Date: 1973
Release: Soul Jazz Records #12
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
The Arabs gave the world the concept of zero. America’s own School House Rock taught us that “three is a magic number.” And Chinese numerologists revealed which numbers carried good luck and bad. All these developments set the stage for the release of eight songs recorded by eight Puerto Rican-born African-American musicians who took their name from the Spanish word for the number eight, Ocho. One of the defining bands of the ‘black and proud’ NuYorican scene of the early 1970s, Ocho masterfully fused elements of Latin, funk and jazz. From 1973-75, they recorded four LPs (all reissued by Soul Jazz Records) that are on par with almost anything released by Ray Barretto, Joe Bataan, and Eddie Palmieri. The cream of the crop is Ocho 1, a glorious record loaded with exactly the kind of sounds I have in mind when I tell people that I’m into Latin music.
Read more »
Date: 1974
Release: Luaka Bop #50473
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
“Inspiration Information is a record for people that have heard a lot of music, maybe too much, and are looking for a new musical romance.”
–Steven Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
Imagine how it must have felt. Three years of your life spent obsessively working your ideas out, stretching and revising and perfecting them until finally you’re ready to set them down. In the studio you experience the magic of complete artistic control, handling almost all of the instrumentation, production and arrangements, fully realizing every bit of your uniquely inspired musical vision. It comes out exactly like it sounded in your head. Your record hits the streets–an album of nine songs–and you think to yourself that one of them might even be a hit. Then you wait…and wait…and nothing happens. Your record label drops you, and you wake up to find that your once promising musical career is dead at the age of 21.
Read more »
Date: 1973
Release: Hi Records #1650
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
If Al Green was the king of ’70s Southern Soul, then Ann Peebles was his queen. A righteous feminist singer in the tradition of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, Peebles made a name for herself singing and writing about women’s all too familiar knowledge of the darker side of love. Her ferocious hit “I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down” served notice on all cheating men that some sisters weren’t going to always turn the other cheek. Sung in a voice menacing in its restraint, this vengeful opus delivers in overtly angrier tones the feminine message of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”: treat us good or watch out! But Peebles wasn’t only concerned with giving men the big payback. Written in partnership with her husband Don Bryant and Memphis deejay Bernard Miller, “Until You Came Into My Life” features Peebles softly singing of a happier kind of love to be shared with the right man. Fortunately for us, her contentment with love is brief. Peebles is at her gritty best when singing bittersweet songs on love’s blues–a fact made amply clear in her riveting masterpiece of heartbreak, “I Can’t Stand The Rain.” Called the “greatest record ever” by John Lennon, I Can’t Stand The Rain deliciously blends blues, gospel and pop into an incomparable Memphis soul stew. Understandably her biggest hit, the song peaked at #6 on the R&B charts in 1974.
Read more »
Date: 1969
Release: Prestige #7765
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
I was first exposed to the irresistible music of Pucho & His Latin Soul Brothers in the mid 1990s, when he was in the midst of his UK inspired resurgence. But it wasn’t a British DJ that turned me on to Pucho, it was my old friend Steve. Steve and I had a strangely competitive friendship, built around a mutual love of music. Our dysfunctional dynamic led us on an out of control CD buying spree, a musical arms race of sorts, with both of us vying to accumulate more wonderfully obscure music than the other…more music, that is, than either of us could afford or digest. This irresponsible form of male bonding through competitive consumption was a direct by-product of our short-lived second adolescence, courtesy of the University of California, where we had found a temporary reprieve from the working world to live high on the hog of student loans (me) and parental largess (‘shaking the money tree,’ as Steve put it). But instead of hitting the books, we spent hours of our not so free time scouring the used record bins, each trying to surpass the other.
Read more »
Date: 1971
Release: Prestige #24176
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
Bernard “Pretty” Purdie’s impeccable beats have dominated hundreds of great soul, R&B, funk, jazz, and pop records. A legendary and versatile drummer, he began pounding on pots and pans at the age of six, graduating to drums a few years later. By the time he was 21, he had firmly established himself at the top of the New York studio scene. Always in demand, he recorded with such masters as James Brown, King Curtis, and George Benson during the ‘60s, and toured with Aretha Franklin through the mid-‘70s, eventually becoming the Queen of Soul’s musical director. By the time he recorded Purdie Good! & Shaft in 1971, his popularity was so tremendous that he was taking 15-20 studio calls per week. These two solo albums capture Purdie in the heyday of his funky drumming style, thumping his way through a high-energy instrumental set of originals and covers.
