Terry Callier What Color Is Love (1973)

Debut album from the folk-soul master on Prestige! Gentle, thoughtful, spacious takes on traditional folk songs such as 'It's About time', '900 Miles' and 'Cotton Eyed Joe'. Beautiful record!

Classic Charles Stepney production! Part of the trilogy of classic Charles Stepney-produced Terry Callier albums that includes "What Colour is Love" and "I Just Can't Help Myself". Epic, lush, bittersweet, string-drenched jazzy folky soul! Recommended!

Wicked stormin' 60s Soul tune

Arr by Charles Stepney.

MINT UNPLAYED ORIG 45

Funky Dells!

Funky Richard Evans production! Mint unplayed USA 45 original.

Charles Stepney production

Quality soul! Arranged by the great Charles Stepney, Chess Records (1969)

Mint unplayed original USA 45

Two Rotary Connection-esque.

Cadet arranged by Charles Stepney.

Mint Orig USA 45

BACK IN PRINT - LONG OUT!
Essential psychedelic soul/rock Rotary Connection album featuring the legendary "I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun", "Love Has Fallen On Me" and more! A Charles Stepney-produced masterpiece! Can't recommend this enough! Ace!

Tripped out guitar funk, released on Chess, 1970 but recorded in St Louis under the direction of the great Oliver Sain.

Soulful harmonic slow tune

Super-rare heavy funk album from Bo

Includes the big tune "Black Gold", later made famous by Rotary Connection!

Essential psychedelic soul/rock! Loads of classic tracks here including Respect, I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun, The Weight, Sunshine Of Your Love, Love Has Fallen On Me and more! Two Charles Stepney-produced masterpieces on one CD: can't recommend this enough! Ace!

Oh man, this is so heavy. The super-deep 'Move Your Hand' along with twisted vocals and hypnotic, incessant rhythm is one of the heaviest sounds of all played loud in a club. Bad, bad tune! Tripped out organ funk of the highest level.

The best Sun Ra album! Super-deep, funky odd-ball jazz with spooky whispered vocals! Cult classic deep experimental jazz with an outer-space alien groove! Highly recommended!

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!

From out of nowhere, UK group Sault drop their album debut on Forever Living Originals (home to Little Simz and Kid Sister), channeling post-punk, primal Afro-funk/punk, dub, alt-pop and heavy soul; taking the best part of The Slits, Golden Teacher, On-U Sound, Konono No. 1 and rolling out something outrageously original - ace!

Amazing, super-funky album supervised by Charles Stepney with the classic trio line-up of bassist Cleveland Eaton and EWF's Maurice White on drums! Includes "If You've Got It, Flaunt It", "Do What You Wannna", "Uhuru", "Bold And Black" and more!

Essential rare groove masterpiece!

Written and produced by Larry Mizell, their first collaboration! It's a classic! Nuff tunes, seriously deep funky heavy 70s jazz monster

Soul Jazz Records’ new Boombox features some of the many innovative underground first-wave of rap records made in New York in the period 1979-82, all released on small, independent, often family-concern record companies, at a time when hip-hop music still remained under the radar.

This first exuberant wave of innocent, upbeat, party on the block rap records were the first to try and create the sounds heard in community centres, block parties and street jams that first took place in the Bronx in the mid-1970s. But where Flash, Kool Herc and Bambaataa were back-spinning, mixing and scratching together now classic breakbeat records like The Incredible Bongo Band’s Apache or Babe Ruth’s The Mexican, these first rap records were all made using live bands, often replaying then current disco tunes, whilst MCs rapped over the top, creating a unique sound that later became known derisively as old school.

And while hip-hop started in the Bronx, rap on vinyl began in Harlem where long-time established rhythm and blues producer-owned record companies such as Joe Robinson’s Enjoy Records, Paul Winley’s Winley Records, Delmar Donnel’s Delmar International and Jack Fatman Taylor’s Rojac and Tayster were the first off the mark to realise the commercial potential of rap music - releasing early ground-breaking records that all quickly followed in the wake of the first rap record, The Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers Delight, a million-selling worldwide hit.

This collection celebrates these first old-school rap records, bringing together rare, classic and obscure tracks released in the early days of rap.

