Organic Grooves Vinyl 563 Items

Includes both the mono and stereo versions of the album!

Strut presents an all-time classic of South African music, the definitive remastered edition of Miriam Makeba's 'Pata Pata', her first album recorded for Reprise in 1966.
The album marked a significant international breakthrough for Makeba. Moving to the US after the anti-apartheid film 'Come Back, Africa' gained international attention and staying there in exile, she quickly built her career in New York during the '60s, mentored by Harry Belafonte. Signing with Reprise after a period with RCA, she returned to one of her older songs: "I wrote 'Pata Pata' back in 1956, back in South Africa", remembered Makeba in her autobiography. "It was a fun little song and I was thinking of a dance that we do at home ("pata" means 'touch" in Zulu and Xhosa)".
The track peaked on the Billboard Hot 100 at no. 12 and the album. Other songs on the album included a version of the traditional Xhosa classic, 'Click Song Number One' ('Qongqothwane'), the atmospheric 'West Wind', later famously covered by her friend Nina Simone, and a version of Tilahun Gessesse's 'Yetentu Tizaleny' which Makeba learned on a trip to Addis to perform for Haile Selassie at the Organisation Of African Unity.

A crown jewel of the US American soul music of the 1960s. The earthy production and vivid feeling makes this album way more tangible for fans of the genre than most polished and slick major productions. A true gem for all collectors of underground soul from the USA.

Very little is known about Roy Redmond besides the fact he recorded 4 songs and 2 singles in 1967 for Loma Records, a Warner Bros subsidiary that is well known by Norther Soul/6os Soul aficionados. Redmond's largest success is probably his soulful cover of The Beatles 's "Good Day Sunshine", considered by some as one of the best Beatles covers. His other single is a more obscure affair featuring on the A side "Ain't That Terrible" and on the flip "A Change Is Gonna Come", a very fine cover of the Sam Cooke's classic - beautiful stuff. The A side "Ain't That Terrible" is a stylish, uptempo, relentless Northern Soul piano stomper that will get Soul fans up and moving their moneymakers in no time! Relatively unknown, this track is on par with the greatest numbers of the genre such as Lou Pride's "I'm coming home in the morning" or Bob and Earl's "Harlem Shuffle". This is pure underground Northern Soul at its absolute best. To be played often and... Loud. Keep the faith!

A Svart Mondo Release. Limited to 500 copies on black vinyl. By early 1960’s, jazz in its mainstream form had become the standard dance music for the student parties in high schools and several student union clubrooms in Helsinki. The Polytech union even organized matinée dances for high school students on Sundays. The change in the musical preference of young people’s dance music occurred with the arrival of British rock in the mid-sixties and this, of course, coincided with another cultural and musical development. As the new campus for the school was built in Otaniemi, Espoo in 1955-1966 and its operations gradually moved there, the modern style “Dipoli” building became the crowning edifice on the campus. It was to be the new home for the Polytech student union. When this controversial building was opened in 1966, it was meant to introduce a new vision of the future and constituted an embodiment of the modernist spirit of those times in the late 1960’s. This reissue of The Complete Jazz at the Polytechnicum recordings, done in 1967-68, also provides us with a glimpse of the modern directions of those days, not only in jazz music, but also in performance art. It is easy to hear that the main aesthetic in these performances was to break conventions and find new avenues for individual expression. The publisher of these recordings was the Jazz Society of the Tech Students, which was formed a little before these recordings. The name of the society was a take-off from Norman Granz’ Jazz at The Philharmonic and it became Jazz at the Polytechnicum. Both are, of course, abbreviated as J.A.T.P., which became formulated in musicians’ mouths into “Jappa”. This Svart Records re-issue consists of four EP-records in chronological order. The first three feature three jazz groups of the leading young players with their ages ranging from 21 to 30. The fourth one documents an avant-garde art “happening” held in Dipoli on March 20th – 24th 1968 called “Posotusta, pimputusta, pompotusta”, which could freely be translated as “Huff ‘n’ puff ‘n’ plonk”.

