Cuba: Music and Revolution: Culture Clash in Havana: Experiments in Latin Music 1975-85 Vol. 1 is the new album compiled by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker (Soul Jazz Records) that explores the many new styles that emerged in Cuba in the 1970s as Jazz, Funk, Brazilian Tropicalia and even Disco mixed together with Latin and Salsa on the island as Cuban artists experimented with new musical forms created in the unique socialist state of Cuba.

The album comes as a heavyweight 3xLP and deluxe 2xCD set, complete with extensive sleeve notes, and is jam-packed with heavy bass lines, synth and Wah-Wah guitar funk combined with the heavyweight percussion, powerful brass lines and the all-encompassing Latin rhythms of Cuban music known throughout the world.

The album is released to coincide with the massive new deluxe large format book Cuba: Music and Revolution: Original Cover Art of Cuban Music: Record Sleeve Designs of Revolutionary Cuba 1959-90, published in November, which is also compiled by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker (Soul Jazz Records), and which features the music and record designs of Cuba, made in the 30-year period following the Cuban Revolution.

The music on this album features legendary Cuban groups such as Irakere, Los Van Van and Pablo Milanés as well as a host of lesser known artists such as the radical Grupo De Experimentación, Juan Pablo Torres and Algo Nuevo, Grupo Monumental and Orquesta Ritmo Oriental, groups whose names remain largely unknown outside of Cuba owing to the now 60-year old US trade embargo which remains in place today and which prevents trade with Cuba – and thus most Cuban records were only ever available in Cuba or in ex-Soviet Union states.

The music on this album reflects the most cutting-edge of Cuban groups that were recording in Cuba in the 1970s and 1980s – who were all searching for a new Cuban identity and new musical forms that reflected both the Afro-Cuban cultural heritage of a nation that gave birth to Latin music - and its new position as a socialist state. Most of the music featured on this album have never been heard outside of Cuba.

Both Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker have been involved in Cuban music for more than two decades – Gilles Peterson with his many Havana Cultura projects for his Brownswood label and Stuart Baker with a number of Soul Jazz Records albums recorded in Cuba. This Soul Jazz Records album is released in conjunction with Egrem, the Cuban state record company, and has been put together after the many crate-digging trips that both compilers have made on the streets of Havana and beyond in Cuba stretching over a 20-year period, searching out rare and elusive original Cuban vinyl records.

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REVIEWS:

"It may only be January, but we already have a strong contender for 'compilation of the year'. Put together by devout crate-diggers and Cuban music enthusiasts Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker (founder of Soul Jazz Records)" JUNO

"It's abundantly clear that these compilers are at the very top of their game. Everything here was previously unheard outside of Cuba, making this a feast for the curious" Vinyl District

"Priceless comp goes beyond Buena Vista" UNCUT

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*Please note the vinyl sticker of this album says "+download code" but it's a mistake! There is no download with this particular album due to legal reasons. Sorry for this error!

Seriously rare, killer and classic Nigerian 70s Afro-Funk, Afro-Disco & Afro-Rock tunes bought together.

Originally released as a now-long-out-of-print collectors’ 7” RSD box, this fully expanded album release now also includes extra tracks from Sonny Okosuns, Wings, Chief Kollington Ayinla and more.

Soul Jazz Records’ Nigeria Soul Power 70 album showcases the influence of funk, rock and disco on Nigerian music during the 1970s

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While for many people the fusion of funk and jazz music with Nigerian rhythms and aesthetics began with Fela Kuti and his afro-beat sound, in fact this can be traced further back to the phenomena of the 1960s Nigerian artists and house bands in nightclubs and hotels who interpreted US soul and pop music with a local flavour and none more so than Geraldo Pino, the ‘African James Brown’ who features heavily in this collection. Other similarly inspired Nigerian funk and soul artists featured here included Tony Grey and his Ozimba Messengers and Don Bruce and The Angels.

Nigeria Soul Power 70 includes a number of tracks from the group Wings originally known as BAF (Biafran Air Force) Wings, an army band formed during the Biafran civil war in Nigeria. The groups’ heavy mixture of funk, rock and African styles was popular among many Nigerian groups at the time.

