Soul Jazz Records journey into early 1990s ragga, drum & bass and jungle. The album features all-time classic jungle anthems such as General Levy’s ‘Incredible’ alongside some serious Ragga heavyweight tunes like Cutty Ranks ‘Limb By Limb’ and Congo Natty’s classic re-make of Barrington Levy’s Under Me Sensi’. The renowned album tells the story of how Jungle developed out of acid house but with its roots in the UK Dancehall scene of the 1980s and comes with extensive sleevenotes, exclusive interviews and photography. // “Every one of Rumble in the Jungle’s thirteen tracks is brimming over with life and sonic thrills” and “some of this music was released in ‘91, but it sounds like it was made yesterday.” BBC MUSIC // “Soul Jazz’s string of success continues…
Tag Archive: Various Artists
Featuring rare tracks of auto-didactic progressive pop music, proto-techno punk, shoot-for-the-stars-land-in-the-gutter chart flops and heralded, underground synth classics, School Daze paints a picture of beautiful failure. Complete with extensive sleeve notes written by King and never before seen imagery, all 24 tracks were remastered by RPM in-house engineer Simon Murphy, many from vinyl copies due to lost master tapes.
The story told on All The Young Droids is one of the dawning opportunity presented by both the emergence to the market of cheaper analog synthesisers and the distribution networks plus indie labels that exploded with the advent of punk music in 1976. While the music that sprouted out all over the globe in the wake…
A sequel to the 2020 compilation Ready or Not: Thom Bell Philly Soul Arrangements & Productions 1965-1978, the 2024 collection Didn’t I Blow Your Mind?: Thom Bell The Sound of Philadelphia Soul 1969-1983 shifts focus somewhat. Where Ready or Not included singles from Bell’s early years, Didn’t I Blow Your Mind? opens with the titular Delfonics hit, a single that effectively ushered in the glory years of Philly soul, an era this collection celebrates.
Compiler Bob Stanley doesn’t shy away from big hits this time around — “The Rubberband Man,” “Then Came You,” and “Betcha by Golly, Wow” anchor this comp — but he doesn’t follow a strict chronological order, allowing himself to bounce back and forth from the beginning of…
Possessing a whisper-soft voice and sweetly melodic trumpet tone, Chet Baker (1929-1988) had a sound that is often imitated yet almost impossible to master. For the latest edition of Blue Note’s Re:imagined series, in which the jazz label invites artists to produce cover versions of its back catalogue, 15 R&B, pop, soul and jazz artists have been given the unenviable task of interpreting Baker’s repertoire – with often surprising results.
The trumpeter-vocalist’s supple take on jazz standards is well reflected in singer Dodie’s delicate version of Old Devil Moon as she emphasises the original’s swaying Latin percussion. British singer-songwriter Matt Maltese’s My Funny Valentine adds a beautifully elegiac guitar line to the well-worn melody.
The CD contains ten covers of 78-era songs by artists such as Luther Dickinson, Eden & John’s East River String Band w/ R.Crumb, William Tyler, Muireann Bradley, Gwenifer Raymond, Michael Hurley and more. Eight of the ten songs were recorded specifically for the project.
We’ve had vinyl, CD, and cassettes all making a “comeback.” So are 78s the next format we’ll all be hankering after. It feels unlikely simply on the grounds of breakability alone. But 78s refuse to go quietly. In the 1960s the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band built a career on recycling the stranger corners of 1920s and 30s Jazz and Dance Band tunes. In 2015 some of these were compiled in a CD ‘Songs the Bonzo Dog Band Taught Us.’ A quick visit to Bandcamp finds that there have…
1. Jimmy Reed – Big Boss Man
2. Johnny Cash & The Tennessee Two – Big River
3. The Crickets – Not Fade Away
4. The Olympics – Good Lovin’
5. Bobby Bland – Turn On Your Love Light
6. Tampa Red – It Hurts Me Too
7. Hank Williams with His Drifting Cowboys – You Win Again
8. Mississippi Sheiks – Sitting On Top of the World
9. Tossi Aaron – I Know You Rider
10. Obray Ramsey – Rain And Snow
11. Judy Collins – Me And My Uncle
12. Cannon’s Jug Stompers – Viola Lee Blues
13. Elizabeth Cotten – Going Down the Road…
14. Marty Robbins – El Paso
15. Jesse Fuller – Beat It On Down the Line
Somewhere in the ‘60s, the folk movement and the psychedelic rock scene intersected and a new sound emerged combining mellow acoustic sounds with further-out ideas that broke from folk traditions. This psychedelic folk-rock sound was wide-ranging, from the more straightforward sounds of bands like Fairport Convention and early Jethro Tull to the acid-tripping bliss of communal groups like the Incredible String Band.
The Magic Forest is the second entry in a series of compilations that began with 2022’s Deep in the Woods, again collecting artifacts of enchanted, pastoral psychedelic folk from between 1968 and 1975. Cherry Red’s anthologies generally intersperse obscure acts among the better known artists of the genre or topic they’re focused on,…
Kalita present the third volume in their ground- breaking ‘Borga Revolution!’ compilation series, exploring the revolutionary phenomenon of Burger Highlife. This unique style fused West African melodies with synthesizers, disco, and boogie, a sound that took Ghanaian airwaves by storm in the 1980s and beyond. With previous volumes receiving strong support by tastemakers such as Gilles Peterson, Antal, Tom Ravenscroft, and Hunee, Volume 3 takes a deeper dive than ever before into the world of Ghanaian digital dance music.
