Surprisingly, very few artists can float a digital-age collection of number one singles without resorting to trickery involving foreign countries or obscure charts. The Beatles had little trouble (The Beatles 1) and Elvis Presley managed both a disc of number ones (Elvis: 30 #1 Hits) and one of number twos (2nd to None), but Michael Jackson bent the rules so far that calling his disc Number Ones is tantamount to consumer fraud. Additionally, a collection of number one singles may not be the best representation of an artist's career; the Elvis volume included nothing from his Sun years, and the Beatles' set skipped "Strawberry Fields Forever." The #1's, Motown's collection of chart-toppers by Diana Ross & the Supremes, fares much better. It benefits from two Supremes characteristics: as a pop group through and through, their biggest hits were often their best songs, and, with the help of the solo Diana Ross, they spent a long time on the charts (nearly 20 years separates the Supremes' debut at the top from Ross' last number one single). While Motown's separate volumes on Diana Ross and the Supremes (in the Ultimate Collection series) remain the best source for a single-disc picture of either act, The #1's works remarkably well. It includes 19 number one pop singles (13 from the group, six from the solo Ross), plus various number ones on the R&B and dance charts, and there aren't any glaring omissions. Granted, fans of early Motown can't live without the girl-group chestnuts "Buttered Popcorn" and "Your Heart Belongs to Me," while those who enjoy latter-day Ross won't find "One More Chance" or "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" -- but of course, this collection wasn't created with them in mind. For the group who recorded more hit singles during the '60s than any other act except the Beatles, and for one of the reigning solo artists of the '70s, The #1's is a worthy tribute.© John Bush /TiVo

Available exclusively on Qobuz Time waits for no one…right? While times and tastes change, every so often a group fine tunes a durable mix of musical firepower and showbiz glitz and manages to defy the years. This first call, horn section-turned-band, has solved the aging issue with a practical formula: get in a groove, write punchy horn charts, consistently whip up a high-energy funk revue where the jams blend together and viola, you have a band that is now celebrating the almost unheard-of milestone of a half century together! Tower of Power has a tradition of marking every passing decade with a live album and for their 50th anniversary in 2018 they brought the house—17 musicians and a full string section—to the Fox Theater in their original stomping ground of Oakland, CA, and filmed and recorded over 20 tracks in front of a partisan crowd that sounds appropriately stoked. Though more than 60 musicians have passed through this band over the years, the first key to the band's longevity is the continued presence in their signature two trumpet-three saxophone attack of the group's two founding saxophone players, tenorman Emilio Castillo and baritone sax player Stephen "Doc" Kupka. Another essential element to the relentless tempos is the return of original drummer David Garibaldi, who deserves an ironman award for setting a lethal pace throughout. A special treat is that the other half of the band's classic original rhythm section, bassist Francis "Rocco" Prestia, appears on four tracks—his final live recordings with the band before his death in September 2020. Of the guests, it's good to hear SNL band director Lenny Pickett back in the fold and B-3 organist Chester Thompson adds several animated solos. While many of these hard funk horn jams are mixed together without a break, this long set contains many outstanding instrumental highlights. ToP, who have appeared as a backup band on records by artists as diverse as Little Feat, The Meters, John Lee Hooker and Elton John, slide comfortably into supercharged versions of their early hits like 1973's "What is Hip" and near the end, 1972's "You're Still a Young Man." A new tune "Stop" from 2018, vividly keeps the band's sound vital. Working hard to be an asset in a horn band, guitarist Jerry Cortez, makes his presence felt in a solo in "Can't You See (You Doin' Me Wrong)" And the band's best sweet soul number, "You're So Wonderful, So Marvelous," reappears here in a new, near-definitive version. At times, strong-voiced lead singer Marcus Scott's vocal enthusiasm verges on being obnoxious—not every tune needs multiple screams or a "Make some noise!" shout between verses. And while it may be time to retire the band's well-worn JB medley, "Diggin' on James Brown," the smooth professionalism here is terrific and it's impressive that the band manages to keep up a full-bore, whirlwind energy level throughout these 22 tracks. While viewing the accompanying video would undoubtedly add to the enjoyment, this is one fiery soul set: proof the horn-driven funk has a thousand variations and so perhaps…an eternal life. © Robert Baird/Qobuz

