his rural Jamaican childhood for many of the lyrics, which gives the album a gentler, more nostalgic message than the political, exhortative Marcus Garvey. Rodney's tenor is well suited to the sentiments, and the all-star band assembled to back him is supportive and, especially in the horn charts, complementary to the lead voice. The demands of recording schedules may have caused Burning Spear to recast earlier songs, but that contributes to the album's theme of looking back. "Door Peep" was the first song Burning Spear released in its Studio One days, and "No More War" updates the Jamaicans' 1967 song "Ba Ba Boom." With Dry & Heavy (1977), Burning Spear consisted only of Rodney, who also jettisoned producer Laurence "Jack Ruby" Lindo and handled the board himself.

2014 three CD set. Characterized by heavy drum machine patterns and cut-throat, droning guitars, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry (The Lorries to their friends) arrived on the newly developing Goth rock scene in 1981 and immediately became indie chart regulars and fan favorites. Between 1982 and 1987 the band cut two albums and a dozen singles for Red Rhino records, all of which breached the Independent Chart's Top Twenty. Three BBC sessions (two for the legendary John Peel) were also squeezed into this period, and all of that material, including b-sides, a 7' given away with one of those albums and a song only ever recorded for the BBC, is included here. Packed with indie chart hits - two top five albums and countless top twenty singles. 53 tracks across three CDs.

This is a great album. It starts off in a pretty generic speed metal approach, but as the disc moves on it takes on a myriad of other styles. Those styles range from groove-oriented hard rocking tones to older straight metal and prog metal textures. Add to this above-average songwriting, killer performances, and great production, and you have a definite winner for fans of hard-edged rock music.