Alice Coltrane KIRTAN: TURIYA SINGS

Essential Alice Coltrane recordings issued for the first time on vinyl by Luaka Bop!

Alice Coltrane was a legendary pianist, composer, spiritual leader, and the wife of John Coltrane, the most venerated and influential saxophonist in the history of jazz. In 1967, four years after meeting John, he died of liver cancer, leaving Alice a widow with four small children. Bereft of her soul mate, Alice suffered sleepless nights and severe weight loss. At her worst, she weighed only 95 pounds. She had hallucinations in which trees spoke, various beings existed on astral planes, and the sounds of “a planetary ether” spun through her brain, knocking her into a frightening unconsciousness.  

The critical event of this period was not that Alice fell into the nadir of her existence, but rather that she experienced tapas, a vital period of trial. These tapas (a Sanskrit term she used to describe her suffering) helped prepare Alice for the spiritual ally she found in Swami Satchidananda, an Indian guru, with whom Alice made her first trip to India. On her second trip there, Alice had a revelation instructing her to abandon the secular life and become a spiritual teacher in the Hindu tradition – so she moved out West – eventually opening the Shanti Anantam Ashram on 47 acres she’d bought in Agoura Hills, California. 

Music was the foundation of Alice’s spiritual practice. From the mid 1980’s to mid 1990’s, Alice Coltrane self-released four brilliant cassette albums. These cassettes contained a music she invented, inspired by the gospel music of the Detroit churches she grew up in, mixed together with the Indian devotional music of her religious practice, and even finds Alice singing for the first time in her recorded catalog. Originally only made available through her ashram, they are her most obscure body of work and possibly the greatest reflection of her soul.

“World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda”, is the first-ever compilation of her recordings from this period, making these songs available to the wider public - well played Luaka Bop!

This First Pressing includes two extra booklets of essays, photos, stories and a hand painted first pressing stamp - Don't sleep!

*LP version only

Double album from the high priestess of deep jazz recorded live in 1978.

Two seminal, deep Alice Coltrane albums on one CD! 'Huntington Ashram Monastery' from 1969 is a trio outing with Ron Carter on bass and Rashied Ali on drums. 'World Galaxy', from 1972, is more orchestral with a string section, voice and Frank Lowe on sax.

5" x 7" Original speia tones photograph!

100% essential, C-L-A-S-S-I-C spiritual jazz album featuring Pharoah Sanders! Deep-as-it-gets, hypnotic, trance-like, spiritually uplifting music featuring Alice playing her harp and weird eastern sounds! Very highly recommended! This is probably Alice Coltrane's best ever album! We love Alice Coltrane! You need this!!

ESSENTIAL deep jazz featuring Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson! This is a true classic of spiritual jazz from one of our favourite artists! Recorded at the Coltrane home studio in 1970 this is as deep as it gets. Highly recommended!

Performer, composer and educator Brandee Younger is an accomplished ensemble leader who perviously played with Dezron Douglas on the superb 'Force Majeure' for International Anthem Recording Company. This equally as impressive album is richly detailed contemporary jazz-harp that echoes greats such as Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby. Essential release!

Second Impluse! records release for cult UK jazz psychonauts, Sons Of Kemet! Frenetic, spiritual, cosmic jazz energy from Shabaka Hutchings, Theon Cross and crew featuring guest spots from the likes of Kojey Radical, Moor Mother, Angel Bat Dawid, Joshua Idehen, D Double E! Don't miss!

UNBELIEVABLE new compilation of deep spiritual music by John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Oliver Nelson, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp and other groundbreaking Impulse Artists.

"Orange and black. Fire and ebony. Fury and pride. Wearing its signature colors proudly and raising its exclamation point high, Impulse! Records was the go-to label for music that harnessed the searching and political stand-taking of the Sixties. Launched in 1961, Impulse grew to become an inherent part of the era’s velocity as well as its volume, pulling jazz into the age of Black Power, Afrocentricity, and Spiritual Expansion. In its balance of tradition and transition, it bridged the golden age of jazz, that brief window from the late Fifties to the Seventies when players representing every jazz era were alive and active—from Louis Armstrong to Albert Ayler, from the legends of lore to a new generation of energy players. Impulse treated all its musicians as innovators, revolutionaries even—from swing and bebop, to free and Afrofuturist. The performances on Impulse Records: Music, Message and the Moment draw their staying power from a wide embrace of styles and sounds, as well as a tight focus on a historic moment when the promise of change was in the air and the message of racial harmony was in the music. Today that music has lost none of its relevance: the promise still deferred, the message still on time."

