Funk | Soul 402 Items

Plus 4 Unreleased Bonus Songs! This is a band project from the late 1960s with a very young Bobby Marin, a leading figure in the invention of BOOGALOO music, a cocktail of Latin music, Rhythm & Blues, Soul and Rock’n’Roll oft he day clearly geared towards the western pop music that made the top of the charts. As he grew up on 107th Street in Harlem / NYC he and his mates played a game called Stickball during the day which is a street variation of baseball originating from the New York area while at night he rehearsed with a doo wop ensemble named THE LATIN CHORDS and others from his team got together in a percussion group in buildings on the opposite site of the street. It was no miracle that both groups soon merged into one act that became the 107TH STREET STICKBALL TEAM producing this sole LP in 1969 with a 7“ decoupled probably upfront that featured the two album tracks „On old Broadway“ and „Mojo shingaling“. Well shaped originals of the full length vinyl go for 200,00 € now as a mono pressing, while even those which fetch lower prices never fall beyond 100,00 €. Therefore this reissue on Everland Records suits us fans of outstanding 1960s music fairly well with even four bonus tracks added that band leader Marin unearthed from his personal vaults. This is clearly a typical album in the field of BOOGALOO music of the later 1960s. Western popular music such as beat with British roots, American soul music with lush arrangements and orchestration and the well known elements of bossa nova, salsa, cha cha cha and merengue team up in an exciting sound that gave us some very intense albums during the short span of it’s real popularity in between 1966 and 1969 around NYC but also far out in the latin world. The anthems of one’s life in the Bronx or in Harlem given by the likes of Tito Puente could be felt pouring out of the relaxed, yet intensely pulsating rhythms from drums and percussion on this record while the melodic constructions on top of this groundwork were either soul inspired such as with the hauntingly dreamy opener „On old broadway“ with a great pop appeal and beautiful horn section and vocal arrangements, had a bluesy approach such as the ballad „Look to me“ in three – quarter time at first but adopting a latin melody and cha cha cha beat towards the end of the song or showed a 1960s pop beat affinity with the vocal melodies on top of a bed of ever grooving mid paced salsa rhythms with powerful horns accompanying the basic structures as you can hear it in the two minute shorty you put a hurt in my heart. But this was only one side oft he coin. There were even more traditional latin songs to be found here which were even sung in Spanish. „Toma Guajira“ could easily be an evergreen on the dancefloor in every bar in Havanna. The mixture was breathtaking for you did not get away from dancing and twirling to the enthralling rhythms upon which sometimes the instruments could take a frantic path such as the organs or the saxophone in the soul inspired instrumental „Barbara with the kooky eyes“, which has this typical late 60s atmosphere. Wherever you put the needle in the groove the music will grab you by the heart and legs. The four bonus tracks fit well with the original album and if you would not know they were added only for this reissue you would never realize they would have stayed unreleased for about 50 years. „Come live with me“ is a hot blooded latin groover with a late 50s soul and doo wop feel merged with cumbia and salsa elements. The melodies drag you straight into the clubs of Cuba’s capital. „Rosemary with the funny knees“ is rather modern soul pop and Northern soul of the day in which more of these Cuban aspects appear for a moment but with the late 60s sound prevailing. It feels like the band drifts from one one world into the other and back without losing a beat. „Hey mama“ is a cross of 60s doo wop vocal music and Latin sounds that makes up a prototypical boogaloo style dance floor sweeper. „Lost in the jungle“ adds some 1950s exotica elements to the haunting 60s pop with latin rhythm groundwork and once more frantic performances from the horns and the singers make it an instant classic. I could go on raving about this album but instead I recommend to buy a copy of the reissue and get the full boogaloo experience. If I should limit myself to only one record from this style it would certainly be this.

With the announcement of their long awaited, highly anticipated debut full length
release, 79.5 drops a new and revamped version of their underground classic
Boy Don’t Be Afraid. Producer Leon Michels took it back in the studio and made it into
a proper two stepper, slowed it down a touch, and added percussion and Wurly. The result
is another sure shot side for the dance floor from one of New York City’s most adored
underground acts. Like many of the girl group classics, Boy Don't Be Afraid is a song about
love. But beyond that, it is a song about being—being hopeful, being romantic, being brave.
A romantic stance and a declaration of love through melody.
The B Side, I Stay, You Stay is a beautiful number about meeting in the middle and a
testament to a woman’s intuition. A love song starting in hesitation, walking through
admiration, and ending in certainty and gratitude. The ladies weave this tale trading leads
and combining voices seamlessly over the band’s signature in the pocket drums and bass,
rhodes chords, and flute flourishes. I Stay, You Stay is a perfect example of one of the
defining things about 79.5 and why they are known as the “Mid Tempo Maidens”, as the
lyrics reflect “they don’t have to rush, they have lots of time”.

