Deluxe Edition is an expanded digital release by Record Kicks that includes three brand-new bonus tracks.
Legendary Milanese combo Calibro 35 continue their journey into the world of cinematic jazz-funk with their new album Exploration.
Exploration marks their return to independent label Record Kicks after their last studio album “Nouvelle Aventures” released on Universal Music in 2023. The band picks up from their latest EP, “Jazzploitation,” released on Record Kicks last October.
“Exploration” is a deep dive into the universe of cinematic jazz-funk, showcasing both the band’s reinterpretations of timeless classics such as Roy Ayers’ “Coffy” or Bob James “Nautilus”…
Category: funk
Congolese guitarist Kiala Nzavotunga began his career playing in Le Grand Kalle’s Africa Jazz band, but he became tired of the regime in the DRC and relocated to Nigeria in the ’70s, joining Fela Kuti’s Egypt 80 and later forming the African-French Afrobeat group Ghetto Blaster.
The second album with his Afroblaster collective, One Race (Tribute to Hilaire Penda) is dedicated to the titular Cameroonian bassist who inspired and supported countless African artists and musicians worldwide throughout his life. For example, in the ’90s Penda collaborated with Mory Kanté, Tala André Marie, Salif Keita, Kassé Mady Diabaté and Amadou Balaké while based in London. Undoubtedly, Penda also left his mark on Kiala, and this can be heard in the new…
House, techno, and garage were respectively invented in Chicago, Detroit, and New York, but the U.K. embraced them and took underground club sounds into the pop charts during the 1980s and ’90s. Burn It Up: The Rise of British Dance Music 1986-1991 explores some of the many developments that took place during the era, from the U.K.’s first attempts at acid house to early rave anthems. Like other Cherry Red anthologies, this one casts a wide net and tries to tell a comprehensive history of its subject, making room for established classics as well as rarities, curiosities, and inclusions that might be kind of a stretch, but hear them out anyway.
The collection starts with Coldcut’s “Beats + Pieces (Mo Bass Remix),” representing…
The second volume in the WaJazz Japanese Jazz Spectacle series, selected by Yusuke Ogawa.
“Japanese jazz expert Yusuke Ogawa continues the WaJazz exploration with another essential collection of music that contains something uniquely Japanese — focusing this time on the King Records catalog. Featuring timeless music by Isao Suzuki, Toshiaki Yokota, Akira Miyazawa, Takeru Muraoka, Yasuaki Shimizu, Masahiko Togashi, George Otsuka, and more.
“It is my great pleasure to introduce you to the second volume of the “Japanese Jazz Spectacle” series. Following the first compilation which focused on recordings from the Nippon Columbia catalog, this time we are digging into the King Records archives.
On their fourth album Yatta!, the celebrated Dutch quartet YĪN YĪN extends, bends, and ignites a joyous mix of disco, funk, surf, psychedelia, and Southeast Asian motifs. UNCUT magazine previously dubbed their highly addictive sound “cosmic disco”—a fitting starting point—but as Yatta! proves, the band’s sonic footprint is an ever-evolving kaleidoscope of sounds, textures, and beats.
As with their breakthrough album Mount Matsu (2024), their devotion to getting the dance floor moving remains front and center. That impulse, already strong, has intensified — Yatta! lifting it to an ecstatic next level.
The result? An album that reveals a band whose groove just keeps getting deeper.
If you know anything about SAULT, they don’t do interviews. They don’t do photo shoots. For years, the British collective — anchored by producer Inflo, has released music with almost no promotion, no faces attached, no origin story to sell. It’s philosophy that the songs belong to whoever needs them, and the people who made them would rather stay out of the way. Since 2019, SAULT has dropped nearly a dozen albums spanning funk, gospel, orchestral ambience, and protest soul, often releasing multiple projects at once (in 2022) as free downloads. Their 2020 records, Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise), arrived during the summer of George Floyd’s murder and spoke to that moment. The anonymity lets the collective voice stay collective — no star to distract…
Widely and rightly regarded as one of the best ever soul and funk bands, the now legendary Average White Band tore-up the rule book and conquered the US, UK & International charts with a series of soul and disco hits between 1974 and 1980.
Although probably best known for their global hit, the US #1 signature single ‘Pick Up The Pieces’, which reached #1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 Chart, this superb collection features 34 classic recordings from ‘Show Your Hand’/’Put It Where You Want It’ (1973) to ‘Cupid’s In Fashion’ (1982).