In the year of his 90th birthday (which he would have celebrated on the 23rd of September 2020 had he not died in 2004), Ray Charles is honoured with a new 90-track compilation box set. Just another compilation like all the rest? Yes and no. Ray Charles is undoubtedly one of the most-compiled artists in the history of music. Published by Tangerine, the label that the musician set up at the end of the 50s to keep the rights to his songs, this box set starts out like all the others: with the post-Atlantic hits, Georgia On My Mind, Hit The Road Jack, One Mint Julep, Busted... These are timeless treasures of proto-soul, but there doesn't seem to be much novelty here. The rest is much more interesting, and much rarer: tracks recorded between the second half of the 1960s and the 2000s, many of which were only released on vinyl, never reissued on CD and until now unavailable on digital. This is the first time that Ray Charles' lesser-known years have been given the compilation treatment in this way, and it is a revelation. In the 90s and 2000s, the production of his songs had a synthetic feel, and they did not age too well. These rarer songs are often hidden gems of southern soul, flavoured with country and wrapped in sumptuous symphonic orchestrations. Whether he is singing the Muppets (It's Ain't Easy Being Green) or Gershwin (Summertime, a duet with Cleo Laine), Ray Charles is always deeply moving. Now, the dream is to hear reissues of all these albums in their entirety. © Stéphane Deschamps/Qobuz

From the solid sales of their independently released debut album, 1982's Under the Blade, New York's Twisted Sister were finally rewarded with a major record label contract, courtesy of Atlantic, who issued their first domestic release, You Can't Stop Rock & Roll, a year later. The album followed the same raw heavy metal direction of their debut, and was even more consistent from a songwriting and performance standpoint. Several of Twisted Sister's best anthems reside here -- the title track (which was one of the band's first videos to be aired on MTV), as well as "The Kids Are Back," "We're Gonna Make It," and "I Am (I'm Me)." But besides a ballad that vocalist Dee Snider wrote especially for his wife, "You're Not Alone (Suzette's Song)," the album is comprised of 100 percent heavy metal -- "Like a Knife in the Back," "Ride to Live, Live to Ride," "I've Had Enough," and "I'll Take You Alive."© Greg Prato /TiVo

The Scorpions' two previous releases, Blackout and Love at First Sting, were mostly successful due to the band's ability to adjust with the times; with Blackout, they used the classic power rock introduced by bands like Van Halen, and for Sting they used similar melodies, but with a harder, tighter sound akin to the work of such bands as Dokken and REO Speedwagon. With Savage Amusement, the group's first studio recording in almost four years, the Scorpions experimented with more polished pop melodies that Def Leppard and the like had made popular. The end result is polished and often predictable music that, while good, on the whole fails to be as infectious as the music on their previous albums. Die-hard fans will certainly find their share of worthwhile songs, such as "Don't Stop at the Top" and "Believe in Love," but they still may find Savage Amusement to be incomparable to its predecessors.© Barry Weber /TiVo

Originally released in February 1991, this album combines material from several different sources to trace the development of Bob Marley & the Wailers between October 1973 and September 1975. The bulk of the disc comes from a 1973 radio concert performed before a handful of listeners at the Record Plant recording studio in San Francisco and broadcast by KSAN-FM. The outfit who played them was technically still the Wailers, since Peter Tosh was still with them (and sang lead on his own compositions, "You Can't Blame the Youth" and "Stop That Train"), although Bunny Livingston had declined to tour and been replaced by Joe Higgs. By 1974, when the group assembled to record their next album, Natty Dread, Tosh and Livingston had quit, and the band was reorganized as Bob Marley & the Wailers. In July 1975, the band played two shows at the Lyceum in London that would break them in the U.K., when recordings from the performances were issued as the album Live!. Finally, the musical tracks are interspersed with excerpts from an interview with Marley conducted in September 1975. While these spoken fragments provide a flavor of Marley's conversation, his heavy patois is very difficult for non-Jamaicans to understand. Still, these are valuable odds and ends for the Bob Marley fan.© William Ruhlmann /TiVo

