Soul Jazz Records/Universal Sound are releasing here the third album from deep jazz flautist and composer Lloyd McNeill (alongside the earlier ‘Asha’ and ‘Washington Suite’ - both now sold out).

Tanner Suite is one of the most beautiful and by far the rarest of all of McNeill’s records, a unique piece of music especially commissioned by the Smithsonian National Gallery Of Art in the late 1960s to accompany an exhibition of the work of Henry Ossawa Tanner, the first African-American painter ever to gain international success.

Tanner Suite was originally released in 1969 as a private individually numbered pressing of 1000 copies on McNeill’s own Asha Record company and has never been issued since. Soul Jazz Records new pressing of this album is also limited to 1000 copies each on vinyl and CD. Both editions come in heavyweight exact-replica hard tip-on USA card sleeve original artwork.

This beautiful and intense set of pieces based around improvisation was the soundscape to the significant exhibition of Tanner's work, created at an important point in post-civil rights African-American self-definition. The music is both profound and spiritual.

Lloyd McNeill is flautist, composer and painter. As musician he studied with Eric Dolphy, played with Nina Simone, Mulatu Astatke, Nana Vasconceles, Ron Carter, Dom um Romao and Sabu Martinez. In the mid-1960s McNeill headed to Paris and became friends with Pablo Picasso. 

As Soul Jazz Records enter into the mighty vaults of Studio One, the most respected label in reggae history, we present you with this showcase of Jackie Mittoo, one of the defining figureheads of reggae music !

From forming The Skatalites, at age 15, alongside Don Drummond, Roland Alphonso, Tommy McCook and others, to his work as writer, arranger, producer at Studio One records during the sixties, writing and playing for artists such as Alton Ellis, Ken Boothe, Marcia Griffiths and The Heptones (to name a few), to his career as a solo artist as well as leader of bands such as The Soul Brothers, Soul Vendors and The Sound Dimension, Jackie Mittoo is at the heart of reggae music. He was one of the instigators of Ska, Rocksteady and Reggae. In the seventies, DJ music and Dancehall were based upon classic rhythms of the sixties, many using the instrumental tracks that Jackie Mittoo created at Studio One at this time.

This compilation features the work of Jackie Mittoo at Studio One. It features music recorded as a solo artist (as opposed to the numerous singers that he accompanied). Most of these are taken from his recordings in the mid sixties where he was recording on an almost daily basis at Studio One's Brentford Road studios developing the funky reggae sound that was his trademark.

Soul Jazz Records are releasing this CD as the first of a series of Reggae artists to be covered following the success of the 100% Dynamite releases. Jackie Mittoo is as much an icon of Reggae as he is to fans of Funk music. He is without doubt the funkiest keyboard player ever to come out of Jamaica !

Reviews:

"CD of the Week. The coolest man who ever lived" THE GUARDIAN***** "

Named by MOJO as one of the 100 cult heroes of all time, this is a lovingly curated compilation" THE INDEPENDENT

"After Soul Jazz Records' groundbreaking 100% Dynamite CD's comes Jackie Mittoo. If you've caught the funky reggae bug, you need this" MUZIK

"Rocksteady, compulsively funky Ska and Soul. An excellent Soul Jazz compilation" MOJO

NOW ON CD as deluxe Jap-style hard-cased exact repro digitally remastered box edition with Obi-card.

also:

Superb collectors edition very limited deluxe (1000 copies worldwide ) VINYL ONLY  release on Soul Jazz Records/Universal Sound. bespoke 180gsm remastered audiophile vinyl, w/jap obi strip and thick card sleeve.

This is the extremely rare debut first album from Gilberto Gil, first released in Brazil in 1967, at a time when Gil was a man already at the height of his creative powers and yet barely a few years into his career. 

In 1967 Gil was already established as a Bossa Nova star in Brazil and had helped launch Musica Popular Brasileira, introducing traditional northern folkloric styles into the urban bossa nova style to create a new hybrid that effectively defined Brazilian popular music for the next 25 years.