Beneath the shadow of the few Nigerian artists who signed international recording deals in the 1970s – Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, Chief Ebenezer Obey – lies a vast wealth of largely undiscovered musical transmutation and cultural cross-pollination, and included here are heavy afro-funk/rock and disco tracks from artists such as the legendary Sonny Okosuns as well as rare cuts from little-known outside of Nigeria - groups such as Colomach and MFB. Most of these obscure artists signed to major labels in Nigeria in the commercial slipstream that opened up as Philips, Decca and EMI tried to emulate the international success of the big three international Nigerian artists.

Finally featured here is Kollington Ayinla, one of the co-founders of Nigerian Fuji music, who gives us perhaps the heaviest of all tracks on this album. Ayinla is the great moderniser of the Fuji sound and in the late 1970s began adding Bata drums and synthesizers to his authentic music to create a powerful and heavy new fusion of traditional and modernist aesthetics, embracing both new technology and experimentation while rooted firmly in Nigerian historical lineage.

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Nigeria Soul Power 70 is released as a heavyweight gatefold double vinyl LP (+ free download code), deluxe slipcase CD and digital album.

This was the first night that our club moved to the new venue - there was a queue 500-long of people waiting to get in, Roots Manuva guested, Japanese TV crews, just 100 yards from our first venue (The Blue Angel) , Electrowerkz was the best venue going at the time - a massive old factory/warehouse building whose only other night was the gothic/industrial Slimelight which may well still be running today

Oh yes! 50 x 70cm KILLER poster!!

Choose "Poster Freepost" if you want this poster sent with any other vinyl order item (LP/12" vinyl only) at NO extra postage charge (poster will be folded into six parts)

Choose "Poster+Tube" if you want the poster rolled up and sent in a customised, protective tube (more expensive to cover postage)

THIS ALSO means if you want more than one poster then you should only put 'Poster+Tube' for one of the posters and select 'Poster freepost' for any others as the rest will be free shipping.

This is the new digitally remastered expanded edition of Soul Jazz Records’ biggest ever selling reggae release, 100% Dynamite: Ska, Soul, Rocksteady and Funk in Jamaica.

If you didn't get it the first time now's your chance to find out where it all began - all killer no filler!. If you did and wore it out get it now with bonus tracks and free download code!

Since the album’s original release nearly twenty years ago, 100% Dynamite has become a cornerstone of funky reggae music: Eighteen killer tracks that show the influence that American Jazz, Funk and Soul music had on Jamaican Reggae.

100% Dynamite features come serious Jamaican funk by Jackie Mittoo, The Upsetters and Toots & The Maytals, the cream of Jamaica's jazz musicians such as Tommy McCook, Cedric Brooks and Lennie Hibbert. Also included here are heavyweight Reggae versions to Soul classics by Marlena Shaw’s ‘Woman of the Ghetto’, Aretha Franklin’s ‘Rocksteady’, Syl Johnson’s ‘Is It Because I’m Black’, William DeVaughan’s seminal ‘Be Thankful’ and more.

100% Dynamite also features revolutionary tunes such as Johnny Osbourne’s ‘We Need Love, Sound Dimension’s ‘Drum Song’ and Lloyd Robinson’s ‘Cuss Cuss’, songs that helped define a unique sound for Jamaican music in the sixties and seventies.

These influences went both ways – check Brentford All Stars massive ‘Greedy G’, the basis for Boogie Down Productions’ ‘Jack of Spades’, or Willie Williams’ ‘Armagideon Time’ later covered by The Clash.

This new expanded edition features seminal tracks from the greatest Jamaican producers – Clement Dodd, Lee Perry, Winston Riley (Techniques) and many more.

The album is available as CD, heavyweight double vinyl (+download), plus digital.

