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Sam Cooke – Tribute To The Lady (Billie Holiday) (1959) [ABKCO Remaster 2003]
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 51:36 minutes | Scans included | 2.12 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Full Scans included | 547 MB

An album that’s seldom been seen and disappeared almost as quickly as it was released. Sam Cooke turned these songs inside out with twisting, awesome interpretations. It was one of the few times he was able to break out of the light pop/teen idol bag in a studio and pour his heart into great lyrics and numbers.

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Sam Cooke – Portrait Of A Legend 1951-1964 (2003)
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 81:56 minutes | Scans included | 3,36 GB
Genre: Vocal, Soul, Gospel | Japan, ABKCO Records (92642)

From his teenage debut as a full fledged member of the legendary Soul Stirrers in 1951 through his career as a rhythm and blues phenomenon, Sam Cooke is acknowledged as the progenitor of soul music. His hit songs, most of which he wrote, went on to become pop standards, enduring to this day. Sam Cooke’s amazing body of work is now encapsulated in Sam Cooke: Portrait of A Legend:1951-1964. It includes 30 tracks and is part of ABKCO’s Sam Cooke Remastered Collection, an initiative to offer state of the art editions of restored and remastered. The songs included into Portrait Of A Legend collectively logged 273 weeks or five years and three months on Billboard’s Pop Chart and a mind boggling 508 weeks (nine years and nine months) on the Pop and R&B charts, combined.

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Sam Cooke – Night Beat (1963) [Analogue Productions Remaster 2009]
PS3 Rip | ISO | SACD DSD/DST64 2.0 & 5.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 37:30 minutes | Scans included | 2,36 GB
or FLAC 2.0 Stereo (converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Scans included | 682 MB

Sam Cooke was the most important soul singer in history — he was also the inventor of soul music, and its most popular and beloved performer in both the black and white communities. Equally important, he was among the first modern black performers and composers to attend to the business side of the music business, and founded both a record label and a publishing company as an extension of his careers as a singer and composer.

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Sam Cooke – Keep Movin’ On (2001)
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 61:50 minutes | Scans included | 2,53 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Full Scans included | 1,24 GB

This 23-song rarities compilation stands in Sam Cooke’s output roughly where the four posthumous LPs released by Otis Redding stand in his catalog, with the major difference that Cooke’s work included far fewer leftovers and sides that were justified simply by being available — he seemed to throw a special effort into almost everything that ever recorded, and that goes double for this disc’s content, which encompasses the final year of his recording career. This was a period in which he explored several promising musical directions and broke through both to an extraordinarily sophisticated synthesis of his gospel roots with topical songwriting within a pop context. Listeners won’t find his most popular songs — “You Send Me”, “Chain Gang”, “Only Sixteen”, etc. — here, a result of the split control of his catalog between RCA and ABKCO, but they will find his most important and influential songs. Cooke was inactive in the studio for a significant chunk of 1963, following the drowning death of his infant son, and when he resumed work late in the year it was under a new contract that was to ultimately give control and ownership of his recordings to him (or, as events worked out, his manager, Allen Klein). Represented here is his foray into a New Orleans sound, on “Basin Street Blues” etc., which he’d never explored before (and which he shaped his own way) as well as his poignant recording of “The Riddle Song”, which was a way of his coming to terms musically with the death of his son; and “Good Times”, the somber-toned party song of Cooke’s that the Rolling Stones chose to cover, and the equally pensive and compelling “Another Saturday Night”, a relic of the first half of 1963 that fits equally well with this later material. On any other R&B collection, all of those tracks would be perceived as extraordinarily fine records, but Cooke himself raised the bar so high during the final months of his career, that they pale next to the most important of his songs: “Shake”, which embodied a harder, more visceral soul sound than Cooke had ever embraced before; and “A Change Is Gonna Come”. The latter, written by Cooke in the wake of his hearing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”, seemed to tie up his origins as a gospel singer with all that he had learned and experienced in the ensuing decade and, channeled through the topical subject of civil rights, became his greatest musical achievement — not his biggest hit, or his best known song even today, but his most accomplished piece of composition, singing, and recording. Cooke never had a chance to follow up either, and died before he could even assess the impact of either song — ironically, it was Otis Redding (who died almost three years later to the day) that took them into his repertory most successfully; so this disc not only brings us to the final, magnificent phase of Cooke’s career, but also shows the door that he opened for Otis Redding and others. Keep Movin’ On should probably not be the only Sam Cooke compilation that a neophyte fan should buy, mostly because it covers only his late career and leaves out a lot of essential material, but it is an absolutely essential companion (along with the Harlem Square Club live set) to his finest compilation, Portrait of a Legend 1951-1964, or the box set Man Who Invented Soul, finishing the story that they start. Most of what’s here had never been available digitally before, and even the tracks that had are improved so significantly in the quality of their transfer, that they’re like new releases.

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Sam Cooke – Ain’t That Good News (1964) [Reissue 2003]
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 33:09 minutes | Scans included | 1,35 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Full Scans included | 675 MB

The last of his studio albums released in his lifetime, Sam Cooke’s Ain’t That Good News offers a lot of superb material, pointing in several directions that, alas, were to go largely unexplored. The central number is, of course, the earth-shattering “A Change Is Gonna Come,” with its soaring gospel sound and the most elaborate production of any song in Cooke’s output. The rousing though less substantial title track also came out of a gospel tradition, as does Cooke’s treatment of “Tennessee Waltz,” which is one of his finest adaptations of contemporary pop material. “Falling in Love” was the work of Harold Battiste, an old friend of Cooke’s who had recently re-entered his orbit and was partly responsible for encouraging the singer in exploring the New Orleans sound that was evident on “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day” and “Meet Me at Mary’s Place.” And then there’s “Good Times,” a bittersweet, introspective party number, and the pensive successor to “Twistin’ the Night Away.” There are a few moments where the spell is almost broken by the intrusion of what seems like pop material, but even Cooke’s version of “The Riddle Song” is worth owning, as a glimpse of how he could turn a folk song into a something so quietly soulful that its origins disappeared. With the exception of “Another Saturday Night,” which had been released as a single early in the previous year, Ain’t That Good News comprised the first material that Cooke had recorded in the six months following the drowning death of his 18-month-old son Vincent; it was also the first album that Cooke recorded and released under his new contract, which gave him greater freedom in choosing repertory and sidemen than he’d ever had, and so it offered a lot of pent-up emotional and musical expression, and, as it turned out, was tragically unique in the singer’s output. Ain’t That Good News was reissued in June of 2003 as an extraordinary audiophile-quality hybrid CD/Super-Audio CD edition by ABKCO Records, with full music and session credits. The sound on that edition literally blows any prior edition of the album, or any earlier CD release of those songs.

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