Here comes the highly anticipated album release from Aaron Abernathy featuring Black Milk, Deborah Bond, Nat Turner, Phonte (of Little Brother + The Foreign Exchange), Zo!

Aaron Abernathy, is a jazz pianist/soul singer and multi-talented entertainer. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Abernathy comes from a long-line of historical pioneers including Civil Rights Leader, Rev. Ralph David Abernathy and student of the same high school music program as the late R&B great Gerald Levert.

He joined the ranks of artists like Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack as a graduate from the prestigious music program at Howard University, where he sharpened his piano playing and musicianship by majoring in jazz piano. With outstanding talents as both a pianist and a vocalist, he has acted as musical director for global touring acts Black Milk and Slum Village and collaborated with Grammy-nominated artists including Jack White, The Foreign Exchange, and Eric Roberson.

In the great and ongoing culture war between high and low, raw and refined, the real versus popular, certain territories have been ceded: styles
considered mainstream get to be pretty, lovely and optimistic. Styles originating underground are presumed to be gritty, burly and practical.
So it’s a subversion of a kind, and definitely an intellectual challenge, to bathe a foreboding bass line in a lilt. To make gloomy shine. To trojan
horse some heavy feelings in a delicate vocal.
Adrian Younge’s Voices of Gemma embodies the potential of the hybrid. By just saying no to the borders a label like underground might impose
on a creativity like his, he’s able to fashion a sound that elbows its way past your defenses, whatever they are. You don’t want to hear anything
grim today? Had enough of that on the news, thanks? Younge has a couple of angels on hand to waft a hard truth over so that when it hits it
feels like a kiss. Sick of the saccharine piped over aisle 4 at Walgreens? Younge’s palming you a melody fit for impending doom.
Voices of Gemma comes from Younge’s refusal to accept the premise. His stance is there in every artist’s job description — the determination
to suction up sounds and flavors and phrases from all over the past and present and imagined and documented, and then splice and dissolve
what he finds into more possibilities and new ways of seeing, something fresh.
On this project his songs are precise, the set ups delivered with a satiny finish and, in the low end, just a hint of louche. His characters are
lyrically poised, but when it comes to their emotional lives, as portrayed melodically, it’s one cliffhanger after another. Younge’s female leads
take up residence in their upper register, a fairytale landscape pierced only once by a man’s voice. The dreamy, internal feeling singers Brooke
deRosa and Rebecca Engelhardt conjure up is tethered to the earth by music that’s filmic and deeply intelligent. Here there are easter eggs left
in accent notes and fills. Care has has been given to every detail, and the old way of doing a thing (bring in an orchestra, record to tape) is the
way its done; it’s like listening to a five-star hotel.
Voices of Gemma is luxurious, a style that we forgot could be present day, as accustomed as we are to sampled and thrice-removed versions
of it. This is high-class signified, a world-class realization.

It was made the way they made electronic music in the good old days, all analog everything, right after synthesizers shrunk to a manageable size and you didn’t have to trek down to a university to use one anymore. Electronic music as practiced and developed by pioneers like Dick Hyman and Raymond Scott and Wendy Carlos is precise and intentional. In making his first electronic album, Younge took his cues from them, reminding a contemporary audience what a synthesizer, deep in its heart, really could be. “Black Noise” is men talking to men about women; “Lemonade” is a woman talking to women about men, and they both orbit around a failure we take for granted like the sun: loving you is complicated. It’s a skill; we forgot. Adrian Younge calls “The Electronique Void” an academic album, by which he means it is both instructional and informational. There’s a problem at the heart of it, a woman who’s been told that she’s loved, but she doesn’t recognize that, can’t feel it, may have heard it all before, may be worrying about the wrong things. Jack Waterson, long a guitarist in Younge’s band, plays the role of narrator, sounding professorial and rather superior as he lays out for the woman where she’s erred. That vocoder you hear is Adrian, talking to her on a subterranean level, the way an artist must. The discourse on the album is the kind of thing that happens when you go blonde and then you can’t keep ‘em off you. These truths are cold and hard, and our hero begrudges the well-meaning advice being rained down upon her as any independent woman would. The science of love, its formulas and if-then constraints, causal relationships and observable properties, is best taught experientially, but learning it hurts so, so bad. Music, especially electronic music, reliant as it is on abstraction and unrepentant as it is about hijacking your physiological responses to tempo and rhythm and dynamics, is a way to get there without going through it.