Just around the corner the musical and cultural anarchy of the Tropicalia movement was about to be created by Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Tom Ze and Os Mutantes. 

Gil had first met Caetano Veloso in Bahia in the early 1960s. Alongside Maria Bethania, Gal Costa and Tom Ze they had formed the Group from Bahia. In 1965 he moved to Sao Paulo to launch his solo career after Elis Regina had a hit with Gil's own composition Louvacao.

This debut 1967 album showed how confident Gil was in his musical inventiveness. As well as the title track, the album includes seminal tracks that have become classics of Brazilian contemporary music. 

Viramundo (later covered by Sergio Mendes) effortlessly blended the north-eastern accordion baiao and xaxado rhythms of Luiz Gonzaga. Procissao, in contrast, took its starting point as the religious processions found in the Afro-Brazilian centre of Salvador. Songs such as Roda, instantly became classics of Brazilian popular music.

Add to this the lyricism of poets and artists Chico Buarque, Torquato Neto, Capinam, Caetano Veloso, Tom Ze and Gil himself and we are presented with one of the most significant debut albums of Brazilian music from one of the most important artists in Brazil to this day.

Soul Jazz Records/Universal Sound are releasing “Soul Translation: A Spiritual Suite" a superb lost USA deep jazz independent private-press album originally self-published by Donald Alexander Strachan and the Freedom Ensemble on Triad Music Concepts in 1975.

This great soulful/spiritual jazz album was the only album that Strachan released and consequently has become a lost rarity -  a must for fans of Tribe, Strata-East and other conscious jazz from the 1970s and features in Gilles Peterson/Soul Jazz Records' Freedom, Rhythm and Sound book.

Donald Alexander Strachan is composer, conductor, guitarist, vocalist and more leading a large 11-piece line-up that includes Jay Hoggard on vibes.

Strachan studied in New York City in the 1970s with composer/saxophonist Sam Rivers and Ghanaian Drum-master Abraham Adzenyah as well as avant-garde guitarist/composer Bruce Johnson all of who helped shape his unique sound.

In the 1980s Strachan entered into the collaborative world of cinema by composing musical scores and has been involved in cinema ever since both musically, as a scriptwriter and director. Donald Alexander Strachan and the Freedom Ensemble’s “Soul Translation: A Spiritual Suite" is a unique product of Strachan’s multicultural and African-American heritage and aesthetic - polyrhythmically complex and spiritually intense.

This is a bespoke high quality hardback-cased Japanese thick card CD edition with exact-reproduction artwork from the original album.

The 180-gram vinyl thick card exact-reproduction artwork is strictly limted to 1000 copies wordwide. 

VINYL COMES WITH FREE DIGITAL DOWNLOAD VOUCHER FROM OUR WEBSITE ONLY!

Soul Jazz Records/Universal Sound are reissuing jazz composer Oliver Lake's Ntu: The Point From Which Creation Begins, his stunning rhythmical Afro-centric deep spiritual jazz debut album originally recorded in 1971. This classic spiritual deep jazz album digitally remastered and cased in bespoke original artwork exact reproduction on hardboard Jap-style box case CD and a very limited (1000 worldwide) heavyweight 180gm audiophile vinyl edition.

This album features in Gilles Peterson/Soul Jazz Records’ own Freedom, Rhythm and Sound large-format book of revolutionary jazz.

Saxophonist Oliver Lake’s unique career path includes working with Lou Reed, A Tribe Called Quest, Bjork, composing for the Brooklyn Philharmonic and as long time member of the avant-garde jazz group World Saxophone Quartet. This genre-defying, wide-ranging and cross-pollinating creativity is a consequence of Lake’s musical roots in the radical Black Arts Movement of 1960s Afro-America.

Oliver Lake’s career began in a creatively charged time and place. In the late 1960s, Lake alongside Julius Hemphill and Charles ‘Bobo’ Shaw, co-founded The Black Artists Group (BAG), the St Louis-based equivalent to Chicago’s Art Ensemble of Chicago/Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians collective.

