Ray Charles

Ray Charles Robinson , pompously nicknamed by the American media " the genius ", the " high priest of soul " or even more simply " brother Ray " was in fact in his beginnings only a little country boy whose ambition limited himself to making a living from his singing and his piano . Nurtured on the sources of blues and jazz , a small place in the sun of success alongside his brothers who, like him in the early fifties, had contributed to popularizing the emerging “ Rhythm'n Blues ” would probably have been enough for him, but there you go... our man was the only one to possess the fatal weapon, an unsuspected secret weapon: the Gospel , of which he had, to the great dismay of his African-American brothers, the audacity and the "genius" of transpose onto secular scenes the accents, ecstasies and trances hitherto confined to places of worship.

CD 1 is devoted to studio recordings from the singer's most creative period , the fifties: CD 2 features Ray Charles at the same time during several particularly torrid concert recordings.