Honest Jon's Funk | Soul 15 Items

A Stranger I May Be Savoy Gospel 1954-1966

2LP | 2020 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

Release: 2020 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves

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The first of three volumes: stomping, rollicking gospel music, intermingling with raw soul, searing blues, hard-rocking doo-wop and jazz, and storming r&b.

Infused and incandescent with the hurting, surging indignation of the Civil Rights movement, here are twenty-four precious scorchers by giants like the Staple Singers and Jimmy Scott, alongside devastating sides by less celebrated names like the Harmonising Five of Burlington, North Carolina, and teen-group the North Philadelphia Juniors, culminating triumphantly with slamming, sanctified versions of Hit The Road Jack and Wade In The Water.

Gatefold sleeve, with full-size booklet; beautifully designed, with stunning, rare photographs and original Savoy artwork.

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You Better Get Ready For Judgement Day Savoy Gospel 1978-1986

2LP | 2020 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

Release: 2020 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves

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Volume three: seventeen gems of fierce funk, rapturous soul and transcendent disco and boogie, super-charged with celebration and affirmativeness, loaded with roaring choirs, rocking horns and popping bass guitars, from the years leading up to Savoy’s acquisition by Malaco.

Some seriously rare cuts here; for instance, the stupendous opener by Edith Moreno only appeared as a blank-label promo, in a tiny run.

Spot-glossed, gatefold sleeve, with gorgeous printed inners.

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Turn It Loose, Ain't No Good Savoy Gospel 1970-1979

2LP | 2020 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

Release: 2020 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves

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Christians Catch Hell (Gospel Roots, 1976-79)

2LP | 2015 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

22,99 €*

Release: 2015 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves

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Used Vinyl

Medium: Near Mint, Cover: Near Mint

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London Is The Place For Me 8: Lord Kitchener In England, 1948-1962

2LP | 2019 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

Release: 2019 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves

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First there is the hooligan chantwell, up for anything in the hurly-burly of carnival proper; and then the casual reporter, firing off postcards to Trinidad about taxis, flashy booze, fast women and football in Manchester, with homesickness and grievance nestled just behind the optimism, pride and tentative senses of belonging.
There is the bearer of news from home, in detailed accounts of murders, tales of stupid local coppers, and reminiscences about food and particular mango trees; the political thinker, considering racism and Africa; and the diarist, with his vivid tales of infidelity, and disclosure of the break-up of his marriage, and his desire to get away.

One foot in the UK, the other in Trinidad; but the man himself somewhere in-between. Kitch In The Jungle, nobody around. A ‘diasporic explorer’; a key twentieth-century witness, alongside such hallowed figures as Samuel Selvon and Edward Kamau Braithwaite.

Though in frustration Kitch would sometimes take over double-bass duties himself, the musicianship of Rupert Nurse, Fitzroy Coleman and co is top-notch. The original glorious sound is down to Denys Preston, recording for Melodisc, often at Abbey Road Studios (where we transferred and restored the 78s compiled here).

Presented in a lovely gatefold sleeve, with a full-size booklet containing superb, specially-commissioned sleevenotes by Kitch biographer Anthony Joseph, and fabulous, previously-unseen photographs

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London Is The Place For Me 7: Calypso, Mento, Joropo, Steel & String Band

2LP | 2019 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

2LP | 2017 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

Release: 2019 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves

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Still deeper forays into the musical landscape of the Windrush generation.

A dazzling range of calypso, mento, joropo, steelband, palm-wine and r’n'b. Expert revivals of stringband music, from way back, alongside proto-Afro-funk.
An uproarious selection of songs about the H-Bomb and modern phones, prostitution and Haile Selassie, mid-life crisis and the London Underground, racism and solidarity, the Highway Code and a 100% West Indian Royal Wedding.

For example some frantic British-Guianan joropo music-hall about Eatwell Brown from Clapham, who starts out biting off a piece of his mother-in-law’s face at a party, then devours everything in his path… a chunk of Brixton Prison, a Union Jack, a policeman’s uniform. Or Marie Bryant — collaborator of Lester Young and Duke Ellington — taking time off from skewering the South African PM Daniel Malan at her West End revue, to contribute some arch, swinging filth about uber-genitalia.

Superior sound, courtesy of Abbey Road, D&M and Pallas; lovely gatefold sleeve; full-size booklet, with full notes, and fabulous previously-unseen photographs, including a set from the family archive of Russ Henderson (who led the first, impromptu Notting Hill Carnival march, in 1966).

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Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

Book Of Sound

24,99 €*

Edith Moreno 7 The Helen Hollins Singers

Release: 2017 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves

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Used Vinyl

Medium: VG+, Cover: Near Mint

Close to NM.

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Get Ready For Judgement Day / Jesus Will Give You Love

7" | 2019 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

10" | 1973 | UK | Reissue (Honest Jon's)

Release: 2019 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves

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Red hot gospel soul from 1983. Only ever issued as a test white-label; never before released commercially. That test pressings sells online for 1000+ dollars.