A never-before-heard live recording from a private collection! Coltrane’s classic quartet inc. Pharoah Sanders. One of only three known concert performances of the most iconic suite in jazz.

Recorded in late 1965 on the culminating evening of a historic week-long run at The Penthouse in Seattle, A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle is a musical revelation of historic importance, capturing Coltrane as he began to expand his classic quartet—adding Pharoah Sanders on second saxophone and Donald Garrett on second bass—and catapulting him into the intense, spiritually focused final phase of his career.

Frenetic, cosmic jazz excursion from the mighty The Comet Is Coming! Remixed version of 'Super Zodiac' appears on the flipside by Noss DJ.

'Palo Alto' is a previously unknown and unreleased live Thelonious Monk recording from 1968!

After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, racial tensions across
the country rose. Palo Alto, a largely white college town in California, was not
immune to the events of the day. Danny Scher, a rising junior at Palo Alto High
School, had a dream to bring Thelonious Monk to Palo Alto to perform and help
bring about racial unity in his community as well as raise funds for his school’s
International Committee.

After somehow securing Monk’s services to perform on Sunday, October27, Scher initially had trouble selling tickets and convincing people that Monk was even going to show up.

With many twists and turns along the way and several hundred people waiting inthe school’s parking lot to await Monk’s arrival before purchasing tickets, the concert eventually happened and was a triumph in more ways that Monk or Scher could have imagined. This is a recording of that historic concert.

The band is Thelonious Monk on piano; Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone; Larry Gales on bass and Ben Riley on drums.

It's the bomb!

Just landing! Release date brought forward! WILL SELL OUT!! Don't miss out!

Comet Is Coming band leader Shabaka is back with The Ancestors on 'We Are Sent Here By History', follow-up to their 2016 breakout, 'Wisdom of Elders'.

"The more urgent, unrelenting and darker feel of the album reflects its social commentary set the context of ancient traditions, with a mixture of African and Afro-Caribbean musical history. It takes the concept of the griot, one of the storytellers who keep alive the tradition of oral history in parts of Africa, and transports it to the present day."

Limited edition last copies - from man like Shabaka - don't miss out!

In 1964, the National Film Board of Canada asked John Coltrane to record the soundtrack for a French-language film titled 'Le Chat dans le Sac' ('The Cat in the Bag'). Amazingly, no announcement was made that the iconic Coltrane was adding new performances to this film.

In June of that year, Coltrane’s ‘Classic Quartet’ entered Rudy Van Gelder’s studio and recorded five previously- recorded Coltrane originals. For many years, viewers of the film who recognised the music thought that they were listening to the original recordings, though in fact they were new and had never been heard. Now, with the release of Blue World, we can hear these newly-discovered recordings for the first time!

FREE UK SHIPPING ON VINYL BOX SET!

John Coltrane 1963: New Directions collects all of John Coltrane’s 1963 Impulse recordings in the order in which they were recorded. 5-LP and 3-CD sets include artwork featuring original collages. The box shows us the growth in Coltrane’s musical journey in 1963 that ultimately resulted in 1964’s Crescent and, especially, A Love Supreme. Music comes from the original albums Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, Dear Old Stockholm (released after Coltrane’s death), Newport ‘63 and Live at Birdland.

Futurist jazz voyagers (lead by Shabaka Hutchings) The Comet Is Coming release their anticipated 2nd album via Impulse! A propulsive, kaleidoscopic trip deep into the cosmos - another essential release!

On March 6, 1963, John Coltrane and his classic quartet - McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones - recorded an entire studio album at the legendary Van Gelder Studios. This music, which features unheard originals, is finally released, 55 years later.

This is, in short, the holy grail of jazz music!

N.B. Tracklisting for single LP and single CD formats:

1. Untitled Original 11383

2. Nature Boy

3. Untitled Original 11386

4. Vilia

5. Impressions

6. Slow Blues

7. One Up, One Down

Classic modal jazz album from the master of deep jazz and one of the most important performer/composers ever! Modal fans will love the tranquil, melancholic ballad After the Rain while fans of the new thing will dig the hectic forward-thinking India and Impressions! Recommended!

Sons of Kemet’s third studio album, and first under the impulse! label! Shabaka Hutchings and his band incorporate sounds of spiritual jazz music, while keeping a consistent and hypnotic rhythm throughout. Essential release!

