The Doors: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition includes a remastered version of the album’s original stereo mix, available on CD for the first time in a decade and remastered for the first time in nearly 30 years. The album’s original mono mix was also remastered for this set and is making its CD debut here. The third disc features live performance from The Matrix in San Francisco recorded just weeks after The Doors was released. Music journalist David Fricke provides detailed liner notes for the set, which includes a selection of rare and previously unseen photographs.
A tremendous debut album, and indeed one of the best first-time outings in rock history, introducing the band's fusion of rock, blues, classical, jazz, and poetry with a knock-out punch. The lean, spidery guitar and organ riffs interweave with a hypnotic menace, providing a seductive backdrop for Jim Morrison's captivating vocals and probing prose…

Another quality L&R Records production that has been saved by a reissue on Evidence Music. Originally recorded in 1982, Chicago's Young Blues Generation features the raw, frantic work of guitarist Lurrie Bell and harp blower Billy Branch, who remain the closest the blues scene has to a modern-day Buddy Guy and Junior Wells. Back in 1982, Bell and Branch were still carving out a sound of their own - an amalgam of Rice Miller, the West Side guitar slingers (namely Guy and Magic Sam), and the funkier Stax and Hi Records hitmakers. This album consists entirely of reworked blues and R&B covers, each one drawn out by lengthy, tag-team soloing - sometimes derivative, but more often wildly inspired and unpredictable. Bell, in particular, goes for broke on almost every note, from his manic vocal inflections to the smallest guitar fill…

Framus Five (also known as Framus 5; Michal Prokop & Framus Five) were formed in the early sixties; Michal Prokop (vocals, guitar) was one of co-founders and later the spiritus movens of the band. Up to this day the band had constant shifting in the line-up, and more than thirty musicians went through it, but the most significant ones are Lubos Andrst, a renowned Czech blues guitarist, and Jan Hrubý on violin. Their first album, 'Blues In Soul' (1968) is exactly what its name suggests. However, a 1971 'Mesto Er', probably the most interesting point of their career for a prog enthusiast, with a prog rock that combined many elements, including blues, jazz big band, and poetry.

Django Reinhardt was the first hugely influential jazz figure to emerge from Europe - and he remains the most influential European to this day, with possible competition from Joe Zawinul, George Shearing, John McLaughlin, his old cohort Stephane Grappelli and a bare handful of others. A free-spirited gypsy, Reinhardt wasn't the most reliable person in the world, frequently wandering off into the countryside on a whim. Yet Reinhardt came up with a unique way of propelling the humble acoustic guitar into the front line of a jazz combo in the days before amplification became widespread. He would spin joyous, arcing, marvelously inflected solos above the thrumming base of two rhythm guitars and a bass, with Grappelli's elegantly gliding violin serving as the perfect foil…