When now-multi-platinum-selling singer Eva Cassidy booked the Blues Alley nightclub in Washington, DC for January 2 and 3, 1996 during the post-New Year’s lull, she put all the money she had on the line to make a live recording which she and her band could sell at future shows.  When technical problems rendered the first night’s recordings unusable, the pressure was on for the second night’s performance to meet her high standards.  13 songs from that show became the CD known as LIVE AT BLUES ALLEY, released locally in the summer of 1996.

By the time of the album’s release, Cassidy had been diagnosed with melanoma, and by November, she would be gone at the age of 33, making LIVE AT BLUES ALLEY her only solo album released during her too-short lifetime. (Her first studio album, EVA BY HEART, had been recorded and would be released posthumously).   She left behind a small catalogue of recorded material that has since been painstakingly and tastefully curated into various individual recordings by independent Blix Street Records.  Since her passing, she has sold more than 11 million records worldwide, including three albums that reached #1 on the charts in the UK.

On December 3, 2021, Blix Street will re-issue LIVE AT BLUES ALLEY as a specially remastered 25^th Anniversary Edition to commemorate 25 years since the landmark recording was originally released. The album, which has become the cornerstone of Eva Cassidy’s vaunted posthumous career, will be available in CD and 24bit digital formats as well as a 180g 45rpm double LP set created to fully showcase the recordings’ phenomenal sound.

Eva Cassidy died five years before she became a worldwide music phenomenon when her SONGBIRD compilation CD reached #1 on the British charts in 2001 and became one of the best-selling albums that year.  Her wide-ranging, but unerringly tasteful, sense of material kept her from a recording contract during her lifetime, but that taste continues to propel interest in her recorded work all these years later.