The Yardbirds
Live At the BBC Revisited
(Repertoire)
★★★★

Originally an R’n’B covers band with Eric Clapton on guitar, by the mid-1960s the Yardbirds were chart toppers with For You Love, Heart Full Of Soul and Shapes of Things.

Culled from BBC radio broadcasts from 1964 to 1968, this three-CDs set features tracks broadcast from the National Jazz and Blues Festival in Richmond-upon-Thames in 1964, the pre-Radio One Saturday Club, Saturday Swings, The Beat Show, the Ken Dodd and Joe Loss shows, Whole Scene Going — all with Jeff Beck — and a final session with Jimmy Page from Saturday Club and John Peel’s Top Gear from 1968.

It was then that the band morphed into Led Zeppelin, hence the inclusion of Zeppelin’s monster Dazed And Confused.

Interspersed with radio interviews, a detailed booklet and broadcast details, its a marvellous chapter of rock music history.

Various artists
Rough Guide to the Roots of Gospel
WMN/Rough Guides
★★★★

SOME music historians say the earliest gospel recording is the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet’s Down On The Old Camp Ground from 1902 and it’s included here, alongside 25 gospel platters from the 1920s and ’30s.

Among them are jubilee quartets — Birmingham Jubilee Singers and Famous Blue Jay Singers — holiness singers including blind pianist Arizona Dranes and slide-guitar player Mother McCollum, superb on Jesus Is My Air-O-Plane, and Blind Willie Johnson’s God Don’t Never Change.

Pre-war gospel singers featured include travelling preachers like Washington Phillips, who played a contraption similar to a zither, hell-fire preachers Rev JM Gates and Rev AW Nix plus “sanctified”singers and white gospel artists including Alfred Karnes who played a harp guitar.

To quote author Greil Marcus, this is “Old weird America.”

Pete Rodriguez
I Like It Like That
(Craft Latino)
★★★★

FRESHLY reissued on vinyl, I Like It Like That (A Mi Me Gusta Asi) is the most iconic boogaloo album of all time.

The seven-track album was originally released in 1967 on Alegre Records and became the national anthem of the boogaloo craze.

It was the fifth album by Pete Rodriguez, born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York, and it filled that city’s dance floors and hit the Billboard charts.

Rodriguez created a music sensation by fusing his Latin roots with cha cha cha, soul and jazz, giving birth to the boogaloo which had a massive effect on Latino kids at the time.

Tracks from the album have been much sampled on TV adverts, video games and film soundtracks.

By 1971 the craze faded but Pete remained king of the boogaloo.

Play loud.