Chocolate Milk Action Speaks Louder Than Words

Rare groove classic! Bernard Wright was part of the Tom Browne/Don Blackman crew that emerged from a musical academy in Queens NY in the late seventies and set the soul/boogie/jazz fusion world alight!

Super funky album that contains some well known samples!

Recommended!

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

Super funky Herbie Hancock spin-off project featuring the musicians from his classic 'Headhunters' album. Includes the ultimate funk track "God Made Me Funky"!

You need this album! 

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.

Killer, killer Brazil - jazz fusion with the incredible Batucada of 'Braun Blek Blue'. Essential!

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

Very highly recommended!

Definitive collaboration between Terry Callier and Charles Stepney for Cadet. Features "Dancing Girl" and "You Goin Miss Your Candyman"

Wicked collection from the man - NUFF tunes!

New Orleans funk produced by Allen Toussaint

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".

Classic, radical mid-70's album from Gil and The Midnight Band featuring "The Liberation Song", "Ain't No Such Thing As Superman" and the live spoken word/poem "Pardon Our Analysis"

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!

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

Andrew Hill's best album, very highy recommended!

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!

A change of style musically as Gil moves from his early/mid-seventies Midnight Band to a sparser keyboard sound provided by partner Brian Jackson on gems such as "Racetrack In France" and "We Almost Lost Detroit".

MONSTER deep jazz with vocals from Jean Carn. Essential reissue!

Stroboscopic Artefacts releases ‘X – Ten Years Of Artefacts’, a 13-track album curated by label head Lucy featuring genre-defining tracks from Rrose, Lotus Eater, Lucy, James Ruskin, Shifted, Alessandro Adriani and more.

Soul Jazz Records are releasing this first ever collection of the pioneering British reggae Lovers Rock group Brown Sugar including rare singles, dubs and extended mixes. The album comes with extensive sleevenotes and interviews with Dennis Bovell, Pauline Catlin, John Kpiaye and Winston Edwards (Studio 16).

Brown Sugar were formed by three young teenage girls – Pauline Catlin, Caron Wheeler and Carol Simms in South London in 1976. In the short period of time 1976-1980, the group – working with Dennis Bovell on the mixing desk and John Kpiaye (‘Brownie T) in the studio – recorded barely a handful of singles on the new Lovers Rock label, a number of which went to the top of the UK reggae charts. But success stopped there, and with no album release and no industry support the group broke up in the early 1980s.

Following their split Caron Wheeler became the lead vocalist for the hugely successful group Soul II Soul, Carol Simms launched a solo career as Kofi (re-making a number of Brown Sugar songs with producer Mad Professor) and Pauline Catlin returned to education.

Despite their relatively low-key mainstream public exposure Brown Sugar (and the label on which their first records appeared) announced to the world a new genre of reggae music, Lovers Rock, which spoke for the first time with the sensibility of a new segment of British society; that of first generation-born Black British female youth.

And while Lovers Rock became synonymous with sweet love songs, Brown Sugar’s music in fact expressed far more; a righteous pride and consciousness in being Black and British, a political stance more often associated with UK roots groups like Black Slate, Aswad, Misty in Roots and other British reggae acts in the late 1970s. Brown Sugar were in fact their own genre of ‘conscious lovers rock’ – an expression of ideological black cultural pride.

Brown Sugar’s handful of three-minute love songs (often plus extended dubs) somehow manage to encapsulate all the complexities of identity, sexual politics and youthful righteousness of Afro-Caribbean youth living in Britain in the 1970s. Songs such as ‘I’m in Love with A Dreadlocks’, ‘Our Reggae Music’, ‘Black Pride’ and ‘Dreaming of Zion’ spoke with a straightforward righteousness and consciousness that few roots groups could hope to match. The fact that they were all teenagers is even more striking.

In the mid-70s British reggae came into being as first generation Black Britain was able to find a voice able to express the issues of growing up British with Caribbean roots. This came about in two different ways – the British roots music of (essentially male) groups such as Aswad, Steel Pulse and Black Slate – and Lovers Rock, the expression of a black essentially (but not totally) female consciousness – Brown Sugar, Louisa Mark, 15-16-17, Marie Pierre, Janet Kay, Carroll Thompson, Jean Adebambo and others. And significantly, while British roots music was a variant on a Jamaican style, Lovers Rock was uniquely British – the first authentic British reggae sound.

Dennis Bovell comments, “For Lovers Rock we needed a pulpit, a way of saying ‘this is the style’. Sound systems were already saying ‘this is lovers,’ brandishing it in the dance. Our intention was to create a style of music that my generation could identify with – one that had a beat, and you could dance to with your partner in a sound system setting.”

Dennis Bovell’s mixes for the group gave a further dimension to Brown Sugar records – a sound system mentality, adding sound effects and dub elements. ‘I’m in Love with A Dreadlocks’ was the debut release for both Brown Sugar and the Lovers Rock label, a fitting calling card for both. The record was a hit on many sound systems across the UK, reaching the top of the reggae charts.

John Kpiaye: “They never put out an album. And all these records were seven-inch singles; when 12-inches turned up it just killed the seven-inch.”

Although the career of Brown Sugar was short-lived, their legacy and influence remains significant and now, 40 years on from these first records, all of the members are still involved in music. Pauline Catlin has recently re-launched her career under a new moniker, Shezekiel; Carol Simms, aka Kofi, remains a successful solo artist, one of the queens of Lovers Rock; Caron Wheeler, after leaving Soul II Soul at the end of the 1980s, embarked on a solo career, before re-joining the soul super-group which she continues to front to this day.

This new collection brings together all the groups essential recordings for the first ever time and is released as double gatefold heavyweight vinyl + free download (+ full sleevenotes), CD with large booklet, and digital album.

The highly anticipated album debut from Rrose! 'Hymn to Moisture' is the point where forward-thinking techno music converges with the uncharted depths of experimentalism and electronic psychedelia. Absolutely essential!

Essential funk album, includes the classic "Blow Your Head" ! As serious as it gets - "Damn Right", 'Blow Your Head", "Same Beat", "Watergate' and more. Every home should have this album.

100% Stone-cold rare groove classic. "Walk that Walk" is a heavyweight monster tune. ESSENTIAL!

By 1974, 31 year-old Weldon Irvine was ready for the next phase of his career. Having spent years working variously as a pianist, band leader, composer, arranger and road manager with the likes of Joe Henderson and Nina Simone, his breakout moment as a solo artist finally came in 1974, when he signed with RCA Records. Finally backed with a budget that could match his ambitions, Irvine's first release was Cosmic Vortex, a sprawling, monumental work that embodied a musician at the height of his powers. The result is an album that molds his jazz instincts for free-form improvisation to fit a deep funk aesthetic, but also matched with strong, spiritual lyrics.