First Impulse original pressing (first came out on ABC in 1957)

Brilliant little-known album from the king of deep jazz, John Coltrane! Features sessions from before and after the landmark 'Meditations' recordings that marked his departure into more adventurous free form improvisation - features African percussion and chanting, stripped down saxophone/drum duos, and both expanded line-ups and classic quartet recordings! Alternately fiery and tranquil, this is some of the most advanced and beautiful modal jazz you will hear! Trance-inducing, meditative, deeply magical music! Very highly recommended!

Landmark free jazz album! An essential classic for any fan of 'new thing' improvisation! John Coltrane was one of the greatest player/composers the world has ever known and this is one of his most adventurous recordings! Mammoth, large scale big band session featuring a host of key avant/deep jazz luminaries such as Alber Ayler, Marion Brown, John Tchicai, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp! This CD features both editions! Intense, extreme, transcendant music unlike anything else! Highly recommended!

100% essential deep jazz classic! Searching, yearning, BEAUTIFUL spiritual jazz of the highest order! This is considered by many to be his best album and consistently gets voted as one of the best albums of all time in any genre! It's that good! 

Two classic 60s Impulse albums from Mingus on one CD

Two seminal, deep Alice Coltrane albums on one CD! 'Huntington Ashram Monastery' from 1969 is a trio outing with Ron Carter on bass and Rashied Ali on drums. 'World Galaxy', from 1972, is more orchestral with a string section, voice and Frank Lowe on sax.

Impulse Records

100% essential, C-L-A-S-S-I-C spiritual jazz album featuring Pharoah Sanders! Deep-as-it-gets, hypnotic, trance-like, spiritually uplifting music featuring Alice playing her harp and weird eastern sounds! Very highly recommended! This is probably Alice Coltrane's best ever album! We love Alice Coltrane! You need this!!

Duke Ellington & John Coltrane is a jazz album by Duke Ellington and John Coltrane recorded on September 26, 1962 and released in February 1963 on Impulse! Records. For Ellington, it was one of many collaborations with fellow jazz-greats in the early 1960s, including Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Max Roach and Charles Mingus, and placed him in a jazz quartet setting (in this case, saxophone, piano, bass and drums), rather than his usual one in a big band.

Archie Shepp's first major outing was recorded in August 1964 about a year before John Coltrane gathered some of these same players (Shepp and alto saxophonist John Tchicai) in the studio for the recording of Ascension.

Sault - the clandestine collective with a talent that knows no bounds - return with their incredible album 'NINE'; infectious, catchy, ardent soul music that perfectly soundtracks the essence of the time that we currently live. Essential release!

Classic house from end to end. This special release is dedicated to Detroit DJ Legend Ken Collier. His untimely passing deeply touched Terrence Parker personally, as he was one of a small few who always supported him and his music. Because of Ken Collier, Detroit developed a dance scene, which in turn inspired artist and producers to make dance records. This record is Parker's personal tribute to him.

"In Loving Memory Of Detroit DJ Legend Ken Collier"

Reissue of Orlando Voorn's P-Funk All Stars-sampling techno classic from 1992, 'Flash'! Top ten techno business - party-starting essential! Backed with 'From The Ghetto' which was released in 1994 and co-produced by Blake Baxter.

Another highly collectable Nathan Davis release on SABA, also recorded in 1965, ‘Happy Girl’ has remained unissued on vinyl since the 1960s. The date gathers together another top drawer line-up, with Woody Shaw on Trumpet and Larry Young, the Coltrane of the organ, uniquely found on piano for this session. Jimmy Woode again supports on bass, with a furious Billy Brooks on drums. ‘Theme From Zoltan’, a fierce modal original by Shaw, was recorded by Young the following year on his classic Blue Note album ‘Unity’. Side 2 maintains the unstoppable tempo with ‘Mister E’, penned by Davis, featuring blistering solos by Davis, Shaw and Young.

Soul Jazz Records’ limited-edition black vinyl 1000-copies worldwide LP (+ download code), (as well as CD and digital) issue of this very rare deep spiritual jazz meets Brazilian and Latin album first released as a private-press album in 1978 on flautist Lloyd McNeill’s own Baobob Record label in Washington, DC. The album has been out-of-print for 43 years and is lovingly remastered by Soul Jazz Records.