ORIGINAL REVIEWS

"Compilation of the month" MUZIK

"Brilliant" TIME OUT

"Album of the week" MIXMAG

"Compilation of the f***ing year" MELODY MAKER

"Buy this excellent compilation immediately" MOJO

"I think there’s a good argument to be made for 100% and 300% Dynamite records - along with Dave Godin’s Deep Soul Treasures (Taken From The Vaults) – Vol 1 & 2, Motown Chartbusters Vol. 3 and Blue Note: Blue Juice Vol. One - being among the finest compilations ever assembled. Anyone who has never heard Sister Nancy’s ‘Bam Bam’ or the Brentford Allstars' 'Greedy G' needs to remedy that situation straight away and anyone who is tired of hearing Althea & Donna’s ‘Uptown Top Ranking’, Willie Williams' 'Armageddon Time' and Wayne Smith’s ‘Under Me Sleng Teng’ needs to have a word with themselves anyway." THE QUIETUS

This is our CLASSIC Soul Jazz Records 12" Bag (Navy blue/White). 100% Essential!

Get down with the get down! Fantastic new season colours in Soul Jazz Records' classic 12" & 7" Record Bags (holds about 30LPs). Fantastic for DJing, impressing your stylish friends or just 'carrying stuff'.

As well as the classic blue bag with white strap and stripes these are now available in limited edition red, green, cyan and more with matching straps - 'nuff colours!

Available now on DVD (and separate bargain-priced CD soundtrack with bonus tracks).

“135 Grand Street, New York, 1979 is invaluable. No Wave music and cinema didn’t just share a name. They were perhaps more intimately related than any other concurrent movements in the history of those two media.”

“Ericka Beckman’s film finds these ensembles deconstructing rock with unpretentious vitality and uncompromised vision. … Remarkably kinetic performances.” Marc Masters (Author of ‘No Wave’) THE WIRE

Ericka Beckman’s film captures the driving energy and posturing of early No Wave bands’ performing live in a sparse downtown loft. Featured bands include Theoretical Girls, UT, A Band, Rhys Chatham, Chinese Puzzle, The Static, Morales, Youth in Asia, Morales, Steven Piccolo and Jill Kroesen.

‘135 Grand Street, New York, 1979’ is a unique film capturing both the aural and visual aesthetics of New York’s No Wave scene in its ascendant. Punk rock and non-musicianship fight it out with art world attitude. Garage band line-ups in varying degrees of musical destruction sit alongside post-everything poetry and experimental noise terrorists. Ericka Beckman’s film matches the rawness, minimalism and radicalism of the music - a fitting document and visual statement of new forms created out of New York’s anti-everything musical nihilism, circa 1979.

‘135 Grand Street, New York, 1979’ is history. It includes the only known footage of the Theoretical Girls, The Static and a number of other No Wave bands of the period. This is a film about bands filled with painters, filmmakers, actors - and occasionally musicians - thriving and thrashing in the pulsating, vibrant post-punk world of New York where high art met low culture, where Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Wharton Tiers, Taro Suzuki and the others featured here made the connections between John Cage and Joey Ramone, between the questioning of art and ? and the Mysterians.

The film is currently showing as part of Sonic Youth’s ‘Sensational Fix’ touring art exhibition as well as being screened before Glenn Branca’s most recent shows in New York City (Sep 2009).

"If you wanna see what the Soho side of No Wave looked like this is the only place you're ever gonna find it" Glenn Branca

This is the soundtrack to 135 Grand Street, New York, 1979 also released by Soul Jazz Records on DVD. The CD includes all the bands featured in the film ( and comes with bonus tracks not in the film). Wild, raw No Wave meets garage band meets post-punk. Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Evan Lurie (Lounge Lizards), visual artists Frank Schneider and Robert Longo, Wharton TIers are just some of the people in the bands. Check out this bargain price CD!

Choose "Poster Freepost" if you want this poster sent with any other vinyl order item (LP/12" vinyl only) at NO extra postage charge (poster will be folded into six parts)

Choose "Poster+Tube" if you want the poster rolled up and sent in a customised, protective tube (more expensive to cover postage)

THIS ALSO means if you want more than one poster then you should only put 'Poster+Tube' for one of the posters and select 'Poster freepost' for any others as the rest will be free shipping.