Read more »
Date: 1967
Release: Reprise #MS-2029
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
Otis Redding is to soul singing what Jimi Hendrix is to guitar. Without realizing it, Redding and Hendrix were black America’s greatest weapons in the culture wars of the 1960s. At the Monterey Pop Festival, they set the stage on fire, forever changing the nation’s music scene by infusing it with a powerful dose of pure soul. Their performances pulled out all the stops, blowing the minds of an LSD-laden audience fortunate enough to experience the decade’s musical peak. Countless “what if” questions continue to haunt us as we ponder the musical directions they might have taken had they not died young. Vastly influential, no two artists could be better suited to sharing space on an album together.
Read more »
Date: 1971-1972
Release: BGP #107
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
In 1971-1972, a handful of long-haired brothers representing Sounds of Unity and Love asked the world two simple questions: “What Is IT?” and “Can You Feel IT?” Miles Davis provided the perfect answer in his autobiography, which begins with an authoritative command to “LISTEN!” Duke Ellington had a deep understanding of what IT is, insisting that “IT Don’t Mean A Thing, If IT Ain’t Got That Swing.” And James Brown let everybody feel IT when he proclaimed, “Say IT Louder, I’m Black And I’m Proud.” While IT may have also been the sinister brain in Madeline L’Engle’s science-fiction masterpiece, A Wrinkle In Time, in the hands of S.O.U.L., IT was just that.
Read more »
Date: 1971
Release: FLYING DUTCHMAN
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
When Richard Nixon became president in 1968, the country was ripping itself apart culturally, politically, racially, generationally. Every aspect of American society was under transformation; the rules and relationships were being rewritten. So with the nation in chaos, Nixon turned his attention abroad and left domestic issues to his administration. Seeking to disempower and discredit the two most politically active, outspoken groups of Americans – blacks and young people – Nixon’s ambitious aides stepped up the criminalization of drugs, turning the law and its enforcers violently against the winds of change. There was one drug, however, that escaped attack: television, opiate of the masses. As the Sixties became the Seventies, the hippie flower wilted, and poverty, racism, violence, and drug addiction were institutionalized, millions of Americans plugged into the alpha beam of primetime TV and drifted off, high as a lost balloon, untethered from reality.
Read more »
Date: March 23, 1999
Release: Motel Records #3
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
Bombay the Hard Way plays like the soundtrack to some imaginary 1970s B-films with names like Shaft’s Bad-Ass Pilgrimage To India or Ganges Ghetto Payback. Featuring the music of Indian composers (and brothers) Anandji and Kalyanji Shah, who wrote and produced soundtracks for the so-called “Brownsploitation” films made in India’s “Bollywood” during the 60s and 70s, this saffron-funk project is the brain-child of Dan “The Automator” Nakamura, Bay Area producer / remixer of Dr. Octagon fame, with additional beats provided by the immensely talented DJ Shadow. The end product is a potent cross-pollination of Secret-Agent-Man guitar themes, Blaxploitation grooves, jazzy horn and flute riffs, hip-hop beats and loops, and traditional Indian instrumentation.
Read more »
Date: 1973 (recorded)
Release: Aztec Music #AZTCD1001
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
“Now if you check my pulse it beats Skull Snaps.”
—Beastie Boys, “Unite”
Skull Snaps is a legendary funk album that has long been shrouded in obscurity. The band recorded their self-titled debut and a handful of singles in 1973, then vanished without a trace. In recent years, their vinyl has become ubiquitously sampled and highly collectible. The monstrous break that opens up their classic cut, “It’s A New Day,” furnished the beat for countless hip-hop hits of the mid-‘90s. But despite all their widespread influence, there’s been almost no information available anywhere on the Skull Snaps. “It’s become a very mystique thing about us,“ says bassist and singer Samm Culley. “I think everybody who stole our music must have thought that we fell off the face of the earth because they didn’t hear anything from us at all. But we’re here, and ready to be heard.”
Read more »