Be With is delighted to present Jorge López Ruiz’s El Grito (Suite Para Orquesta De Jazz), eternal Argentinian magic released on CBS in 1967 that must be one of the most sought-after South American jazz LPs. Living in Buenos Aires in the 60s, driven by creative impulse and rage Jorge López Ruiz used music as his platform to protest the Argentine military dictatorship: “I could never stand dictatorships, to be told how you have to think, what you have to do. Nor did I endure discrimination”. A young López Ruiz had appeared on a television panel alongside writer, politician and philosopher Arturo Jauretche, criticising the Onganía dictatorship. Jauretche told López Ruiz “Now say it with music”. This was the deep inhale that lead to El Grito, literally “The Scream”. As López Ruiz later explained “Jauretche urged me that my protests should not remain in words and acquire the consistency of a work… but it was not so much what he told me but how he told me, what prompted me to make the work take shape, first in a live concert and then in a recording”. As the police and military began resorting to kidnapping, torture and summary executions to quiet dissent, with depressing inevitability the artist community and their work were a particular target of the increasingly brutal regime. El Grito was banned not long after it was released and the majority of original copies were unceremoniously destroyed. The work of a genius artist living under an opressive dictatorship, erased by the government of the time, this is buried treasure in every sense and it’s been a rare record for over 50 years.

Psychedelic Percussion definitely sticks to his title. With the help from Paul Beaver of Beaver & Krause (famous keyboard wizard and sound engineer for the likes of Stevie Wonder), vibe master Emil Richards (check is two fantastic album on Impulse! with The Microtonal Blues Band featuring Joe Porcaro, father of the famed Toto brothers) and Gary Coleman (percussionist in the famous Wrecking Crew), Blaine goes wild in the studio with drums, gong, xylophone, organ, bongos, congas and timpani. Unusual textures and tones lead the way to 12 instrumental exotic numbers similar in a way to Raymond Scott most visionary experiments. This is pure madness, a record full of breaks and still unsurpassed in many ways. Blaine was an American drummer and session musician, estimated to be among the most recorded studio drummers in the history of the music industry, claiming over 35,000 sessions and 6,000 singles. His drumming is featured on 150 US top 10 hits, 40 of which went to number one, as well as many film and television soundtracks. He became one of the regular players in Phil Spector's de facto house band, which Blaine nicknamed "the Wrecking Crew". Some of the records Blaine played on include the Ronettes' single "Be My Baby" (1963), which contained a drum beat that became widely imitated, as well as works by popular artists such as Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, the Carpenters, Neil Diamond and the Byrds.

Venezuelan aggressive guaguanco originally released in 1967 and reissued for the very first time. Frank y sus Inquietos is a little-commented Venezuelan treasure in our time, an amazing, almost unknown jewel of Venezuelan hard salsa, treasured with zeal by music lovers of all times. This group is evidence of the musical communion of the young Caracas of the late sixties with the sounds of the Caribbean in their nascent marriage with urban aggressiveness. As a result of these meetings of “friends who played instruments” such as congas, bongos, piano, timbales and their fiery discharges on the top floor of Block 3 of La Silsa, a building located in this humble and highly populated Caracas popular area, the repertoire of songs by the homonym Frank y sus Inquietos (1969), with an exquisite imagination and brimming with vitality, authentic vocals and choirs, overwhelming percussion, strong bass and fierce piano conducted by Frank González.

This slice of Louisiana deep Southern soul has taken on a life of its own since Dave Godin included it on his first “Deep Soul Treasures” CD, and the single has shot up to well over three figures in value.

In 2021 the song is the subject of a cover version by the-name-to-drop Lady Blackbird and we felt it was about time that it was reissued in its original format.