This is our CLASSIC ORIGINAL 7" Record Bag (Navy blue/white). 100% Essential!

Get down with the get down! Fantastic new season colours in Soul Jazz Records' classic 12" & 7" Record Bags (holds about 50 7"s). Fantastic for DJing, impressing your stylish friends or just 'carrying stuff'.

As well as the classic blue bag with white strap and stripes these are now available in limited edition red, green, cyan and more with matching straps - 'nuff colours!

Fantastic new deluxe large format hardback 12" x 12" book from Soul Jazz Books featuring 100 years of photography in the Caribbean.

From Calypso to Vodou, Communism to Reggae, Colonialism and the Slave Trade, Rum and Revolution, Industry and Tourism – over 100 years of photographing the Caribbean is captured in this book.

The image of the Caribbean is as much a creation of the outsider as it is the complex identity of its people – a melting pot of races created out of the participants of the 400 year slave trade – enforced Africans, indigenous Americans and their colonisers – French, Spanish, Dutch, English.

From luscious and tropical backdrop of tourism and hedonism, to colonial outpost and revolutionary threat within North America’s own backyard the identity of the Caribbean stands at this intersection of tourism, the detritus of the slave trade and tropicality.

The regions politics span a hot bed of ideas and radicalism – from Castro’s Cuba, communist thorn in the side of North America, to the violent right-wing dictatorship of Haiti’s Papa Doc in the 1960s; also from Michael Manley’s Jamaica in the 1970s to Eric Williams’ Trinidad in the 1960s.

Hundreds of fascinating and unique photographs span more than one hundred years of Caribbean history, culture and industry as well as the subsequent diaspora of its people to America, England, Canada and elsewhere.

FOREWORD BY PAUL GILROY. EDITED BY STUART BAKER.

Paul Gilroy is the author of The Black Atlantic (1993),There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), Black Britain - A Photographic History (2004) and more.

Stuart Baker is the founder of Soul Jazz Records.

FEATURES:

See Guardian newspaper cover story/4-page feature/gallery here

Soul Jazz Records’ new album 90 Degrees of Shade features the music of the Caribbean – Mambo, Calypso, Mento, Merengue, Latin Jazz and much more. The music of Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and more all feature in this lightning journey through the many island sounds.

This is the sound of independence, righteous and hot jump-up sounds from the 1950s and 60s, an exciting period of endless new musical styles that would travel across the world – Mento, the Jamaican precursor to reggae; mambos and descargas from Cuba, Dominican merengue, Haitian compas – and more.

This album coincides with the release of Soul Jazz Records’ massive new deluxe large format hardback book 90 Degrees of Shade: 100 Years of Photography In The Caribbean (with foreward by Paul Gilroy) featuring hundreds of fascinating and unique photographs spanning one hundred years of Caribbean history.

The new album comes as a deluxe two-CD pack complete with large outsize booklet, packed full of info and original artwork. There are also two limited edition separate heavyweight double LP vinyl editions, each one housed in gatefold sleeves complete with insert, full text and free download code. Also comes as a worldwide digital release.

Oh yes! 50 x 70cm KILLER poster!!

Choose "Poster Freepost" if you want this poster sent with any other vinyl order item (LP/12" vinyl only) at NO extra postage charge (poster will be folded into six parts)

Choose "Poster+Tube" if you want the poster rolled up and sent in a customised, protective tube (more expensive to cover postage)

THIS ALSO means if you want more than one poster then you should only put 'Poster+Tube' for one of the posters and select 'Poster freepost' for any others as the rest will be free shipping.

Stone-cold classic Studio One on limited-edition brand new 7" - loud, clean, boom!

ALL TIME ROOTS ANTHEM!

NEW ORLEANS  funky boogie soul disco bomb 45!

Latest Soul Jazz Records/Sounds of the Universe SOUL 7-inch series - after the now sold out Brief Encounter 'Human' 45.

A massive slice of New Orleans genius - arranged by Wardell Quezergue, produced by Senator Jones, originally released locally in New Orleans in 1979.

