The holiday shopping season gets under way in earnest on Friday, and record labels have been preparing with the usual outpouring of elaborate box sets. A fair number of those titles are being released as part of the Black Friday offshoot of Record Store Day, but this year the RSD offerings are particularly lame—most of them just repackage music that’s already widely available. In an attempt to provide an antidote to that foolishness, I’ve reviewed ten of the best box sets I heard in 2013—all these releases put music first, bells and whistles second (when there are any bells and whistles at all). Each would make a great present for the right friend or loved one—and with any luck, this will help you decide if you know that person (or are that person yourself).
Within a couple years Kasabele began to make records under his own name, scoring a big hit in 1952 with “Parafifi,” a lilting, propulsive love song with a cheap organ imitating a saxophone. By 1954 he’d formed his own group, African Jazz, which began pushing a much more rhythmic sound, and shortly the group’s acoustic guitars were entirely displaced by electric instruments—a key component of the liquid sway that came to characterize soukous (aka Congolese rumba). Kasabele was one of the first African artists to record prolifically in Europe, where studios were better, and his bands nurtured some of soukous’s greatest talent, including Rochereau, fellow singer Vicky Longomba, and guitarists Nico, Papa Noel, and Tino Baroza. He was a close friend of revolutionary Patrice Lumumba and played an important role in ending colonial rule in 1960. In the late 60s, while some of Kabasele’s disciples pushed soukous forward radically, he seemed content refining the sound he’d forged in the previous decade—but everything in this two-CD set, which covers 1951 through 1970 and comes with a 104-page hardback booklet, holds up marvelously.
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Harry NilssonNilsson: The RCA Albums Collection (RCA/Sony/Legacy) $139.98
The work of quirky American pop craftsman Harry Nilsson is undergoing a sorely deserved reevaluation. In 2010 filmmaker John Scheinfeld made the acclaimed documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?, and this year Alyn Shipton published an in-depth biography, Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter; in 2014 Brooklyn label the Royal Potato Family will release a tribute album that includes contributions from Langhorne Slim, Willy Mason, and Dawn Landes. But nothing is a better testament to the singer’s genius than the records he made for RCA between 1967 and 1977. Nilsson scored hits with a cover of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” (prominently included on the soundtrack of Midnight Cowboy), his take on Badfinger’s “Without You,” and the catchy novelty “Coconut,” but his contrariness, bad luck, and substance abuse prevented him from achieving sustained success.
A fair number of the artists featured were from Chicago—the Gospel Songbirds, the Salem Travelers, the Christland Singers, the Pilgrim Jubilees—but most were southern. The majority of the music is either stirring vocal-group material or straight-up sanctified soul, the collection includes a few mind-melting burners: the Bevins Specials’ extroverted 1969 single “Everybody Ought to Pray” quotes liberally from the Isley Brothers classic “Shout” and Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man” (which makes me wonder if John Belushi had heard this record) and spins borderline psychedelic slide guitar over a barnstorming groove. In the liner notes, though, Opal Louis Nations says nothing about this record (or about many of the others), opting for an overview that seems bland compared to the obsessive scholarship of, say, a Numero Group booklet. But this killer set can go toe-to-toe with any other black gospel collection I’ve heard, so in the end I’m not inclined to complain.
Various artistsVerve: The Sound of America—The Singles Collection (Verve/Universal Music Enterprises) $57.99
This five-disc set serves as a reminder that jazz was once a meaningful part of American popular music, back in the 40s and 50s, when jukeboxes were the YouTube of the day. The anthology collects 100 singles, mostly released between 1947 and 1972 (the inclusion of a 2001 track by Diana Krall feels superfluous), looking back to an era when the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, and Jimmy Smith were charting stars. Verve wasn’t founded till 1956, when producer Norman Granz wrested Fitzgerald away from Decca Records, but he’d released many key bebop records on his Clef label in the previous decade, which were eventually folded into the Verve catalog: among the most notable were raucous jam sessions cut at Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts (which he presented) and the late works of saxophonist Charlie Parker, including his oft-maligned sessions with strings. Verve recorded many singers in addition to Fitzgerald—Billie Holiday, Mel Torme, Anita O’Day, Blossom Dearie, and others—but most of these singles are pithy, elegant instrumentals.
