This is exuberant music-making with real life to it. Whoever is responsible for the feeling of spontaneity, it embraces every performance, and the shifting colors from one selection to the next insures enough variety. First-rate side musicians come and go, and vocalist Joy Denalane embodies an iconic blues singer in Sam Cooke’s plaintive “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

When Sam Cooke signed with RCA Records in 1960, he had already had several hits ("You Send Me," "What A Wonderful World," and "Only Sixteen" among them) on the small independent label Keen Records. He had paid attention to the business sides of things, too, and he signed with RCA because he was allowed to keep control of his song publishing…

This set is near essential to fans of Sam Cooke, despite the fact that it contains none of his gospel recordings for Specialty Records or any of the work from the final year of his career (owned by ABKCO Records). Scattered every few minutes across this four-disc collection are reminders of just how far ahead of all existing musical forms Cooke was, creating sounds that stretched the definitions of song genres as they were understood and created completely new categories…