Search - Ike Turner :: Studio Productions: New Orleans and Los Angeles 1963-1965

Here's where Ike Turner's OTHER singers step up to the mike.When the Ike & Tina Turner Revue was on tour constantly in the 1960s, Ike would use any free time to book a local studio to cut tracks using all the Revue's members.This CD is a collection of those great recordings, cut by Ike in the time period of 1963-1965, at various studios in the USA, Cosimo Matassa's New Orleans among them, made for Modern (Kent) Records of Los Angeles.Some of the tracks come from previously unissued studio sessions and all are in great sound quality. And, yes, Tina herself is here, but as if to prove Ike was no one-trick pony, the Acid Queen sings only two leads here, while she is in evidence as a back-up singer elsewhere in the collection. Other women featured are Jessie Smith, Venetta Fields and Dee Dee Johnson. The male leads featured are Stacy Johnson, Jimmy Thomas, Ernest Lane, Bobby John, Jackie Brenston and Vernon Guy, every one a soul and blues 'King' in his own right.This is a tough bluesy set of mostly original songs, with enough of a dash of soul in the mix to let you know where it was coming from. Songs that weren't written by Ike are by Curtis Mayfield, Jerry Butler, Eddie Boyd and Lowman Pauling. Even the Mayfield was written especially for Ike.Most of these tracks are being issued for the first time. Less than a half dozen have ever been released, and even those are pretty hard to find. In addition there are some tracks intended to be issued with an audience dubbed onto the studio recording and released as live. These have been stripped of their phoney audience and are issued here for the first time in this format.