Date: 1972-1975
Release: Collectables #5202
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Like Jimi Hendrix, the eight members of Cymande were all phenomenally adept self-taught musicians. And also like Hendrix, they were masters at synthesizing funk, soul, blues, and psychedelic sounds, creating a music that resists any convenient labeling. They could funk on a reggae groove, put a heavy dose of soul into a psychedelic jam, and lay down some bluesy riffs around a Caribbean spiced vocal.
Cymande‘s members came from Guyana, Jamaica, and St.Vincent, and they imported a strong island vibe into their cosmic sound. This album is at once raw and polished, extraordinarily diverse, and consistently grooving. The tunes run the gamut from the hypnotic Santana-influenced instrumental, “Dove,” to the New Orleans funk of “The Message,” which actually made it to #22 on the domestic R&B charts in 1974. The spectacularly funky “Bra” was included on Spike Lee‘s highly recommended “Crooklyn” soundtrack.
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Date: 1973
Release: MPC LTD. #UFOXY2CD
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“If Betty were singing today she be something like Madonna, something like Prince, only as a woman. She was the beginning of all that when she was singing as Betty Davis.”
– Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography
The former wife of Miles, Betty Mabry Davis is perhaps the only woman in the world who could rightfully have the following legend tattooed across her rear: THIS ASS INVENTED FUSION. While their marriage only lasted a year (1968-1969), Betty’s impact on the immortal jazz trumpeter was tremendous. Her cutting-edge musical tastes and incomparable sense of style were too much for Miles to resist.
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Date: Jun 1, 1972 – Jun 6, 1972 (recording)
Release: Columbia/Legacy #63980
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An electrified and multidimensional burst of ass-shaking funk straight from the master himself. If Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix took a space ship to India together, they very well might have come up with something approximating On The Corner.
This utterly unique and unprecedented recording was savaged by a lot of the critics of its day. They blasted Miles for creating a new “anti-jazz” that fundamentally violated the genre’s integrity. Reviled as the jazz anti-Christ, his playing on this recording was indeed demonic. His trumpet spits out wah-wah distorted licks of fire and nastiness, and he grinds on the organ like it was a cheap date. He masterfully tangles and intertwines the varied sounds of the sitar, conga, electric guitar, tabla, organ, and electric bass to create thickly-layered rhythms of dazzling complexity. He throws in some heavy licks on top of it all, hitting hard with quick and punchy bursts from his horn that make the groove throb.
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Date: Feb 6, 1970 – Dec 19, 1970 (recording)
Release: Columbia/Legacy #65135
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There’s something about the way this music hits me. It’s not as if I haven’t been exposed to lots of hard, loud music – in fact, compared to some of the stuff that now gets called “fusion,” Miles Davis’ version can often seem quaint on the surface. At the time of the shows documented on this 1970 set, he was playing with a new band (something he was doing more often than in any period of his life theretofore), and playing music that, while broached in the previous couple of years by himself and very few others, was rather unheard of to most music listeners of the time, and certainly the canonical jazz guard.
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Date: September 17, 1970 (recording)
Release: Prestige #24182
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With his towering physique and monstrous chops, Charles “The Burner” Earland dominated the jazz-organ bars once scattered across the cities of the “Chitlins Circuit”. From the late-60′s through the early-80′s, Earland gigged heavily throughout the black urban ghettos of the North, South and Midwest, conquering tough to please crowds with the blistering inferno of his fingers on the keys. It was in these rollicking live settings that Earland’s crowd-pleasing chops burned their brightest. As former Earland reedman Roy Nathanson told me shortly after the organist’s death in 1999,
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Date: August 19, 1969 – February 6, 1970
Release: COLUMBIA #65570
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I am here to report on a completely undocumented supernatural tragedy. At some unknown moment in the last thirty years, a violent rip in the Soul-Funk Continuum allowed The Best of Earth, Wind & Fire, Volume One to take root in everyone’s CD collection and sucked every other Earth, Wind & Fire recording into oblivion. Musicologists are already reacting with horror at the discovery, fully aware that a single-disc best-of package, no matter how jammed with huge pop-funk grooves, is a scientifically inadequate representation of a superfunk supernova like Earth, Wind & Fire. How will they account for the deep, delicious album tracks on hit-spawning discs like Spirit and I Am? Who will answer for the solid, sprawling jazz/funk excursions of Open Our Eyes or Last Days and Time?
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Date: 1972 (recording)
Release: Collectables # 5526
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“My music was party music. I wanted the people to get the feeling of the music as a party. I wanted it always to feel like it was recorded live in some place. That’s why we have that kind of sound.”
–Bill Curtis, founder and drummer of The Fatback Band
One of the best-kept secrets of the early ‘70s, Let’s Do It Again is a classic feel-good party album loaded with some of the tightest instrumental funk jams around. Released in 1972, the album gave The Fatback Band its first successful single, “Street Dance.” An infectious in-the-pocket vamp that crosses the danceable grooves of the Meters and the JB’s with the driving Memphis soul of the Stax Horns, “Street Dance” hits its delirious high with a funk-jazz flute solo by future Charles Mingus band member George Adams.
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Date: 1970
Release: WESTBOUND
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One of the few instances where a band’s name totally describes its sound. With their 1970 self-titled debut album, we hear the raw funk rhythms of the Meters collide with the psychedelic soul sounds of Jimi Hendrix, giving rise to the musical revolution that was Funkadelic. A raw and nasty musical manifesto loudly expressing the madness of King George Clinton, founding father to the “extraterrestrial brothers” of Funkadelic and Parliament. This album is designed to answer the one burning question it asks in the title of the first track: “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?” Definitive bits of Clinton’s strange take on the universe are to be found throughout this hard-grooving acid-trip of an album, such as “soul is a joint rolled in toilet paper,” and “I got a thing / you got a thing / everybody’s got a thing.”
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Date: June 21, 1971
Release: MOTOWN #37463-5339-2
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"When would the war stop? That’s what I wanted to know… the war inside my soul."
That was the question that inspired Marvin Gaye to create his most deeply realized record, What’s Going On?. This 1971 album went against the grain at Motown, which had become mired by this time in its hit-factory mentality of the ’60s. Berry Gordy even fought with Gaye over releasing the album. Fortunately the artist prevailed over the businessman, and Gaye’s masterpiece reached the masses, generating a stellar response and record sales (three songs went all the way to number one).
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Date: 1972
Release: THE RIGHT STUFF #27627
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I believe to my soul that the Reverend Al Green has the easy-chair vibe that we all need desperately in our stressed lives. This gem is a true play-it-all-the-way-through album in the old school sense. As the soulful beats caress your troubled mind, Green’s vocals slide on in and get next to you, letting you know that he knows that you know why he sings “Baby, I’m Glad You’re Mine.” Highlights include the hit “Love and Happiness,” as well as a smooth grooving cover of Roy Orbison‘s “Pretty Woman.” But nothing tops the quiet storm of “So Beautiful,” which slowly builds until you feel the light. This is music invented for lazy afternoons and Sunday drives.
Guaranteed to promote mental health!
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