Music & More

Welcome to Part 2 of my year in music, 2017. In my best of the year lists, I usually only include new original studio albums, I usually disregard live albums, tributes, remakes, reissues, and best of collections. This year there were far too many and too many good ones to disregard. If I included them in my top ten and top fifty lists it would knock out too many other fine recordings. So, this year we have Part 1 and Part 2. Let's get busy. Best Live, etc. Album of the Year: Steve Winwood - Winwood: Greatest Hits Live Buy at Amazon Buy at iTunes Stream on Spotify Christmas came early this year for fans of Steve Winwood in the form of Winwood: Greatest Hits Live . Rather than collecting tracks from the original albums that his fans probably already have, this is a set of recently recorded live renditions of Winwood's finest material, curated by the man himself. Winwood's musical legacy runs deep and over the last 50+ years he has covered a lot of ground. He played...

I have a general rule, when I make an end of the year list, I normally only consider new original works from that year. I rule out live albums, tributes, remakes, best of collections, and reissues. It seems that this year brought some really terrific entries in all of those categories. So much so that I am going to do a separate article on them, even though I was sorely tempted to include Steve Winwood's live greatest hits and the live Mavis Staples tribute concert in my top ten. Yes, they are that good. All that said, I must break my own rule to offer a fifty year old album as my choice for album of the year. I will explain fully below. Following that is my top ten. My methodology hasn't changed. My choices for top ten each need to possess the goods to be the album of the year. Forty more albums follow to complete my top 50. Each of those picks is something that might place in the top ten in a lesser year. Which is not necessarily saying that one album is better than anot...