Tori is a stunning album that blends Brazilian and Latin flavours with deep Spiritual Jazz, recorded in 1978. The album features an unbelievably strong line-up which includes legendary Brazilian figures like Dom Um Romao, Nana Vasconcelos and Dom Salvador alongside jazz heavyweights such as Buster Williams, Howard Johnson, John La Barbera and more. These A-team musicians were all regulars in McNeill’s long-running and highly successfull resident live group in New York all set up to blend deep jazz, Brazilian and Latin music together.

Lloyd McNeill is an African-American flautist, painter, poet, and photographer born in Washington, D.C., in 1935. His multi-disciplinary creative life led to encounters and friendships with Nina Simone, Picasso, Eric Dolphy, Nana Vasconceles and other legendary cultural figures. Lloyd McNeill’s hypnotic ‘Washington Suite’ was originally commissioned as a piece of music for the Capital Ballet Company, in Washington, DC.

McNeill grew up through the era of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and his life and work is a reflection of those ideals. In the mid-1960s he moved to France where he became friends with Picasso, working with a number of émigré-jazz musicians whilst living in Paris. In the late 1960s he taught jazz and painting workshops at the New Thing Art and Architecture Center in Washington. In the 1970s he travelled throughout Brazil and West Africa studying music and taught music anthropology in the US.

Nathan Davis recorded ‘The Hip Walk’ in 1965 alongside his school mate, trumpeter Carmell Jones (who a month later went on to record the Song for My Father album with Horace Silver). The quintet is backed by the tightest of rhythm sections: Francy Boland on piano, Jimmy Woode on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums. One of the most beautiful, swinging jazz pieces ever captured on tape, ‘Carmell’s Black Forest Waltz’ is presented in all-analogue richness on 45 single format for the first time. On side 2, ‘B’s Blues’ finds Davis on soprano trading fours with Jones, driven irresistibly by the Clarke-Boland rhythm section, a highlight of the Hip Walk date.

Superb hardback 188-page book with loads of text, photos, artefacts, record labels etc written by Noel Hawks.

With contributions and quotes from (wait for it): King Jammy, Bunny Lee, Dennis Alcapone, Bob Marley, Paul Khouri, Graeme Goodall, Horace Andy, Burning Spear, Augustus Pablo, Marcia Griffiths, Jojo Hookim, Derrick Harriott and many many more!

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'An absolutely crucial survey of the origins of the Jamaican music industry replete with chapter and verse quotes from many of the pivotal movers and shakers.

"A wealth of new information, expertly marshalled: this is a book whose time has come!" STEVE BARROW (Rough Guide to Reggae).

This is a limited-edition book, DO NOT MISS OUT!

‘Headsoup’ is a new compilation that deepens the legend of mysterious Swedish psych collective Goat even further. Collecting rarities from across band’s celebrated career, including standalone singles, B-sides, digital edits and two enormous brand new tracks, it’s a globetrotting acid trip of a record that’s even bigger in its scope than their acclaimed studio LPs.

**N.B. CD format release date is now 12th November**

A Civil Rights activist who marched alongside Jesse Jackson, preacher for Earth Wind & Fire, Stax recording artist, “Family Feud” contestant, Stephen Curry soundtracker, high school drop out, and Kanye samplee, Pastor T. L. Barrett stuffed a dozen lives into one. His signature 1971 spiritual soul jam “Like A Ship” has transcended its humble South Side Chicago beginnings, rediscovered by Leon Bridges and Beck and described by Radioheadʼs Colin Greenwood as “The most euphoric celebratory music that makes you want to jump around the house and explode with joy.” This release is the definitive statement on Barrettʼs two decades of recordings, 49 tracks spread across five albums, including 'Like A Ship, Do Not Pass Me By Volume 1 & 2', 'I Found The Answer', plus a bonus album of singles and sermons, a 10,000 word blow-by-blow, and illustrated discography.

This astounding collection bring together some incredibly rare tracks and artists that cannot be found on any other Reggae albums. Then there is of course Perry's fantastic house band The Upsetters and the great man himself with some legendary tracks.

There is wealth of outstanding material across this box set, covering all sub-genres of Jamaican music with some particularly fine Dubs

All of the music featured here on this new Soul Jazz Records collection was created by Brazilian artists living and working in the USA in the 1970s.