The Essential Selection also includes their other UK and US hits, ‘Cut The Cake’, ‘Queen Of My Soul’, ‘Walk On By’, ‘For You, For Love’, the much sampled ‘School Boy Crush’, ‘When Will You Be Mine’, ‘If I Ever Lose This Heaven’, the track that…
If you’re worried that you’re a latecomer to the work of uncategorizable Chicago musician Ben LaMar Gay, take solace in the certainty that you’re not alone. Gay’s new album, Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun, supposedly draws from seven of his previous records, with curious names like Grapes, Benjamim e Edinho, and Confetti in the Sky Like Fireworks. But when you start googling, not one of these albums surface. In this age of Bandcamp and Soundcloud, the cornetist, composer, and vocalist recorded seven albums in seven years but never let anyone outside of his inner circle hear them. Instead, he worked with jazz and experimental artists like Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society, Nicole Mitchell, Jaimie Branch and Bitchin Bajas while…
Multi-instrumentalist Chris Franck and DJ and producer Patrick Forge have been making music under the moniker Da Lata for a good quarter-century now. In all that time, the gist of the project has remained largely consistent: Da Lata‘s music is warm, soulful, and made, more or less, in collaboration with (or at least inspired by) artists working with musical styles that have emerged from African-Brazilian interchanges.
It’s a comfortable niche for Da Lata, which has done an admirable job of making music that holds up pretty well over the decades, even with heavy lounge and jazz-fusion vibes. Now, a full 25 years after the debut of Songs from the Tin, the new album Edge of Blue continues the group’s steady stream of appealing tropical grooves.
…includes instrumentals and acoustic versions (plus a new stripped track).
On their first two albums Kit Sebastian — the duo of multi-instrumentalist Kit Martin and vocalist Merve Erdem — hit upon a winning formula. They blended ’60s psychedelia from around the globe with jazz, soundtrack funk, easy listening, and nostalgic pop, then added winsome vocals and catchy, moody melodies played on instruments often unfamiliar to Western music, like oud and saz. Things were working do well that when it came time to record a third album, they didn’t tinker with the approach much.
Maybe New Internationale is a little more focused, taught and more psychedelic in spots? Perhaps a little less jazz and a little more sounds of…
Active as a professional DJ in Japan since the late eighties, DJ Yoshizawa Dynamite is also a renowned remixer, compiler and producer. An avid record collector and an expert of Wamono music, Yoshizawa has published in 2015 the now-classic Wamono A to Z records guide book, which instantly sold-out. The book unveiled a myriad of beautiful and rare records from a highly prolific, but still then unknown, Japanese groove scene. He has also selected a large part of the music in our highly acclaimed Wamono compilations.
For this brand new chapter in the series, Yoshizawa explores King Records’ legendary catalog and unearths exceptional, rare and unknown musical gems. King Records has been releasing music since 1931 and is one of the most prestigious labels…
…20-track overview of funk-rock combo War’s earliest recordings with British rocker Eric Burdon of The Animals. It includes three unreleased tracks, including an unedited remix of this iteration’s biggest hit, “Spill the Wine.”
…After fronting The Animals and becoming one of the defining voices of the British Invasion, Eric Burdon sought a new musical direction in the late 1960s. In 1969, he teamed up with the Long Beach funk band WAR, a collaboration that produced hits like “Spill the Wine,” included in this release alongside its unedited remix, and earned accolades from fans, fellow musicians, and journalists — including NME’s Richard Green, who called them “the best live band I ever saw.” WAR’s legendary producer Jerry Goldstein adds,…
U.S. jazz-funksters Lettuce are firmly rooted in the late-sixties/seventies when artists such as James Brown/Maceo Parker and Tower of Power held sway. With the popularity of disco in the late-seventies many erudite funksters crossed over, so we had the likes of Earth, Wind & Fire regularly raiding the charts.
As previously, this band are also close in spirit to The Meters who were pioneers of nascent funk/R&B, characterised by their 1969 hit ‘Cissy Strut’.