Prince was shooting for the top of the charts with Graffiti Bridge, and he missed. The movie was a disaster, causing the soundtrack to sell very poorly. Despite its poor showing, Graffiti Bridge is not a bad album; in fact, it's often very good. Prince wrote all of the songs, but only performed a little over half the tracks, leaving the rest for The Time, Mavis Staples, and Tevin Campbell. With the exception of The Time's slamming "Release It" and Campbell's "Round and Round," the best songs are the ones Prince performed himself. The George Clinton collaboration "We Can Funk," the psycho-blues of "The Question of U," the sinewy single "Thieves in the Temple," and the pop/rock of "Can't Stop This Feeling I Got," "Tick, Tick, Bang," and "Elephants & Flowers" make Graffiti Bridge a thoroughly enjoyable listen.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

For the fifth volume in the You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore series, Frank Zappa prepared two unrelated discs. Disc one features the original Mothers of Invention in unreleased live and studio recordings mainly from 1969 (but also one from 1965 and a couple from 1967-1968). Disc two documents the 1982 European tour. There is something wicked -- almost obscene -- in this pairing, and it surely was intentional. Throughout the 1980s, fans of the early Mothers had attacked Zappa's integrity in the case of the re-recorded CD reissues of We're Only in It for the Money and Cruising with Ruben & the Jets, and often despised the scatological antics and straightforward rock stylings of his latter bands. This was a calculated move, a way to say: "So you want unreleased material from the early Mothers? OK, but you'll have to pay for the 1982 band -- and hopefully listen to it, too." The material on the MOI disc occasionally features meager sound quality (as expected), but it contains many gems for the aficionado ("Run Home Slow," the hilarious "Right There," and "No Waiting for the Peanuts to Dissolve" stand out). This is a place for fans to salivate over bits and pieces, not for newcomers to get the full picture about Zappa's pre-1970 career. On the other hand, the performances on disc two are of more general appeal. Although the 1982 band had not really been documented yet (left only a few tracks on Vol. 1 and Vol. 4 of this series), it was not the case for its repertoire. Of historical significance are "Dead Girls of London" and "Shall We Take Ourselves Seriously?" The other tracks show good performances but don't stand out as particularly original or essential.© François Couture /TiVo

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The English music press can never let anyone be. They're always quick to hail the next big thing, and in this case, the next big Coldplay is Keane. (Lowgold briefly held that title upon its debut release in 2001, but U.K. critics rushed to give that crown to someone else.) Keane haven't positioned themselves to be kings of anything, though, let alone the next Coldplay. Sure, Coldplay's biggest hit to date, "Clocks," included only pianos, and they released the Safety EP on Fierce Panda, which is also Keane's label, but those are the only things Keane have in common with Coldplay. Alongside their beautiful, emotive dalliance of instrumentation is one thing that'll separate Keane from all the rest, and that's drive. The band's open-hearted ambition on Hopes and Fears is audible on every song. Lead vocalist Tom Chaplin's rich vocals are as vibrant as any choir, and track such as "This Is the Last Time," "Bend and Break," and "Can't Stop Now" reflect Keane's more savory, dramatic moments. Confidence bursts throughout, and for a band that has been around seven years and has never released a studio full-length album until now, achieving nearly epic-like status is quite impressive. Keane obviously have the songs and they have a strong voice leading the front; however, Tim Rice-Oxley (piano/keyboards/bass) and Richard Hughes (drums) allow Hopes and Fears to come alive with glamour and without the sheen of slick studio production. Even slow build-up tracks like "Bedshaped" and "We Might as Well Be Strangers" are just as passionate, if not more so, than some of the bigger numbers on the album. Some might find Keane's debut a bit stagy, or too theatrical at first, but that's okay. Listening to "Somewhere Only We Know" alone a few times is more than enough to convince you that Keane stand next to Coldplay -- challenging them rather than emulating -- and it's a respectable match at that.© MacKenzie Wilson /TiVo