It's a bomb! Exact replica reproduction, wicked sound, killer funky soul boogie 7" 45!

THIS 7-inch can ONLY be bought directly here from Soul Jazz Records or Sounds of the Universe websites and shop. It is a very limited 500-copies pressing and you need to buy it now!

Super special 20th anniversary SILVER vinyl!

Incredibly inspired electronic retro-futurists who were so ahead of their time that they eventually imploded. This is a classic album!

In the space of five short years (and as many albums) at the end of the 20th century Add N To X caused havoc with their unique retro-futurist electronic music. Add N To X’s musical intensity proved too much for the group who split up in 2002. Their album On The Wires of Our Nerves, complete with its classic cover image, recorded on Soul Jazz Records’ then new offshoot label Satellite Records, launched them into the spotlight and included two NME Singles of the Week ‘Black Regent’ and ‘King Wasp’. Over twenty years since it was first released and long out of print the album 'On The Wires of Our Nerves’ stands up one of the most forward-looking electronic albums of then and now.

This classic album is released in a very limited one-off pressing transparent vinyl edition as an Record Store Day exclusive title

"A devastating album of epic dancefloor rituals and visions from Jamal Moss (Hieroglyphic Being) and Noleian Reusse in their prized Africans With Mainframes guise, amounting to their most substantial and impressive collection." BOOMKAT

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This album is available as a very limited 1000 double-LP (+download) and 1000- tip-on hard Japanese gatefold card style CD, digital album all designed by the artist Paolo Parisi.

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Jamal Moss, aka Hieroglyphic Being, returns for a new second album on Soul Jazz Records, after last year’s debut The Acid Documents. this time under the name Africans with Mainframes.

Hieroglyphic Being and fellow Chicago producer Noleian Reusse have been releasing music under the name Africans with Mainframes for over 15 years now, ever since their debut on Hieroglyphic Being’s own Mathematics Recordings label in 2005. ‘K.M.T.’ is the debut album from the group, a collage of apocalyptic Chicago acid meets industrial and transcendental post-house machine funk. 

Both intense and unique, the album of forward-thinking, experimental, boundary-pushing Afro-futurist electronic music shows why Hieroglyphic Being is regarded as one of the most serious purveyors of experimental black music today. You can't stop the prophet!

Born and based in Chicago, Moss’s music embodies two of the cultural foundation blocks of the city’s musical lineage; that of Chicago’s original Acid House sound (c. 1986), that of Frankie Knuckles, Phuture, Marshall Jefferson et al, alongside a rigorous experimental sound searching that taps into the cosmic musical lineage of pioneering artist Sun Ra whose Arkestra landed and was based in the city from 1946-61.

Similarly his relationship to Chicago’s original acid house pioneers of the late 80s is no hyperbole. Originally mentored by artist/producers Adonis and Steve Pointdexter, Moss also now runs his own Mathematics label which has released music by foundation acid house pioneers Lil’ Louis, Adonis and many others. To quote Moss, ‘I am the last of the line of producers directly influenced by Ron Hardy (the pioneering acid house DJ) at the Music Box.’

Moss grew up in the south side of Chicago. After being thrown out of the home of his adoptive parents, he then spent three years homeless living on the streets of Chicago, living a nocturnal existence as a gigolo in Chicago’s alternative clubs. He began his career as a DJ at the pioneering Liquid Love parties at Chi-town’s legendary Power House (home of Ron Hardy’s MusicBox) around 1989.

What clearly defines Moss’s music is that while sometimes pushing the limits of sound to an ear-splitting dimension of experimentation and DIY-electronics – the music is always clearly a progression of the lineage of black music. In the words of fellow Chicagoans, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, it is simply ‘Great Black Music.’ And yet in this uniquely defined sound, Moss somehow manages to draw into this world elements of industrial music, German electronic music (Cluster, Harmonia etc), Detroit’s sci-fi techno artists (Atkins, Saunderson, Craig) and more.