The interjection of a sharp twin-horn/brass section (Ryan ‘Zoid’ Zoidis, Eric ‘Benny’ Bloom) is a highlight as on opener ‘Grewt Up’ which reminds a little of the swing of Hugh Masekela’s ‘Grazing In The Grass’, although with suitably…
Ah, Ghana Special: Modern Highlife, Afro Sounds & Ghanaian Blues 1968-81 — a classic compilation. Released in 2009 by Soundway Records, it’s an epic five-LP set held in the highest esteem by those among us whose attention was caught by the fiery sounds of old West African music. Sixteen years later, the label is giving the album a second life by whittling it down into a lean 10-song suite titled Ghana Special: Highlife. Dedicated fans of retro Ghanaian sounds might be disappointed by the lack of fresh catches here (Soundway did actually release a direct sequel last year), but that doesn’t diminish the fact that every song is a killer example of how great this music could be. And given the shorter running time when compared to its lengthy forefather, it’s easy to envision…
Finnish composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Jimi Tenor celebrated his 60th birthday in 2025 by touring and releasing three albums. In March, he released Sinus Amoris in collaboration with Freestyle Man, July Blue Skies appeared in April with Finn soul kings Cold Diamond & Mink, and Selenites, Selenites! arrived in November as the debut album by the Jimi Tenor Band. The latter was recorded at two studios: Electric Avenue in Hamburg with producer Tobias Levin, and at Kiikala Center of the Universe Studio Complex in Finland (a remote house) with producer/guitarist Lauri Kallio. These eight songs have various styles but are guided by optimism as an aesthetic. Selenite is a soft, translucent variety of the mineral gypsum, named after the Greek moon…
Over the past few years Acid Jazz has been the proud custodian of the legendary Albarika Store label, which produced some of the finest, deepest West African cuts of the last century. The mainstay of the Albarika sound was the mighty T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo, who were prolific throughout the label’s activity from the late ‘60s to the early ’80s.
When they reformed for their first-ever European tour in 2009, Benin’s T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo underscored their status as one of the all-time greats of West African music.
Formed in 1968 by bandleader Clément Mélomé, their rare alchemy of scorched funk and driving Afrobeat didn’t just defy a repressive political system; across fifty studio albums, it revealed a group infinitely worthy of the world stage.
…feature 13 non-LP remixes and B-sides. Original mastering engineer Bernie Grundman has overseen the remastering along with engineer Chris James.
…An eternally hard-to-pin-down artist, Prince was already at work on the album when Purple Rain hit theaters and record store shelves, and the LP arrived less than a month after he’d finished touring that record. “I didn’t wait to see what would happen with Purple Rain,” he told Rolling Stone. “That’s why the albums sound so different.” (He’d call it “the smartest thing” he did in that same interview.) Influenced by the psychedelia of the West Coast-based Paisley Underground movement (but not, he was clear in one of his only period interviews, The Beatles), Around the World mixes Middle Eastern orchestration…
On their first album in five years, Antibalas return to the sound that launched their career back at the turn of the millennium. Hourglass is a straight-up slab of rich, punchy Afrobeat with a funk heartbeat, jazz lucidity, and no vocals. The Brooklyn band’s core foundation was built around their instrumental prowess, though surprisingly, this is their first all-instrumental set.
Over the years, they have paired elegant grooves with thoughtful lyrics about everything from late-stage capitalism and climate change to Native American genocide. Following 2020’s conceptual Fu Chronicles, Antibalas parted ways with singer Duke Amayo, who had been with them since their debut. Rather than seek a new vocalist, they decided to emphasize what has been their…
Perception is the 1973 second album by Catalyst, the Philadelphia jazz-funk quartet whose blend of soul jazz, fusion, and avant-garde set them apart as a cult phenomenon. Featuring Zuri Tyrone Brown (bass), Onaje Sherman Ferguson (drums, percussion), Nwalinu Odean Pope (tenor saxophone, flute), and Sanifu Eddie Green (electric piano), the album stretches from spacious, electric fusion to driving, groove-forward funk and episodes of free improvisation. Recently reissued to renewed acclaim, Perception is recognized for its raw, inventive energy and genre-defying musicianship that prefigures later jazz fusion movements.
Emerging from the fertile musical landscape of early-1970s Philadelphia, Catalyst…
VA – Jazz Dispensary Presents: Dream a Dream with Studio G: Cratedigger’s Archive (1970-2009) (2025)
Established by John Gale in London in 1966, Studio G produced a wide range of genres and styles, geared toward local TV, sports programming and adverts. As Ryan Jebavy, producer of Dream a Dream, explains in his liner notes, it unleashed “pastoral folk, maniacal horror, funk-spat jazz, quixotic pop, alluring electro and the usual novelty side spells of national anthems, children’s music and whatever other utilitarian cues society demanded of the moment” upon the commercial space. Even as more sizable outfits such as KPM, Bruton, De Wolfe and Chappell consumed the majority of the marketplace, Studio G offered a truly fetching alternative-sleek, hip art not previously seen on mostly unremarkable album covers released by neighboring companies…