(BHM) Founded by Ray Charles in the 1960s, Tangerine Records is proud to celebrate the 17x GRAMMY Award-winning singer, songwriter, and pianist's singular legacy with the Tangerine Master Series, a new slate of reissues highlighting Charles' best-known music alongside classic records long out of print, and ready for rediscovery. Each album has been restored and remastered under the direct supervision of The Ray Charles Foundation, painting a vivid new portrait of an artist and icon whose impact continues to expand and inspire.
The Tangerine Masters Series continues today with the reissue of Come Live With Me, a blend of pop and gospel-infused soul that sees Charles demonstrating his unmatched versatility available now at all DSPs and on vinyl for the first time in over 50 years; a CD edition arrives on Friday, September 26.
Remastered by 5x GRAMMY Award-winning engineer Michael Graves and acclaimed vinyl mastering engineer Jeff Powell, Come Live With Me showcases Ray Charles in full '70s crossover mode, embracing everything from string-laden arrangements, country-tinged ballads, and soulful soft rock to R&B and funk. At a time when R&B was defined by the politically charged, genre-blending work of Sly Stone, Funkadelic, Curtis Mayfield, and Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles didn't chase trends. Instead, he carved his own path, doing something entirely his own.
Next up in the Tangerine Master Series is 1963's milestone Ingredients In A Recipe For Soul, available at all DSPs and on vinyl for the first time in more than half a century beginning Friday, September 19. Pre-orders/pre-saves are available now.
A top-10 stew of jazz, soul, and pop standards highlighted by the GRAMMY Award-winning, Top 5 hit, "Busted," as well as the top 20 favorite, "That Old Lucky Sun," Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul made it abundantly clear that by the 1960s, Ray Charles didn't so much ignore genres, but had become a genre unto himself. Bootlegged across Europe for decades, this is the first and only legitimate reissue of this essential album on vinyl - as well as its first appearance on CD since the 1990s - now fully restored and remastered with the full cooperation of the Ray Charles Foundation.
"When Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul arrived in August 1963, Ray Charles was riding an unprecedented wave of success in the three years since leaving Atlantic Records for ABC-Paramount - four Top Ten hits from his 1962 albums Modern Sounds in Country and Western and three No. 1 hits - 'Georgia On My Mind,' 'Hit the Road Jack' and 'I Can't Stop Loving You,' writes legendary music critic/author Joel Selvin in an exclusive essay notes expressly for this new reissue.
"Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul asserted Charles' emerging eminence. He was able to convincingly roam across styles and genres, treating everything like a Ray Charles song. With Modern Sounds, he had broken free of rhythm and blues and entered an entirely new realm where he himself was the idiom. With Ingredients in a Recipe for Soul, he flexed this newfound musical persona with a profound certainty. He drew his own boundaries. It would be Ray Charles who decided who he was, and with this album, he established the template that would guide his future recordings for years to come, on this neglected masterpiece that has long been living in the shadows of the monumental Modern Sounds in Country and Western.
"Ray Charles always knew who he was. His immense inner confidence carried him through his life and music. On Ingredients For A Recipe For Soul, Charles took charge of a wide musical panorama - from Broadway musicals to big band jazz, from vintage pop standards to contemporary country. It all comes out pure and unadulterated Ray Charles, a vision finally galvanized in its entirety on the album Ingredients in a Recipe of Soul."
In the early '60s, just one pop hit - the revolutionary "What'd I Say" - into his career, Ray Charles realized he'd outgrown the traditional music business. Risking everything to secure his creative and financial independence, he negotiated a deal that would reshape the industry, granting him full control and ownership of his recordings and the means to build his own publishing company, recording studio, and business offices. Recording what he wanted, when he wanted, Ray Charles would answer to nobody but himself. This is where the story of Tangerine Records begins, created by Ray Charles to achieve greatness on his own terms and the label that remains the only authorized home of some of his greatest works.
The Tangerine Master Series will also see reissues of such masterpieces as 1970's Love Country Style, one of the finest examples of Charles' country crossover work and out of print since its original release, and No One Does It Like...Ray Charles! - The Great Ray Charles Album That Should Have Been, a previously uncompiled collection of singles circa 1962-1965, released for the first time ever as a cohesive body of work, offering a rare glimpse into a prolific and creatively explosive period in Charles' multi-decade career.
As a truly independent artist with the freedom to trust his taste and the talent to back it up, Ray Charles summed up his own A&R strategy simply: "If I like it, I'm gonna sing it." The result is an oeuvre that boldly defies categorization, rewarding open ears and curious minds. With decades of hindsight, the consistently staggering quality of the music Charles made on Tangerine Records becomes far more obvious than it ever was to critics trying to make real-time sense of an artist who had no concerns for fleeting trends or nostalgic expectations. That means for every iconic song, for every classic album, there are a dozen revelations just waiting to be heard, each crafted with as much care and delivered with as much soul as the immortal Ray Charles hits that continue to be passed across generations and around the world.
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