It's a fact and you can look it up: no one person has been more influential to modern rock and roll and modern blues than B.B. King. From the British Invasion forward, every guitar solo and riff ever created owes something to the legendary "king of the blues."

This latest collection presents King's work from his landmark Live At The Regal album to the present. The songs from this era of King's career were more experimental and diverse than the platters laid down for the first fifteen years of his career. Most of King's best- known chart toppers, including "The Thrill Is Gone," "Why I Sing the Blues," and "When Love Comes To Town" (in which he steals the show from Bono and U2) can be found in this collection.

The compilation also does well to document King's trademarks: the bottleneck guitar style he perfected, and his soulful, pleading vocals. But a true greatest hits collection should span the course of two discs: one covering his 1950- 1964 period which would display King cutting his musical teeth and honing his art, and this later period material, which portrays the definitive guitarist of the last half of the twentieth century flexing his artistic muscles to Herculean proportions.

-Duane Ambroz