The album brings together some of these finest works and comes complete with extensive notes that explains the path these musicians took from Brazil to the USA and shows the political and musical links between Brazil and the USA that created the conditions for this unique fusion of these two distinct cultures, North American Jazz and Brazilian music, that occurred in the 1970s.

In the early 1970s North American jazz musicians were eager to work with upcoming Brazilian musicians. Miles Davis invited Airto Moreira to join his new ‘electric’ band, Dom Um Romao (part of Sérgio Mendes’ legendary Brazil ‘66 in the 1960s) joined the fusion group Weather Report, Flora Purim and Airto both became a part of Chick Corea’s new project Light As A Feather, Wayne Shorter collaborated with Milton Nascimento, George Duke recorded Brazilian Love Affair, and so on.

With all the attention placed on them from these important jazz artists, North America became the new musical playground for a large number of these Brazilian artists – Airto Moreira, Flora Purim, Sérgio Mendes, Luiz Bonfá, Eumir Deodato, João Donato and many others.

Most of these musicians had already experienced success through the earlier popularity of bossa nova in the 1960s, either at home in Brazil or in the USA. But by the end of the 1960s many Brazilian artists had left their own country, as the military dictatorship became progressively more authoritarian and repressive. In the USA, through their critically acclaimed work for Miles Davis, Weather Report, Light As A Feather etc., all of these artists were now given reign to explore new musical terrains away from the restrictions of both a musical genre and a state censor back in Brazil.

The album comes as a deluxe gatefold double vinyl LP, complete with download code, full sleeve notes, exclusive photography, double inner sleeves. The CD contains CD plus a large 40-page outsize booklet all housed in Soul Jazz slipcase.

Soul Jazz Records’ new release ‘Soul of A Nation: Jazz is the Teacher, Funk is the Preacher’ is a powerful new collection of radical jazz, street funk and proto-rap made in the era of Black Power (1969-75).

This is the second ‘Soul of A Nation’ album released by Soul Jazz Records to coincide with the exhibition ‘Soul of a Nation – Art in the Age of Black Power’, critically acclaimed and enormously successful when it opened at the Tate Modern in London last year (as was Soul Jazz Records’ accompanying first album ‘Soul of A Nation – Afro-Centric Visions in the Age of Black Power 1968-79’). The blockbuster international exhibition is now at the Brooklyn Museum, New York and then travels to Los Angeles in 2019.

This new album features a number of important and ground-breaking African-American artists – The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry, Funkadelic, Gil Scott-Heron and more – alongside a host of lesser-known artists all of whom in the early 1970s were exploring new Afrocentric poly-rhythmical styles of music – radical jazz, street funk and proto-rap – while at the same time exploring the Black Power and civil-rights inspired notions of self-definition, self-respect and self-empowerment in their own lives.

During this era African-American jazz musicians ripped up traditional definitions – rejecting the term ‘entertainer’ to redefine themselves instead as ‘artists’. They worked outside of the mainstream music industry perceiving this artistic relationship to be fundamentally exploitative and politically flawed. Artists instead formed their own pan-arts community-centric collectives, set up their own record labels, ran concerts in alternative performance spaces – art galleries, parks, lofts, community centres – all as a way of taking control of their own creative destinies.

At the start of 1960s jazz musicians had embarked on an intense period of musical experimentation as artists John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry sought to dismantle the traditional definitions of jazz by creating new music that broke free from its establishment shackles. By the end of the 1960s, forward-thinking African-American jazz musicians had absorbed the ideas of this radical and avant-garde path but also began to introduce many new elements – not just civil rights concepts of freedom but also black power ideas of self-respect, righteousness and anger.

Their music developed into a radical and intense Afrocentric mix of jazz, funk, soul and street poetry, all in search of a new musical language that could better represent artistic African-American cultural expression.

All of the featured artists here were involved in this search in different ways; A shared sense of Afrocentric collectivism joined the dots between the deep avant-garde experimentalism of The Art Ensemble of Chicago (here featuring soul singer Fontella Bass singing the powerful ‘Theme de Yoyo’) to the hyper funk psychedelia of George Clinton’s Funkadelic.

The poetry of Gil Scott-Heron and Sarah Webster Fabio performed with a backdrop of street funk and heavyweight percussion laid down the template for the birth of rap. The Har-You Percussion Group, a group of young Harlem teenagers, showed how government-sponsored social initiatives helped create great art and music. Gary Bartz and The Oneness of Juju offer spirituality and cosmology. Collectives like The Pharaohs and Detroit’s Tribe add deep jazz and street funk in equal measures. And so on.

