Booker T. And The M.G.s Green Onions (1962)

w/ Bobby Hutcherson, Harold Ousley , Ray McKinney and Grassella Oliphant on drums.

Very good deep jazz.

Soundtrack to the film starring Irene Cara, composed and produced by Curtis Mayfield, with the wicked track 'Jump'.

Disco not disco synth pop 83

Amazing, rare, folk-funk from David Crosby of Crosby, Stills and Nash! Seriously deep, coke-fueled West Coast AOR! Recommended! This is also a big, underground cosmic record. You really should own this!

KILLER soulful tune as covered by Idris Muhammed for his LOFT/PARADISE GARAGE ANTHEM!

USA original first pressing 1970

Classic!

Monster funky-jazz-organ from 1968! 'But It's Alright' BIG jazz dance tune!

The Aleem Brothers with Leroy Burgess in 80's electro-funk shocker!

Second album from grime/UK rap star Stormzy. 'Heavy is the Head' features guest spots from Aitch, Burna Boy, Ed Sheeran, Headie One, H.E.R., Tiana Major9 and YEBBA with production from Fred Gibson, Fraser T Smith, T-Minus and more.

Philly 60's soul written and produced by Gamble and Huff, arranged by Bobby Martin and Thom Bell.

The unbelievably deep Rufus Harley - the Roland Kirk of the bagpipes. Listen to him disentangle and deconstruct Mary Poppins to seriously deep leftfield effect. Rare album!

Classic, classic soul jazz latin tinged groovy album featuring 2 killers "Listen Here' and "Sham Time".

Forget the wack cover - this is a serious compilation!! Similar to Soul Jazz Records Philadelphia Roots CDs with seriously obscure tracks.60s and early 70s Funky Soul from Philadelphia showing the true roots of Disco music that would follow 5 years later. Recommended. Wonderful collection of funky Philadelphia based groups who blessed the scene between 1968-1973. Many of these recordings have been re-mastered from the original reels for the first time! Before many of these musicians were making music you hear on television and movies, they played under different names and labels during the late '60s early '70s, mostly as funky jams recorded for tax write-off purposes!" Artists include: Interpretations, Brothers of Hope, Hidden Cost, Daley Diggers, Sam Reed Band, Alliance, Cupit, Race Street Chinatown Band, Electric Indian, French Connection, Pat & The Blenders and Ando Orchestra

Backed by The Bar-Kays and featuring epic versions of "Walk On By" and "By The Time I Get To Phoenix". Awesome!

Essential, classic, soul masterpiece!.

Classic Roy Ayers album featuring deep jazz legend Harry Whitaker on keyboards alongside Strata East musicians Charles Tolliver and Sonny Fortune! Funky deep early 1970s soulful jazz and jazz-funk!

The third in this essential and highly recommended series. Mr. Brown brings us some of the heaviest and rawest funk on his very own 'People' label.

Highly recommended!

Reissue of this highly sought after Nigerian funk-rock album on the mighty Soundway. Killer LP that moves effortlessly between reggae, jazzy afrobeat and psych rock. William Onyeabor and Funkees fans should check this one - essential!

Heavyweight album - loads of killer funky rock shit

''Can You Dig It?' is as definitive as it gets, and treats its subject seriously, lovingly and with an attention to detail that makes it a necessary purchase. An exemplary collection that is near perfect.' WIRE MAGAZINE

‘Can You Dig It?’ charts the rise of ‘Black Action Films’ from 1970-75. It comes as a double-CD collection of the stunning music from these films. The vinyl is on two monster loud separate double albums.
The Black Action Films
of the early 1970s gave the Hollywood industry its first African-American cinema – actors, directors, cameramen, editors and writers. These films discussed aspects of the African-American experience in the form of entertainment. Storylines interwove post-civil rights revolution with action stories, many involving pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers or private detectives.