Plus some classic early-eighties soul vibes on the flip, as Helen Hollins — from James Cleveland’s Southern California Community Choir— magnificently busts loose Burt Bacharach, strutting resplendently onto the dancefloor with her dad, husband and two daughters Alicia and Francheasca in glorious cahoots.

Lovely spot-glossed sleeve.

Devilishly limited, all three of our Savoy singles.

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The Metro-Tones Inc.

Get Together

The Famous Ward Singers / Jessy Dixon

Release: 1973 / UK – Reissue

Genre: Organic Grooves

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Dedicated ‘to the United Nations and especially young people’, this is slow-burning, steeply screwed, early-seventies Atlanta funk by James Conley and co, spun out of a line from Eliza Hewett’s nineteenth-century hymn, When We All Get To Heaven.

The flip is deadly, too: a super-soulful blend of Sly & The Family Stone with Kool & The Gang, movingly confused and sincere in its pleading (without threats or machismo) to be loved back.

Both sides come with instrumentals. Check part two of Get Together.

Beautifully sleeved.

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I'm Getting Richer / Wade In The Water

7" | 1960 | UK | Reissue (Honest Jon's)

Release: 1960 / UK – Reissue

Genre: Organic Grooves

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A scorcher from the golden age of gospel, via its cardinal label.
From 1960, during the family’s second decade with Savoy, featuring Gertrude Ward, Christine Jackson, Mildred Means and Vermettya Royster — and Clara, totally riveting and in-your-face with evangelistic fervour and raw soul.

Plus a rambunctious, floor-filling Wade In The Water, by Jessy Dixon and his Singers.

Handsomely sleeved (showing a contemporary but slightly different Wards lineup).

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Christians Catch Hell: Gospel Roots 1976-79

2LP | 2015 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

London Is The Place For Me

Release: 2015 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves

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Utterly magnificent, sublimely soulful survey of the Gospel Roots label, subsidiary of the mighty TK Records at the height of the Miami Sound. Beautifully presented, the LPs come with a 12"-square, full-colour, sixteen-page album of photos and original artwork and truly outstanding notes, including insightful new interviews across the board; mastered at Abbey Road.

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Volume 5: Latin, Jazz, Calypso & Highlife From Young Black London

2LP | 2013 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

London Is The Place For Me

Release: 2013 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves

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As then, calypso carries the swing. There are four more Lord Kitchener songs — in consideration of his wife leaving him for a GI, cricket umpires, a fling onboard an ocean-liner and West Indian poultry — besides a hot mambo cash-in, cross-bred under his supervision, and an uproarious, teasing Ghanaian tribute to him in Fanti by London visitors The Quavers.
Other calypsos range compellingly from the devaluation of the pound through jiu jitsu, big rubbery instruments, football fans, heavyweight champ Joe Louis and the sexual allure of English women police. The Mighty Terror contributes the woe-begotten, cautionary tale of his beloved Patricia's change of heart: 'I cannot believe, not for one moment / She gone with Millicent... / You may think I am jocular / But this really happened in Manchester / I felt so ashamed, my friends laughed at me / I had to take a train for London city.'
Ambrose Campbell is back, with six more shots of prodigal, limber, melancholic, visionary West African highlife. Also the Rolling Stones' favourite Ginger Johnson, with a percussive Latin scorcher; and Mona Baptiste, with some wonderful, soulful exotica.
Jamaican mento makes its first entry in the series, with a brace by Tony Johnson: a drily witty drinking-song, and a love-letter to Marilyn Monroe. Also finally getting some dues, the path-breaking Latin-African-jazz experiments of Ghanaian drummer and percussionist Buddy Pipp, with spine-tingling playing by the great Jamaican saxophonist Joe Harriott.
Expert jazz idioms course sophisticatedly through all the selections, which include a straight-up, South London version of Duke Jordan's Jordhu, something from Dizzy Reece's soundtrack — brokered by Kenneth Tynan — to the British crime film Nowhere To Go, and a trio of magnificently hybrid, hard-swinging instrumentals led in turn by master-guitarist Fitzroy Coleman, Kitch's innovative arranger Rupert Nurse, and trumpeter Shake Keane — named after Shakespeare because of his love of poetry — from St. Vincent.

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Volume 6: Mento, Calypso, Jazz & Highlife From Young Black London

2LP | 2013 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

Rocket Juice & The Moon (Damon Albarn, Tony Allen and Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers)

Release: 2013 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves

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Leave-Taking

10" | 2012 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)

Moyege Mark Ernestus Remix

Release: 2012 / UK – Original

Genre: Organic Grooves

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Three of the deepest, freshest instrumentals from the imminent album — featuring the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble on the opener. Sound-wise, this is doubly lethal, as alive and present as vinyl gets: mixed by Mark Ernestus, mastered and cut at D&M, manufactured at Pallas. In a silvered, silk-screened sleeve; a limited one-off.

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Tony Allen

12" | 2006 | UK | Original (Honest Jon's)