Chicago: Terry Kath (vocals, guitar); Robert Lamm (vocals, keyboards);

Peter Cetera (vocals, bass); Walter Parazaider (winds, background vocals); Lee Loughnane (trumpet, background vocals); James Pankow (trombone); Daniel Seraphine (drums).

Recorded at Columbia Studios, New York, New York; Columbia Studios, Hollywood, California in August 1969. Originally released on Columbia (KGP-24). Includes liner notes by David Wild.

All tracks have been digitally remastered.

CHICAGO II remains a classic album, encapsulating its time (1969) in all its tumult and glory. The Vietnam War (and the civil unrest it inspired) was still raging, the counterculture dream had not yet crashed and burned, and rock music could be taken seriously as an "art form" while still generating radio hits. Chicago, with their then-new fusion of jazz, rock, and pop, rose high on the charts, while taken seriously both in and beyond the rock-critic establishment. (Some jazz listeners respected and enjoyed Chicago as well.) Their approach had a freshness and vibrancy--"25 Or 6 To 4" was surging, dramatic, and slightly ominous; "Fancy Colours" and "Make Me Smile" were full of soulful optimism; a four-movement suite showed the band had ambition beyond the three- or four-minute pop song. To paraphrase one of Chicago's song titles, it was only the beginning.

In some ways the first real Chicago album (1969's self-titled CHICAGO TRANSIT AUTHORITY had, in addition to the longer band name, a harder and somewhat more experimental sound), 1970's CHICAGO II is fairly progressive and jazzy, especially in comparison to the straight pop records the ensemble would be making in only a few short years. The album, originally a double-disc record on vinyl, is composed as four side-length suites of interconnected songs, a conceit that works better here than it often can, not least because CHICAGO II includes some of the group's best material. In particular, the hits "Make Me Smile" and "25 or 6 to 4" (incidentally, author Robert Lamm finally cleared up the mystery of that title a couple of decades later--it's about someone looking at a clock and seeing that the time is around 3:35 a.m.) are here. So is the simply perfect ballad "Colour My World," the band's first masterpiece and still perhaps their finest song ever.

Q (10/02, p.122) - 3 stars out of 5 - "...Yeilds intermittent rewards, most notably on the baroque psychedelia of 'Fancy Colors' and 'AM Mourning'..."

Mojo (Publisher) (10/02, p.112) - "...Crammed full of fine stuff..."