dead Ray Charles makes new cd

When's the Ray/Tupac coming out?

Official word is Ray wanted the album completed after his death and he would have approved etc... but still...

Rhino does something icky:

Roger Friedman says Ray Charles Sequel a Flop

If there's such a thing as karma, then the late, great Ray Charles is influencing it from above.

Charles' "new" album, "Genius & Friends," released on Tuesday, is a flop. Charles is no doubt cheering in heaven.

The album, as I told you a few weeks ago, is something of a fraud. It's a bunch of vocals that Charles recorded seven years ago with other artists.

Those artists' voices have been erased and replaced with new vocals.

Some of the new artists are people Charles may not even have heard of, and certainly did not know.

They include John Legend, "American Idol"'s Ruben Studdard, Idina Menzel (from "Wicked" on Broadway), R&B singer Leela James, the tonally deprived Mary J. Blige and a singer named Laura Pausini.

The remaining "new" tracks were provided by the immortal Gladys Knight, as well as Diana Ross, Patti LaBelle, George Michael, Willie Nelson, Alicia Keys, Chris Isaak and Angie Stone.

The project is so cynically conceived that the record label, Rhino, has not even offered the usual 30-second samples on Web sites like Amazon.com.

As far as I can tell, "Genius & Friends" is also not available on iTunes or in the MSN Music Store.

Apparently, being able to sample the music online might turn potential customers off. Rhino might be right about this.

As of last night, "Genius & Friends" was hovering around No. 150 on Amazon.com's bestseller list.

Last year's Grammy-winning "Genius Loves Company," which the "new" CD is supposed to be a sequel to, was lodged at around No. 65.

Interestingly, a brief listen to the new CD shows a lot of audible edits where the new vocals by the guest artists have supplanted the old ones. As well, the new CD apparently still carries some credits from the original, now much rearranged, sessions from 1998.

The truly sad part of this exploitation of Charles is that the whole origination of the "genius" thing has been lost.

The real album to own is "The Genius of Ray Charles," which was released in 1959 on Atlantic Records and features Quincy Jones and David "Fathead" Newman.

This album also contains the greatest of all Ray's recordings, "Come Rain or Come Shine."

So it's nice to see the public reject the "new" CD. Maybe it will teach the vultures responsible for this project a lesson about how they'll handle his future releases.