Out of this BAG collective came many other variant groups and arts projects which included The Human Arts Ensemble, Red Black & Green Solidarity Unit, Onawali Dancers, Malinque Rhythm Tribe, BAG Drama Dept., Great Black Music Orchestra of St. Louis, Fire-Earth-Air-Water, Me We & Them and the Julius Hemphill Quartet.

The first recordings from Oliver Lake and the Black Artist Group collective, true to keeping with the era’s radicalism, self-definition and economical empowerment value system, kept a wide birth from the mainstream music industry and were released on the private pressing record label, Universal Justice, self-distributed at concerts and events.

In 1971, after appearing on two collective projects by The Human Art Ensemble and Children of The Sun, Oliver Lake recorded his own debut album Ntu: The Point From Which Creation Begins, self-financed for release on his own Passin Thru’ record company. However, shortly afterwards the tape of this album was put in storage, as Lake and the other BAG members headed off to Europe in the path of The Art Ensemble of Chicago and other free jazz African-American musicians, many of whom were finding a new open-minded audience across the Atlantic.

Ntu: The Point From Which Creation Begins remained unreleased until 1976 when an association with major label Arista/Freedom issued a number of Lake and the Black Artists Group’s early releases and unreleased tapes. Long unavailable, this album has now itself become a rarity.

Heavily progressive, rhythmical and intense, the album features Lake alongside an all-star cast of St. Louis’s finest radical, avant-garde and deep jazz musicians which includes Joe Bowie (Lester’s brother, who also later formed Defunkt and worked with James White and The Blacks), Don Moye (on loan from the Art Ensemble of Chicago), and regulars such as Charles Bobo Shaw.

Lake returned from Europe to live in New York in the second-half of the 1970s to firmly ensconce himself in the emerging Loft Jazz scene, which soon became the dominant avant-garde movement of this era, and Lake an intrinsic member. At this time Lake also formed the World Saxophone Quartet alongside Julius Hemphill, Hamiet Bluiett and David Murray, which continues it’s own radical path to this day.

Unique collection containing authentic rhythms of Haitian Voodoo drumming. Recorded in Port-au-Prince, Haiti by Soul Jazz Records, this album features The Drummers of the Societe Absolument Guinen.

Voodoo is the African religion at the heart of Haitian life. The complex rhythms of the drums are used to bring down African spirits in Voodoo ceremonies. These drums are the link between the music of Africa and the Caribbean. With links to Cuban Santeria, Jamaican and Trinidadian Afro-religions, Voodoo rhythms are the heaviest, most intense of all. Soul Jazz Records.

REVIEWS

"Soul Jazz yet again come correct with the roots and culture. This amazing set of ritual breakbeats Haitian style has to be the most phenomenal, left field battle breaks album you could imagine. The rhythms used cause spirits to manifest themselves in the physical world, all powerful, some benevolent, others less so. Enjoyable and really quite mind expanding, this is recommended to anyone who thinks traditional music is not for them. Really unparallelled, both in terms of quality and the competition." Boomkat

"Haitian Voodoo is a religion of the new world that came about during the 16th century African slave trade. During their rituals they use drums to bring spirits down to the earth, faccilitating a possession of a worshipper by a specific spirit. Soul Jazz released these pristine recordings and I think it’s one of the best recordings of a drum ensemble I’ve ever heard. It documents the broad tonal range of these drums. I had to check the liner notes to make sure there wasn’t a bass guitar or synthesizer in the mix!" Type

"This record, which consists entirely of recordings of voudou drumming made in Port-Au-Prince, is one of a series of Soul Jazz releases exploring Haitian music, all of which are worth your attention. Nonetheless there's something about the intensity and virtuosity of this particular drums-based album that's particularly transportive. Beautifully recorded so each strike of each drum punches with all the force of an electronic dance music kickdrum, it captures the extraordinary complexity and sophistication of these ceremonial rhythms, which shift, interlock and switch angle of attack with a logic that's near-indecipherable as a listener unable to see visually how they unfold. These drum rituals are central to Haitian voudou, whose roots lie in closely related religions on the West Coast of Africa, and which originated in the 18th century when Haiti was a French slave colony. Their roles in ceremonies seem as complex and detailed as the rhythms themselves, involved in drawing participants together through the shared pulse of the beat and inciting spiritual possession. Yet their power to awe and mesmerise isn't dimmed through being relatively unfamiliar with the traditions that underlie them; these recordings are dynamic and riveting in their intricacy and power." Quietus

