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The available 3 CDs exclusively contain material from the 1950s, even if some of it was released for the first time up until 1961, and three tracks have not been released at all yet. Everything is finely remastered, as is customary for modern reissues, so I can enjoy the artist during his creative and commercial rise for a full 75 tracks.
Admittedly, that’s quite a substantial amount of music, and I don’t even know if I would listen to my favorite bands for three albums in a row in such a concentrated manner. However, you get to hear all the hits you would expect, from the heavily rocking "Mess Around" to the song later declared the official state song, "Georgia On My Mind," to the probably most famous song, "Hit The Road Jack." Ray Charles definitely dabbled in various fields. Soul, jazz, blues, boogie, and more are lined up alongside individual instrumental pieces, making the nearly four hours quite varied. I find the occasional background singers a bit cheesy, but that’s probably a matter of taste. Technically, Ray Charles is beyond any doubt. He croons and jubilates through his pieces as if it were the first thing he learned before walking upright, conducting the band with his feet and shoulders while sitting at the piano, thus manifesting the title that adorns the cover: "The Genius of Ray Charles".
For a special edition on the 10th anniversary of his death, the booklet is unfortunately very modest; besides the release dates of the tracks, six album covers are visible on its back – perhaps those are the ones from which pieces for this triple album were compiled? "Best of" is also mentioned somewhere, but how the selection was made remains unclear. Since the tracks are not arranged chronologically, it seems an enjoyable listening flow was aimed for. In my experience, hit collections from musicians of this single-focused era are quite useful for people who are not exactly fanatic collectors, as albums often included weaker tracks as filler alongside a few chart-toppers. But here, certainly more than just the most well-known tracks were chosen, giving a sense of how versatile the man was. You can certainly hear that very well here, and since I have no idea what Ray Charles produced in the following 30 years, I can initially draw a lot from these three discs. By the way, I also find a snippet in the last track where Ray Charles talks about a meaningful order of songs on an album noteworthy. Like many musical high-flyers (James Brown or Frank Zappa, for example), he was an absolute perfectionist despite the lightness of his music, and that has definitely contributed to the longevity of his opus.