The films also featured the finest funk and soul black music of the time as stars such as James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Willie Hutch and Roy Ayers produced some of their finest work, with film budgets allowing for the addition of huge orchestral arrangements by jazz legends such as Quincy Jones, Johnny Pate and JJ Johnson. In the early 1970s, Black Action Films exploded into the cinema with three extremely successful films – ‘Shaft’, ‘Super Fly’ and ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song’. The most profound statement of these films was their actual existence – black actors and black directors entering the previously closed Hollywood film industry. Black Action Films were a representation of politically everything that had gone before and stylistically of everything that was current. Civil rights, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Black Power, Black Panthers, Vietnam sit alongside the criminal worlds of policemen, private investigators, bail bondsmen and the criminals, drug dealers, pimps and hustlers that they parole. ‘Can U Dig It?’ brings you everything you always wanted to know about black action films. This is an essential Soul Jazz Records release!

VOLUME ONE OF VINYL is TRACKS 1-16
VOLUME TWO OF VINYL is TRACKS 17-34

FEATURE REVIEW

The INDEPENDENT

Gary Shider joins the P-Funk gang and they hit paydirt with the dancefloor power of the title track, and the much sampled "Nappy Dugout".

Recommended!!

Essential second part of this classic compilation series from Mr. Brown delivering the funk recorded on his own label 'People' records. Featuring: Bobby Byrd, Maceo & The Macks, Lyn Collin's, Vicki Anderson and many more! You need this! ESSENTIAL funk classics! Buy! Buy! Buy!

US CD IMPORT

It's for the tracks on here, as much as his own albums, that James Brown is revered as the Godfather of Funk! Absolutely essential! The bee's knees!

Features the Loft classic "City Country City"! + "World Is A Ghetto" + more!

All time classic early ninetees gangster rap album!! featuring massive hits 'nuthin but a "g" thang' 'fuck wit dre day' and many more!! Wicked!!

Essential, definitive, Blaxpoitation movie soundtrack with loads of wah wah guitars!

Highly recommended!

Well, funk me! Nearly 50 tracks on 3 CD's!

Ace reissue of this high octane Chicago soul rarity on the Chess label! Mind-blowing harmony vocals over a range of soul styles from sweet to funky to Northern - all with a tightness that rivals the Dells or the Temptations at the top of their game! Features arrangements by the legendary Charles Stepney and Richard Evans! Recommended!

This album coincides with the massive new exhibition Soul of A Nation - Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, London.

Watch Channel 4 news piece here

Read Guardian feature here

The album shows how the ideals of the civil rights movement, black power and black nationalism influenced the evolvement of radical African-American music in the United States of America in the intensely political and revolutionary period at the end of the 1960s following the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and the rise of the Black Panther party.

Featuring groundbreaking artists such as Gil Scott-Heron, Roy Ayers, Don Cherry, Oneness of Juju, Sarah Webster Fabio, Horace Tapscott, Phil Ranelin and many others, Soul of A Nation shows how political themes led to the rise of ‘conscious’ black music as new afro-centric styles combined the musical radicalism and spirituality of John Coltrane and radical avant-garde jazz music alongside the intense funk and soul of James Brown and Aretha Franklin and the urban poetry and proto-rap of the streets.

The Soul of a Nation exhibition draws on the links between Black art forms – art, music, poetry - and how they came together during the civil rights and black power era as part of the wider black arts movement across the United States.

Iconic African-Amercian revolutionary figures such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Angela Davis, John Coltrane, Muhammad Ali all appear in the radical artworks of Barkley L. Hendricks, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Lorraine O’Grady and Betye Saar.

Stuart Baker (founder of Soul Jazz Records) will appear with the curators on the panel of Jazz for Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power discussion at the gallery as part of the show. You can book a ticket for this event here

The Soul of a Nation album comes with extensive sleeve-notes and exclusive photography in a large 36-page outsize booklet and slipcase. Double gatefold vinyl album edition comes with full colour inners + bonus download code and includes full sleeve-notes/photography.