"I haven't heard anything quite like this; the rhythms are very deeply orchestrated yet it also sounds like improvisation. There are tonalities and textures coming from this album like I've never heard. A great album by Soul Jazz, it's very well recorded, the drums sound so warm and nuanced, a great representation of each drum in the mix. Some of the sounds I have no idea how they are getting them. I would love to see this group play! As a drummer, this album is bending my ear and setting off the dancing devils in my soul!! Unreal!" Guardian Guide

Soul Jazz Original Brazil Classics:

In 1965, Elis Regina dominated the world of Brazilian music. Riding high on her success, the powerfully-voiced singer was the star of her own television show (O Fino da Bossa), winner of the first national broadcast musical competition (for TV Excelsior) and a stunning live performer on stage.

Having emerged out of the Bossa Nova wave of the early 1960s, Elis Regina's stunning theatrical mixture of boss nova, samba, jazz and other music styles placed her at the top of her profession and her unique style effectively launched MPB (Musica Popular Brasileira), the new post-bossa nova modern musical movement in Brazil that would reign supreme for the next 20 years, as singers such as Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso, Jorge Ben, Chico Buarque and others embraced this new style.

Artistically Elis Regina surrounded herself with only the finest songwriters and musicians such as Edu Lobo, Carlos Lyra, Marcos Valle, Vinicius de Moraes, Baden Powell.

Whilst her music was apolitical, her criticism of the military dictatorship ( from a coup in 1964), led to persecution by the state, at one point the authorities forcing her to sing the Brazilian national anthem at a stadium concert, under threat of her family's safety.

Elis was married twice, first to boss nova songwriter Ronaldo Boscoli and secondly to the musician Cesar Mariano. She tragically died in 1986, aged 36.

Samba, Eu Canto Assim is one of Elis Regina's definitive albums recorded at the height of her career and long regarded as a classic release in Brazil. This is a bespoke high quality box-edition hardback-cased card CD edition of this seminal album with exact-reproduction artwork from the original album. 

Soul Jazz Records/Universal Sounds Original Brazil Classics series.

Following on from our earlier release ‘Avanco’ comes Tempo – an album blending bossa nova and jazz with an unparalleled experimentalism. Originally released in Brazil in 1964, The Tamba Trio’s third album Tempo is a deep bossa jazz masterpiece.

The group were centred around the genius pianist/composer Luiz Eca, alongside Bebeto on flute and bass and Helcio Milito on drums. Emerging out of Brazil’s new Bossa Nova scene at the start of the 1960s, they became the key group of musicians associated with all the major singers of the period - Carlos Lyra, Edu Lobo, Nara Leão, Sylvia Telles and more - as well as a stunning body of work as a group in their own right.

This is a bespoke high quality box-edition CD of this seminal album with exact-reproduction artwork of the original album.

There is also a very collectable limited edition (1000 worldwide), exact-repro vinyl edition with hardback American-pressed sleeve and heavyweight 180 gm vinyl.

In the early 1970s pianist and composer Adegoke Steve Colson and vocalist Iqua Colson were both members of The Association for Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the radical home of jazz music in Chicago, and spiritual home of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

In 1980, Colson released ‘Triumph!’, recorded in Chicago with a stellar line-up of Art Ensemble and AACM members in the group including Joseph Jarman and Doug Ewart. This album was released on the private-press Silver Sphinx label, and distributed mainly in the local Chicago area. Universal Sound/Soul Jazz Records are releasing this extremely rare deep spiritual jazz album for the first time ever as a hardback edition CD and a very limited edition of 1000 –copy exact reproduction vinyl.