This volume features rare, sought-after tracks from artists including Obibini Takyi, Osei Banahene, and Okyerema Asante, as well as Burger Highlife trailblazers George Darko and Lee Dodou. Borga Revolution! Volume 3 offers a curated…
1. Gentle Giant – Proclamation
2. Yes – Long Distance Runaround
3. Crack The Sky – Hold On
4. Gong – Occupy
5. Ithaca – Journey (Destruction – Rebirth – Patterns of Life)
6. King Crimson – The Night Watch
7. Tangerine Dream – Raum (Edit)
8. Henry Cow – Amygdala Extract (Demo)
9. Peter Bardens – The Answer
10. Zior – Every Inch a Man
11. Gryphon – Second Spasm
12. Djabe & Steve Hackett – Hairless Heart
13. Samurai – Saving It Up for So Long
14. Lady June – Tunion
15. Jade Warrior – Snake
Numero Group’s terrific Eccentric Soul series are studies in early soul, rock and roll, R&B, and pop, much of which is obscure and largely forgotten to time. The most recent installment of the series showcases the Cobra Records label, an establishment founded in San Antonio by Abraham “Abe” Epstein, sometime record producer and real estate mogul.
As is Numero’s wont, The Cobra Label is a finely-packaged double LP with extensive liner notes featuring label and band histories and ephemera. And the music herein is a wonderful overview of Cobra’s oeuvre. Beginning with Sonny Ace & The Twisters’ take on “Wooleh Booleh,” The Cobra Label runs through 28 tracks, from the label’s 1961 debut release, The Royal Jesters with…
The 2025 release of Look At All The Love We Found: A Tribute to Sublime marks the 20th anniversary of the original 2005 tribute album Look At All The Love We Found (Cornerstone R.A.S.), now reworked and remastered, featuring over 30 artists covering classic Sublime tracks including Zac Brown Band (“Wrong Way”), Pennywise (“Same In The End”), Jack Johnson (“Badfish”) and more, in addition to 8 previously unreleased tracks. One of the unreleased tracks includes a collaboration with Slightly Stoopid and Stick Figure with their take of the Sublime classic “Slow Ride.”
“We’re honored to release our cover of “Slow Ride” with our brother Stick Figure to honor the legacy of Sublime. Produced by our good friend “Miguel” Happoldt, the OG Sublime producer…
Numero’s flagship Eccentric Soul series is effectively remapping the American soul diaspora. Each compilation explores, a US city’s smallest time hooks and would-be world beaters tossed into the glutted big-hole record sea of the ’60s and ’70s.
Among presidential hopefuls and future astronauts, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, located in Greensboro, was a hotbed of black excellence, activism, and raw talent. At the helm of a half-dozen labels, local yokel Walter Grady assembled a rotating cast of townies, homecoming queens, and big men on campus to manifest a scintillating sound that was both homegrown and revolutionary. Eccentric Soul: The Linco Label compiles melodic milestones from the birthplace of the civil rights movement.
Planet Mu 30 continues the label’s tradition of marking its five-year anniversaries with compilations that mainly center around its roster at the time rather than reflect on its history. (The mammoth three-disc special edition of µ20 was a considerable exception.) The set’s 25 tracks come from longtime mainstays as well as more recent signees making their label debut, and it leans heavily on footwork, jungle, experimental techno, and various permutations of all of the above. Most of the material is exclusive at the time of the compilation’s release, with only a handful of tracks previously surfacing digitally.
Jlin’s “B12” begins the release, weaving curious samples of classical instruments throughout a rhythm that starts out sounding close to…
Electric Junk: Deutsche Rock, Psych and Kosmische 1970-1978 is Cherry Red’s deep dive into the German underground, mainly focusing on rock music but also delving into spacy, abstract electronic sounds. The liner notes make a point to immediately disavow the K word, though it makes the set’s title slightly misleading, as Deutschrock is actually a much more mainstream, blue-collar form of German rock music than the experimental styles lumped together as Krautrock.
The compilers intentionally avoided Can and Kraftwerk, instead shining light on a lot of more obscure acts, yet also making the case that Faust should be regarded as a pop band. The release doesn’t shy away from including lengthy jams, with a righteous Guru Guru cut starting things…
In 1972 black people rarely featured in the country’s white-owned official newspapers, unless, perhaps, they were a dead “terrorist”. However, Dr Footswitch’s performance prompted The Rhodesia Herald to print the picture of their guitar player, Manu Kambani, on the front page along with the screaming sentence “Jimi Hendrix is dead but Manu is alive”. With his ability to mimic the mesmerising antics of Jimi Hendrix Manu had impressed everybody and the editor of the paper couldn’t resist printing the story. Heavy criticism from conservative whites followed, accusing the Herald of “lowering the standards.” But the coverage turned Manu into an emblematic figure in Harare, one of Salisbury’s oldest townships, and would influence many youngsters…