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Chuck Berry - 2014 - Rock And Roll Music Any Old Way You Choose It (16 CD's) BCD. 17273





There have been countless Chuck Berry compilations but never one like Bear Family's Rock and Roll Music: Any Old Way You Choose It, a mammoth 16-disc box containing his complete recorded works for Chess, Mercury, and Atco. Only the soundtrack to Taylor Hackford's star-studded 1987 documentary Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll is missing and it isn't missed much, not in the face of this abundance. Almost everything here is previously released -- Universal not only released Chuck's complete Chess recordings as three four-disc sets on Hip-O Select in the 2000s, they did a pretty good job clearing out the vaults in the '70s and '80s -- but with a set of this size, what counts is not rarities but context. Here, that context is not the original Chess singles of the '50s and early '60s, the smashes that became standards, but rather what happened afterward, when Chuck kept working and working, churning out records for Mercury as he played with pickup bands across the land. That said, the deeply detailed recounting of his pioneering first stint at Chess -- lasting from 1954 until 1966, barring a two-year hiatus to serve a prison sentence; here, the time line is expanded by a single he cut with Joe Alexander right before he signed with the Chess brothers -- remains rich and wondrous, illustrating how quickly Berry settled into his signature groove and how many variations he found within his blend of jazz, blues, and country. All this is familiar from the three Hip-O Select sets, but when the late-'60s recordings for Mercury are added to the picture, it becomes more apparent how Berry was eager to change with the times, adding swinging horns as a nod to the soul emerging from the South or jamming with the Steve Miller Band so he could please the crowd at the Fillmore. Berry was savvy. He knew how to change with the times, a talent that is plain on the live material here, including both dates recorded with the Motown rhythm section in Detroit in October 1963 and the Toronto Rock n Roll Revival from 1969, some BBC sessions, and cuts from the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958. On the earlier dates he's charmingly polite, but in 1963 he starts to loosen up with offhand jokes, and by 1969 he's happily leading a large audience through a dirty nursery rhyme. That schtick could play on college campuses and Chuck, alone among the original rockers, really made a play for the counterculture by recording such outlaw anthems as "Tulane," an ode to a pair of dope dealers that sounded like nothing but Chuck Berry. This box makes clear that this is one of the keys to Berry's genius: he always stood apart from the pack, so he could sell trends back to the audience, all filtered through the boogie, blues, and sliding guitar runs he loved so. He kept this up until 1979, the year he released Rock It, an underrated little record that contained "Oh What a Thrill," a song that proved he still could knock off a killer when he needed. It was the last time he needed to, however: he had already built a body of work that defined rock & roll and, in many ways, all the hopes and dreams of 20th century America. The glory of Rock and Roll Music: Any Old Way You Choose It is that it captures that work in all its incandescent glory.





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