When you look around at the world of music, you suddenly realize how few recording artists there really are. True, the great factory of popular music is bustling and crammed with vocals, rhythm tracks, and solos in every storeroom and warehouse. And I'll defend the role of such popularity-driven music with a fervor that even David Geffen would admire. But the true artists are always an endangered species, striving for the perfection of their craft in exchange for the best years of their lives. When a recording artist keeps himself afloat for over two decades in a sea of recording manufacturers and releases a Greatest Hits collection to prove it, his new offering deserves more than a passing glance. Such an artist is Phil Keaggy, and such an offering is Time.
There are two basic kinds of "Greatest Hits." The most common kind takes all the radio singles of the musician and then adds a few other tracks until the CD has enough songs to sell to people with a passing or negligible interest in the musician. The other kind, the Boxed Set, tends to be a multi-CD set filled with hits, rarities, and trivia, enough to satisfy the die-hard fans. Time occupies an uncomfortable middle ground, with 35 songs on two CDs (sold individually). That seems like a lot of music, but it's really only breaking the topsoil in a musical garden which has produced over a dozen albums in 28 years. Time goes for breadth instead of depth, with at least one song from each major-label release, with several live or unreleased songs thrown on top.
Five instrumentals are included-all from different musical eras of Keaggy's career-each showcasing a different facet of his genius: from the medieval ("Pilgrim's Flight") to the ethereal ("March Of The Clouds"), from jazz ("Happy," Emerging's "Theme") to Irish ("County Down"). And anyone who found Keaggy's True Believer album a poor exemplar of his prowess will probably blow their speaker cones to shreds blasting this collection. Older treasures like "Sunday School" and "Take A Look Around" mingle with new versions of "Shouts Of Joy" (recorded live) and "Time" (in a rare mid-80's version), both of which clock in over 7 minutes each, with each of the latter two tracks mostly consumed in an electric guitar inferno of soloing.
Any longtime Keaggy fan will probably find several omissions from the collection to complain about; I for one would have loved to see "Send Out Your Light" and "As The Ruin Falls," to name a couple. But there's no wasted space on these two CDs. There's also really no compelling reason to buy one instead of the other if you can only afford one, as no apparent pattern determined a given song's placement on either disc.
To truly do Keaggy justice in a retrospective, you'd need a box set twice the size of the excellent Keith Green Ministry Years set offered some years ago. And if such a Keaggy collection ever surfaces, it will be because Time sold well enough to make such an investment worthwhile for the record labels. In the meantime, this carefully gathered collection delivers the abridged legacy of one of the handful of Christian musicians who have earned recognition as living legends.
If you're a fan, the hard-to-find and new tracks make owning this collection a cinch. And for the potential new fan who may have been bewildered by the daunting length of Keaggy's discography, be reassured that this is a thoroughly representative collection, a reliable launch pad to catapult you toward the albums which you may especially enjoy.
More from Phil Keaggy
1996Acoustic Sketches
1993Crimson and Blue
2000Inseparable
1999Music to Paint By - Still Life
1998Phil Keaggy
1994Blue