In the great and ongoing culture war between high and low, raw and refined, the real versus popular, certain territories have been ceded:
styles considered mainstream get to be pretty, lovely and optimistic. Styles originating underground are presumed to be gritty, burly
and practical.
So it’s a subversion of a kind, and definitely an intellectual challenge, to bathe a foreboding bass line in a lilt. To make gloomy shine.
Adrian Younge’s Voices of Gemma embodies the potential of the hybrid. By just saying no to the borders a label like underground might
impose on a creativity like his, he’s able to fashion a sound that elbows its way past your defenses, whatever they are. You don’t want
to hear anything grim today? Had enough of that on the news, thanks? Younge has a couple of angels on hand to waft a hard truth over
so that when it hits it feels like a kiss. Sick of the saccharine piped over aisle 4 at Walgreens? Younge’s palming you a melody fit for
impending doom.
Voices of Gemma comes from Younge’s refusal to accept the premise. His stance is there in every artist’s job description — the
determination to suction up sounds and flavors and phrases from all over the past and present and imagined and documented, and then
splice and dissolve what he finds into more possibilities and new ways of seeing, something fresh.
On this project his songs are precise, the set ups delivered with a satiny finish and, in the low end, just a hint of louche. Care has been
given to every detail, and the old way of doing a thing (bring in an orchestra, record to tape) is the way it’s done; it’s like listening to a
five-star hotel.
Voices of Gemma is luxurious, a style that we forgot could be present day, as accustomed as we are to sampled and thrice-removed
versions of it. This is high-class signified, a world-class realization.

Ahmed Malek - Algeria's Ennio Morricone

Ahmed Malek was one of the most important musicians of the Algerian scene of the 1970s. His sountrack works that were composed for various Algerian movies of the time fuse Arabic influences with jazz, psych and funk influences. Dark cineastic soundscapes meet african Jazz at times reminicent of Mulatu. Original copies of his vinyl releases have been sold for enormous amounts. For this release we combined the strongest tracks from his releases with a selection of unreleased material straight from the families archive. The vinyl edition comes with a 8 page 12” size booklet, the cd version with a 16 page booklet with lot of unseen photos, an interview with the artist from 1978 and an introduction to Algerian cinema.

Following the acclaimed first album of Al Sunny released in 2017, Favorite Recordings proudly presents this single remix package of “Open Up Your Eyes”.
Al Sunny is a young composer emerging from the French soul music scene. Soon after learning the guitar, he started composing and became involved in numerous projects and collaborations. He quickly discovered deep inside himself the music that he truly loves, inspired by artists such as Tim Maia, America, Al Green, and Al Jarreau. During his studies he met musicians including Florian Pellissier, and it's then thanks to Florian that he met Pascal Rioux, founder and A&R of Favorite Recordings. Together they produced Time To Decide, a first album acclaimed by many tastemakers and gaining a solid success in Japan.
One of the highlights of the LP was the track “Open Up Your Eyes”, which disclosed the premise of Al Sunny music style, infused with Blue-Eyed-Soul, Pop and Folk. Also tainted with a funky dancefloor color, “Open Up Your Eyes” was a perfect match to build a nice remixes package for DJs. On the A side, Bruno “Patchworks” Hovart delivers again a hot Soulful/Disco version of the song with his famous touch. As for the B side, Favorite Recordings asked the Canadian producer Jex Opolis (Good Timin’ Records), with a Disco style slightly more oriented in Electronic and House vibes.

Two disco jewels signed by Maestro Alessandroni for an obscure Italian sexy-comedy in 1976, presented here in a new edit on 12'' designed for the dancefloor.

A groovy vibrant jazz / soul / funk soundtrack for an imaginary hard-boiled movie from the 70s!
The varied selection of instruments (organ, flute, moog, bongos, cello, violin, drums, bass, acoustic
and electric guitars etc.) blend flawlessly into each other and make this album an intense and
inspired trip... in fact it may turn into a movie in front of your very eyes! Featuring the legendary
Edda Dell’Orso on vocals and her husband Giacomo on string arrangements!!!

