By the mid-1970s, Chicago had become one of the most insipid factors in rock music. However, only a few years earlier, they produced a couple of superbly crafted albums that gave little clues of what was to come. Chicago’s second album (1970) has been reissued in a sterling new remix that puts in sharp relief their conservatory perfect, brass-woodwind arrangements. The album flowed effortlessly from Chicago’s big-band jazz updated with rock dynamics into blasts of free jazz, passages of Baroque intricacy, Beatlesque harmonizing and soulful testifying. Originally issued as a two-LP set, Chicago II included three songs that reached Top-10, “Make Me Smile,” “25 or 6 to 4” and that favorite of ’70s wedding bands, “Colour My World.”