Influenced and radicalised by Black Power and civil rights, all these artists were involved in creating – in the words of the Art Ensemble of Chicago – ‘Great Black Music: Ancient to Future.’

This album is available as heavyweight triple vinyl (+free download), full and extensive text, exclusive photography, with house inners, and as deluxe CD with slipcase, 40-page outsize booklet and jewel case.

Reissue of the rare, extended version of disco version of Lorraine Johnson's 'The More I Get, The More I Want' on cult NYC label, Prelude. Backed with the Francois Kevorkian mixed, Paradise Garage classic, 'Feed The Flame'!

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

Soul Jazz Records’ latest excursion into the Crescent City vaults delves deep into the roots and history of the Voodoo world of New Orleans Funk.

Packed to the brim with serious break-heavy, heavyweight funk tunes from classic New Orleans artists including Eddie Bo, Betty Harris, Dave Bartholomew, Johnny Adams and Eldridge Holmes (with the ever-present Allen Toussaint and The Meters as always behind the scenes). There is also a host of rare cuts from a number of lesser-known second line New Orleans artists, whose fame rarely reached past the walls of the city, including Gus ‘The Groove’ Lewis, James K-Nine, Norma Jean, Bob French, Chuck Colbert, Zilla Mayes and Joe Haywood.

In the 1960s the syncopated beat of New Orleans Funk developed out of a gumbo mix of New Orleans local flavours – rhythm and blues, Mardi Gras Indians, the street percussion Second Line of the Jazz Funeral and Marching bands, Caribbean rhumba and mambo rhythms – all of which are in full effect. Even Zydeco, the rhythm and blues offspring of Louisiana Cajun music, had the funk as the King of Zydeco, Clifton Chenier, shows us here. 

New Orleans music and Voodoo both have their roots in the African-American free black and slave gatherings held at Congo Square from the 18th century onwards. Here Voodoo king Doctor John (the original one!) and Voodoo queen Marie Levaux held court over their followers, and here also could be heard the first sounds of New Orleans jazz music. Soul Jazz Records’ latest album describes how these two cultural forms are inextricably inter-related. 

The album traces the path of funk from the very first glimpses of the style – Dave Bartholomew’s super-tight ‘The Monkey’ (recorded in 1957) and James Waynes’ junkie jailbird anthem ‘Junco Partner’ (1951, later covered by Dr John, Professor Longhair, James Booker, and The Clash) through to the 1970s heavyweight boogie funk of Chocolate Milk’s rare groove classic Action Speak Louder Than Words and The Baron’s ‘Making It Better’. 

Also featured is a selection of hard-core classic funk productions from the legendary Eddie Bo (James K-Nine, David Robinson) and the genius of Allen Toussaint (Eldridge Holmes, Gus ‘The Groove’ Lewis, Lou Johnson). There also a number of super-rare independent New Orleans’ one-off 45 single funk productions from the likes of Chick Colbert and Bob French. And lastly, New Orleans Funk female vocalists are in full effect with tracks by Betty Harris (whose ‘Lost Queen of New Orleans Soul’ has just come out on Soul Jazz Records), Zilla Mayes and Norma Jean. 

This album is released as a heavyweight double gatefold vinyl (+ download code), CD pack and digital album, and comes with extensive long-form sleeve-notes and stunning photography from the Ralston Crawford New Orleans collection and Hogan Jazz Archives at Tulane University, New Orleans.

Recent related Soul Jazz Records release: Betty Harris 'The Queen of New Orleans Soul' (SJR LP/CD/D345).

Digital album includes all tracks. Tracks 4,7,11,12 not available individually (only as bundle).

Glenn Underground under his one-off Jellybean guise for Relief records back in the mid-90s! Features the classic, Manhattan Transfer-sampling, halloween party spin 'Twilight Dome Pt. 2'! ESSENTIAL!

Reissue of this classic '97 release from Boo Williams under the guise of Moon Man. Wicked disco-loop madness to ignite any floor that was originally released on Cajual records.

Classic Kerri Chandler production (arguably his greatest!) from 1994 featuring a heroic vocal from the great Arnold Jarvis. Big, big, big vocal house tune!

Absolute party-starting, mid-90s house music from Chicago legend Mike Dunn under his MD X-Spress guise! Backed with Pal Joey's killer remix of Three Kings' 'Shake Dat Booty'!