Deluxe double CD-pack comes with slipcase, 40-page outsize perfect-bound booklet, extensive notes, exclusive photography and original label artwork. Triple-vinyl heavyweight vinyl includes full artwork, text and notes as well as free download code.

REVIEWS:

Soul Jazz has a reputation for top-notch compilations that offer crash courses in a variety of styles and genres both beloved and obscure; they are, in essence, the K-Tel of the millennial generation.

This is one of the best Soul Jazz sets in ages, a legitimate party in a box, overflowing with underground deep cuts that have seldom — if ever — been spotted on other collections - FACT

 ROLLING STONE Best Rap Albums of 2016

The Holy Grail of modern soul!  Share in the secret and find out why this album is so highly regarded!

Very highly recommended!

New fully remastered re-release of Soul Jazz Records’ ‘The World of Arthur Russell’, the seminal collection of Arthur Russell’s essential music back in print on awesome limited-edition heavy deluxe triple vinyl and deluxe CD edition.

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This album brings together some of Russell’s best-loved and most accessible works including his wide-ranging music both solo and in groups including Dinosaur L (the essential ‘Go Bang’), Loose Joints (the equally classic ‘Is It All Over My Face’) as well as rarities such as the 7” only ‘Pop Your Funk’, Indian Ocean’s ‘Schoolbell/Treehouse’, Lola’s ‘Wax The Van’ and more.

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“Arthur Russell fused the avant-garde with disco and sounds like nothing else on earth.” The GUARDIAN

“Russell is the great enigma of the New York music scene” THE WIRE

“Simply one of the best compilations of this or any year.” RECORD COLLECTOR

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Arthur Russell’s music effortlessly crossed musical boundaries making it timeless. His dance music credentials are faultless and this collection features mixes from Larry Levan, Françcois Kervorkian and Walter Gibbons. Similarly, his song-writing, musicality and performance skills are equally cherished as composer Philip Glass wrote, ‘this was a guy who could sit down with a cello and sing with it in a way that no one on earth has ever done before or will do again.’

When Soul Jazz Records’ The World of Arthur Russell first came out in 2003, Russell’s music had slipped into near obscurity. Nearly 18 years later there are over a dozen releases of his music, reissues of his original albums and more. ‘The World of Arthur Russell’ is the classic first collection of his work available once more.

His only solo album, recorded just before his untimely death: great psychedelic soul featuring a cover of Curtis Mayfield's "Hard Times" and Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come".

Another breathtakingly original transmission from UK group, Sault! Hot-on-the-heels of their essential 'UNTITLED (Black Is)' of earlier in 2020, 'Untitled (Rise)' sees the band evolve even more, blending funk, dance, post-punk and soul music into the soundtrack of the year. ESSENTIAL!

Culled from the three albums that made 'Placebo' a much sought after name in Soul and Jazz music history

Brilliant early Gil Scott-Heron album. One of his rarest on the great Flying Dutchman label.

50 year anniversary reissue of the second, incredible album by visionary producer, David Axelrod! 'Song Of Innocence' fuses elements of rock, classical, funk and psyche into one thoroughly cosmic, alchemical body of work. Essential.

Absolutely essential jazz funk album! A rare groove classic and the only album James Mason recorded. Every track's a winner but look out for "Sweet Power Your Embrace", "Free" and "Slick City" in particular! You need this album!!

Seminal jazz funk fusion album including top funky re-version of Hancock's own "Cantelope Island". Also "Doin It" and "Gentle Thoughts" all with the great Headhunters in full effect.

**Previously unreleased blue-eyed/country soul and AOR album! Check the stunning opening track, 'Sunshine'!**

Randy Mundy recorded his album ‘Celestial Skies’ in 1975 in Nashville, Missouri. The album remained previously unreleased until this issue via Cordial Recordings. A beautiful sprinkling of Americana, blending a touch of blue eyed/country soul with some good old AOR!

Classic jazz funk album produced by the brilliant Mizell brothers! Features "Music Is My Sanctuary" and "Carnival De L'esprit"!

Brilliant, brilliant album - every track's a winner! Highly recommended!

Heavyweight fusion from 74 with Airto, Herbie Hancock, Billy Cobham, Pete Cosey, Keith Jarrett and Carlos Garnett - an allstar lineup if ever.

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.