It's wild to think that, back in the '90s, when Femi Kuti first made an impact on the international music scene, the eldest son of Fela was seen as a modernist bent on re-molding his father's afrobeat sound with an unapologetically contemporary approach. His arrival was bracing. Even though Femi's career kicked off at basically the same moment his father's recording career had stopped (but a few years before Fela's death), it was during a time when Fela's prime '70s work was undergoing a broad reassessment and revival of interest; Femi's work seemed like more of a sharp break from his father's than the more gradual evolution that it actually was. Of course, in the three decades since, Femi's approach has gotten more and more "classicist," reveling in backward glances and legacy preservation, and the passage of time has allowed a more reasonable perspective on that father-son succession. That makes a work like Stop The Hate that much more interesting. While it absolutely sounds like the work of a middle-aged man wrestling with the internal struggle between genre fealty and continued creative evolution, it also rests alongside the blossoming of his own son's career. Stop the Hate is not only being released in tandem with son Made Kuti's debut For(e)ward, but is also being packaged with it as a double album called Legacy+. To be sure, these are very different albums by very different artists, but in the same way that Made will be both aided by and saddled with his family legacy, so was Femi. With Stop the Hate, it's clear that Femi has made peace with settling into a groove that honors and evokes his father's work. Tracks like "You Can't Fight Corruption with Corruption," "Young Boy / Young Girl," and album opener "Pà Pá Pà" are exactly the sort of work one would imagine Fela producing in the year 2021; while shorter and possessed of a buffed-out studio sheen, they balance bristling political energy and languid, loping grooves in a classically afrobeat way. Other cuts though—notably the staccato groove of closing track "Set Your Minds and Souls Free" and the frenetic, anthemic "Land Grab"—show Femi's continued inventiveness and willingness to subvert a genre that is literally his family's legacy. Just as his father had to deal with the career benefits and limitations of being the scion of an icon, Made Kuti is kicking off his international music career in the position of someone who has to both honor the legacy of his father (and grandfather) and simultaneously forge his own path. Wisely, he is not dodging the issue at all with For(e)ward, which is not only sharing a release date with his father's latest, but also a producer (erstwhile Fela producer Sodi Marciszewer) and album cover artist (Delphine Desane). However, the similarities beyond that are few and far between. Yes, Made is working in an afrobeat heritage, but he is neither explicitly beholden to the style established by his (literal) forebears nor to the more contemporary, hip-hop-indebted permutations recently dominating dancefloors. Instead, Made even explicitly and reverently invokes his grandfather on one song, "Different Streets," about how, as time passes, some things may seem familiar and connected to the past, but there are even more things changing, growing, and evolving into that which will move us into the future. And Made is definitely moving into the future. Rather than utilizing a small army of musicians like his father and grandfather, all of the music here was created by Made himself, and while it shares textural and structural similarities with classic afrobeat—the languid horns, the insistent rhythms, the politicized lyrics—there is a density and complexity to these tunes that is unique. The jagged, interrupted rhythm of album opener "Free Your Mind" does a great job of expectation-setting, making it clear that this won't be another stop on the Kalakuta Express; meanwhile, the scratchy guitar lines and off-kilter drum parts, whispered vocals, synth banks and other unexpected flourishes that make their way into the a packed-full song like "Young Lady" point the way toward many future iterations of highly individualized take on the family tradition. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz

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