Hip-O Select's 2004 compilation Get It While You Can: The Complete Legendary Verve Sessions is not the first time Howard Tate's revered sessions for Verve have reached CD. About ten years earlier, in the summer of 1995, Mercury released the almost identically titled Get It While You Can: The Legendary Verve Sessions, which contained all of Tate's 1966 debut -- also titled Get It While You Can -- along with five bonus tracks, for a total of 17 cuts. The 2004 collection adds twelve tracks to that, for a grand total of a whopping 29 tracks, is an embarrassment of riches by any measure. Even if the majority of these new tracks are mono single mixes, this remains an essential '60s soul collection, showcasing a singer who bent soul, blues, gospel, and pop to his own will, creating some of the most distinctive R&B of the decade.