American composer and drummer Pheeroan AkLaff's celebrated ‘House of Spirit:Mirth’ features in our recent revolutionary jazz records book (compiled by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker).

This album was originally released in 1979 on the composer Oliver Lake's bespoke private-press label Passin Thru' Inc., a not for profit label 'dedicated to fostering, promoting and advancing the knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the arts'.  Consequently 'House of Spirit' remains one of the most elusive deep jazz releases of its time to collectors.

Aklaff was an original of the Detroit jazz scene of the early 70s alongside musicians of the Tribe (Wendell Harrison, Phil Ranelin, Doug Hammond) and Strata collective (Kenny Cox and Charles Moore) and local luminaries such as Travis Biggs before moving to New York in the mid-1970s to work at the centre of the vibrant Loft/radical jazz scene. Here he worked and recorded with original greats such as Oliver Lake,  Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Davis (with numerous releases on India Navigation and other radical NY avant-jazz labels). At this time Coltrane drummer Rashied Ali became mentor to AkLaff, with Aklaff practically living at Ali's legendary club/live space 'Ali's Alley'.

In the 1980s Aklaff continued his solo career with releases such as 'Fits Like A Glove' (1985), and 'Sonogram' (1989) featuring the cream of the New York 80s avant-garde players (Sonny Sharrock, Geri Allen etc) as well his continued work alongside artists of the calibre of Don Byron, Anne Claudine Myers, Julius Hemphill, Henry Threadgill and Oliver Lake.

‘House of Spirit: Mirth’ is one of the most radical of deep jazz releases of its time. Avant-garde beyond a doubt but with an Afro-centric rhythmical intensity hard to find in the myriad of independent free/loft jazz recorded in New York at the time.

Influenced by Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Duke Ellington and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, AkLaff also studied African drumming travelling to and working in the Ivory Coast, Togo, Swaziland, Malawi, Liberia as well as Nigeria, where he performed with Fela Kuti.

Pheeroan AkLaff currently performs as a solo artist in New York and as part of the Cecil Taylor group. In 2006 he also co-founded Seed Artists Inc. for Artists and Communities, a non-profit organisation promoting inter-generational activities, concerts and music lessons, based in Brooklyn.

This bespoke perfect replica reissue comes in a limited edition hardback box-case CD edition and a very limited  heavyweight vinyl and gatefold sleeve edition of 1000 copies worldwide.

Following on from their recent New Thing album of Deep Jazz in USA (Sun Ra, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Alice Coltrane, Archie Shepp), Soul Jazz Records are re-issuing this lost classic album.

Travis Biggs' "Challenge" is a boogie/jazz-funk/jazz lp originally recorded in Detroit in 1975.

This one off-album initially came out on his own tiny T & C label with a pressing of 500 copies and was used by Travis as a demo.

This is the second of 3 lost albums that Soul Jazz Records are re-issuing following on from first appearing on New Thing. As well as the track "Tibetan Serenity" (as featured on "New Thing" album), the album also includes super-rare versions of Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" and a cover of the Loft/Paradise Garage classic track, Steve Miller's "Fly Like An Eagle".

The second of three albums by Ocho, one of the defining bands of the Latin New York Funk sound. Led by Chico Mendoza, Ocho have been featured heavily in Soul Jazz Records "Nu Yorica" series and these re-issues are the three definitive albums by the group. Along with other artists such as Ray Barretto, Eddie Palmieri, Joe Bataan and Tito Puente, Ocho mixed Latin, Funk and Jazz in equal measure. The music of Ocho has never been fully available in this country before and Soul Jazz Records are releasing them in their entirety for the first time. These releases come on CD and luxury vinyl. Ocho 1 includes "Coco May May" as featured on Nu Yorica. Ocho 2 includes "What are you Doing For The Rest Of Your Life" also featured on the "Nu Yorica" series. And Ocho 3 includes the Latin Funk classic "Hot Pants Road".