LW’s the genius behind Marvin’s I Want You and the genie animating nuff Theo and KDJ. Here’s his two-step touchstone from 1982, featuring the bim bimmer Why I Came To California, and Somewhere, a duet with the great Flora Purim. (Airto’s on call, too.)

The master drummer’s sparkling set of duets with Larry Young in 1977; plus JC doing full justice to Trane’s After The Rain, alone on piano.
Check your Bobby Hutcherson Blue Notes from the late-60s — records like Oblique and Spiral — for how Joe Chambers bends them round the wall and into the top corner, with his musicianship and compositions both.
Premier sampled Mind Rain for Nas’ NY State Of Mind (to put you out of your misery).
Very warmly recommended.

‘After keyboardist/composer Bayeté aka Todd Cochran established his musical presence on the San Francisco scene playing in Bobby Hutcherson’s band, and before becoming a key member of the innovative band Automatic Man, which he co-founded with Santana drummer Michael Shrieve, he recorded a couple of solo albums for the Prestige label that feature some of the most far-out, futuristic music the legendary jazz imprint ever released… Early ‘70s electric Miles is a clear point on the compass, but so are Parliament-Funkadelic and Lonnie Liston Smith, if he were playing a fuzzed-out clavinet instead of a Fender Rhodes.’

“While I’ve held space for the blues aesthetic and jazz in everything I’ve done, I was leaving one world and entering another, unmooring the ship and heading into a sea of unknowns, so to speak.”

Jazz cornettist Olu Dara has featured on a heap of killer records. David Murray’s Flowers For Albert, Roy Brooks’ Ethnic Expressions, Doug Carn’s Revelation, Are You Glad To Be In America?, peak Cassandra Wilson, Illmatic… and on and on.

From 1988, his solo debut is something else, and a blast.
‘Mixing up sly humor and evocative description, Dara’s singing slips and slides around the steady guitar rhythms, which borrow equally from Delta blues, Caribbean calypso and West African high-life’ (Washington Post).
‘Performing songs about daily life in the ‘hood back in the day of okra-selling street peddlers, intoning blues that refuse to separate desire from its cultural context, and collaborating with his rap star son Nas, Dara manifests an aesthetic co-inhabited by Robert Johnson, Tampa Red, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie and Arrested Development’s Speech as if they were all members of the same band’ (SFGate).
‘As warm and as gentle as a summer day in Mississippi… a perfect blend of Southern blues, New York jazz and African rhythms… pure enchantment’ (CMJ New Music Report).

‘Girl group greatness, courtesy of the Chicago-based Hutchinson Sisters (with Theresa Davis on this record) and co-producers Isaac Hayes, David Porter and Ronnie Williams! Recording at Muscle Shoals and Stax studios seems to have added a little grit to The Emotions’ sound, too; this 1971 classic on the Volt label offers the perfect blend of sweet and sassy. Show Me How was the hit, but it’s Blind Alley that made Untouched one of the most collectible albums of its kind: that track’s one of the most sampled in all of pop and hip hop, most notably by Big Daddy Kane (Ain’t No Half-Steppin’) and Mariah Carey (Dreamlover).’

The superb Memphis vocal trio, powered by the sublime falsetto of Jasper ‘Jabbo’ Phillips.
Giddily soulful, ravishing slow jams and sweeter-than-sweet harmony overtures. Paradigmatic murder like If I Could Say What’s on My Mind, Love… Can Be So Wonderful, and I Love You, You Love Me. An all-conquering version of Dedicated To The One I Love, to cap it off.
We love The Temprees.

Stanley Bryan was a jack of all trades at Channel One in its heyday. As an engineer, he mixed the Eek-a-Mouse classic Wah Do Dem, for instance. If a drummer dropped out of a session, Stan was the man to step in. And into the night, Ranking Barnabas worked the mic for the Channel One Sound System, often toasting over rhythms that he had recorded himself in the studio. Though Barnabas mixed countless dubs during these years, The Cold Crusher is the only LP released solely under his name, as a limited edition in the US.
Very well presented by the Italian label Jamming, with new notes, and expert sound restoration at Dubplates & Mastering. The terrific cover photo is by Beth Lesser.
Dub fans, don’t dilly dally. This won’t stick around.

‘Their second and final LP, from 1973, with the same AACM-derived line-up as the first, plus Rufus Reid. Spiritual jazz, free jazz, soul jazz, fusion jazz, you name it — The Awakening take all those threads common to early ‘70s African-American music and, like any great ensemble, weave them into a beautiful sonic garment that’s greater than the sum of its parts. The Mirage is a bit less political/pan-African than Hear, Sense And Feel, which definitely owed some of its feel to the band’s Art Ensemble of Chicago/AACM roots; this record is a little more abstract, a little more varied in its moods and textural colouring, yet no less powerful and transporting.’

Spiritual jazz from early-seventies Chicago, by a sextet combining members of the AACM and Phil Cohran’s Artistic Ensemble, augmented by bassist Richard Evans for Brand New Feeling. You can hear co-leaders Ken Chaney and Frank Gordon’s years together in Young-Holt in Kera’s Dance; the Art Ensemble, brought to the heel of Alice Coltrane, in the bells and chimes of the killer cut Will It Ever End; your favourite CTI records in the electric piano-playing, freshly luminous throughout.
A bonafide Black Jazz classic.

The LPs are sky blue vinyl, in an alternative cover.

Donato Dozzy & Neel.