Soul Jazz Records are re-releasing Airto Moreira’s classic album ‘Samba de Flora’, out of print for 30 years ever since its original release in 1988. The album is very limited to just 1000 copies only, pressed on both vinyl and CD.

The impact of Airto Moreira in both the world of American jazz and in Brazilian music is unparalleled. At the start of the 1970s Airto was invited to join Miles Davis’ groundbreaking ‘electric’ group, which with albums such as the seminal ‘Bitches Brew’ helping Davis regain his title from John Coltrane as the most important jazz artist of all time.

Two years later Airto helped establish two of the most important jazz fusion groups of all time: Weather Report, with Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul and Miroslav Vituous; and Return to Forever, with Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Flora Purim.

Airto Moreira also began his solo career in the USA in 1970, and alongside his wife, the singer Flora Purim, and Brazilian artists such as Hermeto Pascoal, Sivuca, Deodato, Raul de Souza, Azymuth, all played a major part in the Latinised sound of American jazz fusion throughout the 1970s.

By this time Airto established himself in the USA in the 1970s, he had already had a formidable career back in Brazil in the 1960s as an important figure in the Bossa Nova movement, which soon after spread throughout the world. Airto played in a number of important groups during this time – Quarteto Novo Sambalanco Trio and Sambrassa Trio (all of with Hermeto Pascoal) – which proved to be three of the most ground-breaking groups of this era.

The album ‘Samba de Flora’, including the seminal jazz dance title track, is a masterpiece of jazz and Brazilian fusion and features Airto Moreira alongside Flora Purim, fellow Brazilian artist Raul de Souza and heavyweight USA jazz musicians Alphonso Johnson, percussionist Don Alias (from Stone Alliance), Cuban conga player Cachete and Argentinian pianist Jorge Dalto.

The album was originally released on the small independent Montuno Record label (which was run out of the unassuming Record Mart record store situated in the Times Square underground subway station!) and has been unavailable for many, many years.

This album is fully re-mastered and re-released by Soul Jazz Records for the first time ever, packaged in full original artwork on both vinyl (+ download code) and CD.

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.

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. 

Get down with the get down! Fantastic new season colours in Soul Jazz Records' classic 12" & 7" Record Bags (holds about 30 LPs). Fantastic for DJing, impressing your stylish friends or just 'carrying stuff'.

As well as the classic blue bag with white strap and stripes these are now available in limited edition red, green, cyan and more with matching straps - 'nuff colours!

Get down with the get down! Fantastic new season colours in Soul Jazz Records' classic 12" & 7" Record Bags (holds about 30 LPs). Fantastic for DJing, impressing your stylish friends or just 'carrying stuff'.

As well as the classic blue bag with white strap and stripes these are now available in limited edition red, green, cyan and more with matching straps - 'nuff colours!

Get down with the get down! Fantastic new season colours in Soul Jazz Records' classic 12" & 7" Record Bags (holds about 50 7"s). Fantastic for DJing, impressing your stylish friends or just 'carrying stuff'.

As well as the classic blue bag with white strap and stripes these are now available in limited edition red, green, cyan and more with matching straps - 'nuff colours!

Get down with the get down! Fantastic new season colours in Soul Jazz Records' classic 12" & 7" Record Bags (holds about 50 7"s). Fantastic for DJing, impressing your stylish friends or just 'carrying stuff'.

As well as the classic blue bag with white strap and stripes these are now available in limited edition red, green, cyan and more with matching straps - 'nuff colours!

Get down with the get down! Fantastic new season colours in Soul Jazz Records' classic 12" & 7" Record Bags (holds about 30 LPs). Fantastic for DJing, impressing your stylish friends or just 'carrying stuff'.

As well as the classic blue bag with white strap and stripes these are now available in limited edition red, green, cyan and more with matching straps - 'nuff colours!

Get down with the get down! Fantastic new season colours in Soul Jazz Records' classic 12" & 7" Record Bags (holds about 30 LPs). Fantastic for DJing, impressing your stylish friends or just 'carrying stuff'.

As well as the classic blue bag with white strap and stripes these are now available in limited edition red, green, cyan and more with matching straps - 'nuff colours!