Artist and musician Alex Puddu, whom many already know for his “Danish Pornography” series and solo records, has written and produced the second album for his soulful band The Moonfires. A second coming that showcases strong R&B classic melodies and tight grooves that bring the listener up to a level of great funk bands like New Birth, Ohio Players, Mandrill, and Black Heat. The amazing album cover, showing King Kong spreading panic in the city, has been made by Italian comic-book and science fiction artist Giuseppe Festino, the same that, back in 70’s, illustrated the paperback covers of the popular sci-fi Urania series.
The opening Stones-inspired title-track “Gotta Keep it Rollin” kicks off the groove, building up with steady organ and a killer blues guitar riff, accompanying a street-story-telling by lead singer Duane Hobson. The second track is “Kill Me with the Rain”, a funky tune with powerful afro winds section, rock-funk guitar, and a great vocal leading all the way through the strong melody. “Woman” is a truly sexy-funk tune with Afro-vibes all throughout and catchy lyrics. The album’s first single, and probably the strongest tune on the album, is “Thunder Road”, a feel-good, up-tempo R&B song with catchy hook line and a sleazy organ playing along the tight rhythm section. The A-side closes with “Weekend Pleasure”, a powerful instrumental piece that lives up to the groove, and builds up to a cool break with a great bass solo.
The B-side starts strong with a cover of The Four Tops from the score “Are You Man Enough” – a great version of one the band’s top tunes! The following song is another album favorite, “Soul on Fire”: a well-produced tune played tight, and a perfect score for a street gang, warriors-type movie, as if it was written in 1979. The album continues on with two up-tempo tracks, “Funky City” and “Voodoo People” – definitely something for the dance floor! Crazy organ, funky riffs, massive percussion and congas taking the album to another level. The last song is a perfect ending, another great composition by Puddu: “King of The Night” – a strong West Coast ballad with prominent piano, played smooth all through, accentuated with a great vocal performance and a classic saxophone solo on the end.
“Gotta Keep It Rollin” is Alex Puddu at his groovest!!!

Alex Puddu pulls an ace from up his sleeve with the new album The Gambler On his 10th solo album Alex Puddu is back and surprises with a strong set of songs, inspired by a mixture of the early 60’s sound of doo-wop vocal harmonies, together with R’n’B and a hint of jazz og surf references. It’s clear that one can unmistakably hear Puddu has a true love for the music of this period; unapologetically his sound references Dion and The Belmonts ,Vince Taylor and his Playboys, The Marcels and classics Movie scores such as West Side Story, The Wanderers, The Incident and Music To Read The Pretenders by Joe Rene Complex. Morricone’s string musicians and the legendary voice of Edda Dell’Orso On The Gambler there are numerous special guest appearances: First and foremost Ennio Morricone’s legendary vocalist Edda Dell’Orso, well known for her singing on the 60’s og 70’s Western soundtracks The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West og Giù la Testa. Dell’Orso sings on three songs on the album, while her husband, Giacomo Dell’Orso, has orchestrated the album and conducted a small group of Ennio Morricone’s string musicians under the name of Piccola Orchestra Cinefonica di Roma. With Alex Puddu on guitar, organ and piano, he is joined by Heidi Luke on drums, Henrik Mathiassen on contrabass, Mikael Fleron on saxophone, with Lukas Sherfey (The Movement) Stefan Moulvad (The Sandmen) and Anders Bruus (The Breakers) on electric guitar. Participating on lead vocals are: Steffen Westmark (The Blue Van - on two tracks), Peter Sandorff (Hola Ghost), Jess Møller Rasmussen (Taggy Tones), Duane Hobson (The Moonfires) and the Italian crooner Max Locci.

Top Originally Unissued Killer Sixties Northern Soul Mover Outta Philadelphia For Upfront Deejays Which Is Taking No Prisoners!

Another outstanding Jazz fusion release for Dynamite cuts. limited edition 7” release of 2 masterpieces by Alice Babs and Nils Lindberg's Orchestra. Both tracks taken from the “Music With A Jazz Flavour” LP.

Mystery-music from the strange and ancient-modern California fringe … thats what the press release says. Kinda fitting!

After the famous Andre Tanker’s “Back Home”, Jamwax is very proud to reissue River Come Down in its 12'' version.
Originally released on the Contraband label in 1979 and recorded at famous Semp studio in Trinidad, “River Come Down” is a blend of islands funk, soul, disco, soca with also a touch of gospel: “River, the river come down, the river come down, the river down...wind blow like a hurricane...the river come down, washing the right, washing the wrong, washing the weak, washing the strong, the river come down...”
On the other side you will find an obscure synth instrumental released on an impossible to find 7'' in 1986. “Movin Round” was produced by Andre Tanker for Horace Wilson's Turn of The Tide. This song was absolutely under the radar and remains a strong banger for any dances.

‘Caribbean Roots’ represents a return to his roots for Anthony Joseph, who has always remained true to a powerful, deep-seated sense of his Caribbean identity.

Finally ! After 6 albums published in 12 years, the poet Anthony Joseph pays tribute to Trinidad with this album recorded on his native island. A sunny trip with the local stars of the island, from steel drum to calypso. Ella Andall, singer of the deities Orishas, "Boogsie" Sharp and his metallic harmonies or 3 Canal and Brother Resistance with big phrasings.

Recorded facing the ocean, Anthony Joseph drew his inspiration from his roots, his island.
An album in the image of his poet.