Few have done as much for salsa in Venezuela as band-leader, composer and pianist Ray Pérez. He burst on to the scene in the mid-60s with his group Los Dementes, creating the blueprint for guaguanco, pachanga and boogaloo in Venezuela. When the name salsa began to be used as something of a catch-all-term he was still at the forefront, recording two hugely-popular salsa albums with Los Dementes in 1967. Remarkably, that very same year, he also recorded two albums with a brand new group, Los Calvos, that showed how as well as being the genre’s most visible band-leader, he was also pushing the nascent genre to its limits. Looking back, revered journalist Alfredo Churion states that Los Calvos were “one of the most innovative experiences in Venezuelan popular music.” Estos Son Los Calvos is the first of the two albums he made with Los Calvos. On it, he made a few alterations to the line-up that may seem minor, but created a completely new sound. For the first time, he recruited a drummer (unprecedented at the time for a salsa ensemble, which always used percussionists), he switched from the trombones of Los Dementes to the much harder, direct sound of trumpets, and he recruited Carlos Yanez, best known as El Negrito Calavén, as singer. Whereas Los Dementes had been aligned with the slightly pop sound of tropical orchestras, Los Calvos took an almost-jazz approach, allowing room for the musicians and vocalists to improvise, and they also took inspiration from the sounds of surf rock swirling around Caracas. The group’s drummer El Pavo amusingly once described the group’s sound as like “wearing a dinner suit with flip-flops”. Opening track “El Kenya” is the clearest example of that surf rock influence; it’s opening lines make clear its intentions: “una linda trigueña que me invitó a bailar el Kenya” (“a beautiful trigueña – tri-ethnic girl – invited me to dance the Kenya”). They are intent on creating their own dance craze, El Kenya. If the group had ever performed live, then maybe it would have taken off, as the song had all the credentials: rollicking montuno piano from Pérez, ingenious scatting and vocal improvs from Calavén, and a middle section where the drums and trumpets battle it out hard, with an audience screaming its appreciation throughout. It’s followed by ‘Mi Salsa Llego’, which Pérez had already recorded with Los Dementes; here, it’s a tougher beast, the sparser hits of the drums and trumpets giving a harder sound evocative of the times, with more and more people moving to the cities, and wanting a grittier, urban soundtrack. The secret weapon in Los Calvos was the fact that this was a group made up of some of Venezuela’s finest musicians, many of which, Pérez included, had working class roots. Music for them was as much a part of their day-to-day lives, as it was a profession, it was what they did. The legendary Frank “El Pavo” Hernandez was on drum kit, with revered names like Alfredo Padilla, Carlos “Nene” Quintero, Pedro García, Miguel Silva, Enrique Vazquez, Rafael Araujo and Luis Lewis, also involved in the group. Their versatility allowed Los Calvos to go from the slower, haunting groove of “Negrito Calavan”, a showcase for their singer to improvise, and on to “Bailemos Kenya”, another attempt by the group to create their own version of “The Twist”! Los Calvos never played live, but that was always the intention. Pérez was in demand by the record labels of the time and his deal with RCA Victor to make two albums as Los Calvos was only ever that. But the spirit of Los Calvos remained when Pérez then formed Los Kenya, whose name came from the opening track of this album, and whose line-up featured the same inventions as Los Calvos, with a drum kit, two trumpets and the same vocalists (for their second album, Carlín Rodríguez joined as a singer, and remained for Las Kenya). For this reason, Los Calvos would never have the same successes as Pérez’s other groups, though even Pérez has revealed in interviews that the two albums he made as Los Calvos are some of the most fun he ever had recording. With the price of originals for both albums ever increasing for vinyl collectors, this is a great chance to get hold of two of the heaviest salsa albums ever issued in the 60s, and an important moment in the life of Venezuela’s salsa king, Ray Pérez.

How Cynthia Schloss’ debut album Ready And Waiting ended up as part of the infamous tax-scam label TSG Records’ catalogue is characteristically mysterious and unknown. Originally released on Merritone Records in 1976, it’s rich reggae sound is a celebration of life and love, and the Jamaican singer’s syncopated grooves stand apart from familiar TSG funk and soul territory - though both find space to breathe inside the mix of this expansive album. Nevertheless, a year later the album found itself with a new sleeve and identity under the distinct TSG colour and logo. P-vine is thrilled to be reissuing Ready and Waiting as a limited edition LP for the first time in the world with an iconic Japanese obi strip attached.

A multi-instrumentalist who reconfigured jazz many times during his long career, Yusef Lateef came to prominence in the late 1950s, after having toured with Dizzy Gillespie. Jazz Mood dates from 1957, when his Quintet had some of Detroit's finest, including Alice Coltrane's brother Ernest Farrow on bass and future Jazz Messenger Curtis Fuller on trombone. The use of an argol on 'Metaphor' and a rabat and finger cymbals on 'Morning' point to Lateef's Islamic grounding and his belief that music serves a higher purpose; this edition has bonus track 'Passion,' from the equally excellent Before Dawn. Rich, deep, and varied, this is required listening for all serious jazz heads.