Taken from a variety of sources, this collects 22 of
Ike Turner
's instrumentals from 1954-1965, none of them vocals, none of them recorded with
Tina Turner
, and all of them highlighting his guitar work.
Turner
's really wild and uninhibited for much of this set, especially in his ferocious string-bending and use of the whammy bar. While the tunes themselves are mostly generic
R&B
with a touch of
rock & roll
, it's also fair to say that generic instrumental
rock
rarely sounds this good, mostly because
's guitar work is so much more inventive and passionate than the nominal songs to which they're tethered. About half of this consists of the tracks on his 1962
Sue
album,
Dance With Ike & Tina Turner and Their Kings of Rhythm Band
, a good showcase for his crackling axework on a batch of mostly self-imposed wordless workouts. There are also a couple of numbers he cut in the late '50s under the pseudonym
Icky Renrut
; a 1965 single with brass that has a more
soul
-oriented arrangement than anything else here, albeit
of a gutbucket kind; and a smattering of items dating back to his mid-'50s
days with
Flair
. There's also an odd nine-minute medley of instrumental
blues
covers,
"All the Blues All the Time,"
which wound up on a 1963
Crown
LP,
Rocks the Blues
. ~ Richie Unterberger