Read More Reviews of the Soul of A Nation Exhibition:

Independent

Time Out

The Telegraph

Frieze

BBC News

Classic album of deep, deep, funky jazz......Includes 'Astral Travelling', as covered by Pharoah Sanders. Heavyweight line-up including Cecil McBee on Bass.

Soul Jazz Records’ new journey into the mighty vaults of Clement Dodd’s Studio One steps once more into the fertile musical environment of Jamaican music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, from the sweet harmony vocals of seminal 1960s Rocksteady right up to the nascent birth of Reggae and Roots music at the start of the 1970s.

Sleevenotes to this album are by Steve Barrow, author of ‘Rough Guide to Reggae’ as well as Soul Jazz Records’ own ‘Reggae Soundsystem Cover Art’ books.

While Ska at the start of the 1960s had taken American rhythm and blues as its main influence, Rocksteady focused on the emergence of American Soul music – with Jamaican vocal harmony groups such as The Gaylads, John Holt & The Paragons, Carlton & The Shoes showing a particular fascination with the close harmonies of Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions and other US soul acts. Here The Heptones even feature with a cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’.

The influence of Soul music on Jamaican rock steady and reggae is almost palpable, so much so that one wonders how much more successful singers like Delroy Wilson, Alton Ellis, Slim Smith and John Holt would have been had they been born in Chicago, Detroit or Memphis

Artists such as Alton Ellis, Delroy Wilson and Owen Gray defined the era – a slowed down beat as Jamaican political and social heat slowly increased as the 1960s progressed into the start of the 1970s –  and the music evolved further from rock steady into roots reggae.

Wicked tunes!

Double vinyl + download code, Deluxe CD, Digital album.

Reviews:

"Every tune is a bonaflide classic" Pitchfork

Read full Pitchfork article here

Soul Jazz Records’ are releasing Tee Mac’s ‘Night Illusion’, a lost classic Nigerian Afro soul meets disco boogie funk album originally released in Nigeria in 1980. Impossibly hard to find, the record remains practically unknown outside of Nigeria.

Tee Mac Omatshola Iseli is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger and features on Soul Jazz Records’ recent collection Nigeria Soul Fever – Afro Funk Disco and Boogie alongside Joni Haastrup, Christy Essien and others, as well as on a recent compilation ‘Nepa Oh Nepa’ (released on Hot Casa earlier this year). 

The timelessness of this soulful, ground-breaking funk jazz lost masterpiece ‘Night Illusion’ leads to comparisons with James Mason’s legendary lost classic album Rhythm of Life, with his unique individualism and intensity hinting at the boogie funk of groups such as Mass Production and Slave so loved by artists such as Moodyman and Theo Parrish.  While Fela Kuti is now a cultural icon of Nigerian music throughout the world, the recent crossover success of William Onyeabor shows just how much undiscovered Nigerian music remains waiting to be explored outside of the country.

Tee Mac was born in Lagos, the son of a Nigerian princess and a Swiss diplomat. He picked up the flute at age 7 and ten years later was studying classical musical in Switzerland under his uncle the composer J.J. Direndirger. Returning to Lagos, Nigeria in 1970 he formed the heavyweight afro rock group Tee Mac and Afro Collection (which included Johnny Haastrup on keyboards and The Lijadu Sisters on vocals). This band was famously joined by the legendary Cream drummer Ginger Baker who came to Nigeria to play with them in 1971 (captured in the film Ginger Baker in Africa).

At age 24, Tee Mac moved to Germany where he co-wrote and recorded the European disco group Silver Convention (whose ‘Fly Robin Fly’ became number one in the USA charts). 

Tee Mac continues to live in Lagos today and travels the world as a composer – one of whose pieces is The City of Mer Kailash (2009), a two-hour ballet featuring over 60 dancers and a 100+ piece orchestra.

Soul Jazz Records are releasing this lost classic Nigerian album as a strictly limited-edition 1000 copies worldwide exact-replica artwork reproduction LP (+ sleevenotes + free download), CD and digital album.