*(2017) ''Great Guitars & Drums At Sun'' (Various Artists)

*(2017) Great Guitars & Drums At Sun (BCD 16148 / BCD 16273) Various Artists A New Focus People who love Sun Records - and that includes us - have favorite recordings and favorite performers. And almost all of that dedication is concentrated on the singers. But thinking about that, we realized that many, if not most, of the records we love have great music surrounding the vocal. Many people view the instrumental work as mere background. But Iet' s face it: very few of our favorite records are a cappella performances. So in these two collections of recordings from the Sun label in Memphis (''Great Guitars At Sun'' and ''Great Drums At Sun'') we're going to change all of that. We'll focus on the guitarists and drummers who provided much of what was great about our favorite Sun records. Twelve selected some of the best musical performances at Sun and, at least this once, put the musicians at the center of our attention. Not Casual Choices. The job seemed pretty straightforward. Take the best guitar playing and the best drumming recorded at Sun Record, compile it onto two CDs, and release them as a tribute to the fine musicianship at Sun. Done. Over and out. Even I fit had been that simple, this was no easy task. Fun, yes; easy, no. There were approximately 230 singles released by Sun. Add to that another nine on Flip and about 70 on Phillips International. Call it 310 in round numbers. Now double that number since singles have two sides. so we stafled with 620 tracks to consider. The 20 LPs issued by Sun and Phillips contained more material not issued on singles. On those 20, let's say there were maybe 80 new tracks to add to the list. We were up to about 700 released tracks to keep in mind while we were compiling these two CDs. A wonderful but somewhat daunting task! Here's where it gets interesting. For every one of those 700 released tracks, there are, on average, maybe three alternative takes (sometimes zero, some- times 15). That takes us up to about 2800 tracks. Then there are the originally unissued titles and artists. The bottom line is, the number of Sun releases is a lot less than the totality of Sun tapes. When we selected the 56 tracks for these two CDs, we considered a lot of material. It was a true embarrassment of riches - well over 10,000 tracks - to get to the finished product. We can't say we sat down from scratch and listened to every Sun recording made from 1952 until they closed the doors in the mid-1960s. But we can say we've probably heard damn near all of them, some of them hundreds, if not thousands of times. We can still spot a Carl Perkins (or Ernie Chaffin or Johnny Cash) outtake at 40 paces. This is what it means to be a SUN fan /collector/historian. Many of these tracks are etched into our memories. At the end of the day, these were not casual choices we made in compiling these CDs. We 'II do our best to share the reasons behind each choice. An unexpected Problem We expected to have two non-overlapping categories: Great drumming and great guitar playing. We've been hearing terrific guitar solos and tasty drumming as long as Sun records have been part of our lives and we thought these two CDS would pretty much compile themselves. To some extent, that was true. But not entirely. We hit an unexpected snag. We'd take a record like Carl Perkins' ''Matchbox'' or Roy Orbison's ''You're My Baby'' and we knew it had to be included. The trouble was, we couldn't figure out which collection it belonged on. Both the drumming and the guitar work were memorable. One simple solution would have been to include it on both CDs, but that didn't seem fair. A lot of the buyers of one CD would likely be buying the other and we didn't want to put the same material on bath. Our options were limited and we hope you 'II understand why on one occasion we used the released version on one disc and an outtake of the same song on the Other. In discovering this problem, we learned something important. When the playing got hot at SUN, it often inspired everyone in the room. A great guitar break raised the energy level and fired up the drummer. In return, hot drumming lit a fire under the guitar player. Of course, it didn't stop with them,• their work plainly had an impact on the vocalist, not to mention the piano player and the bass player. Maybe some day those guys will get their own CDS too. For now, we'll keep the spotlights on the guitarists and drummers. Liner notes by Hank Davis & Scott Parker Source and more information see: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Condor Recordings reserves the right to remove any comments from our site or various social media platforms at any time. Comments featuring hate speech or otherwise threatening or violent content will be deleted. * - Digitally Remastered © - Condor Records - ©