Vintage funk and sweet soul by children, drawn from obscure 45s — fresh and irresistible, praps our favrit Numero so far.

This guitarist was a long-time mainstay of the B.B. King band.
His one single for Kent Records came in 1973, in its last days.
The A-side is a driving James Brown-style funk dancer, with tumbling horns; featuring Johnny Adams. That’s organist Earl Foster igniting the flip.

Her 1982 collaboration with Roy Ayers — classic disco boogie. One side is a full vocal; the other a flute-led instrumental, beefed up for the dancefloor by Ayers, at the mixing desk .

“We started with a cosmic idea that we were taught from a very young age – that the stars and planets make a sound, that deep in outer space there is audible harmony.”
Book Of Sound is the brilliant, richly resonant exploration of these interstellar low ways. By turns urgent and contemplative, funky and reflective; varied in its textures, but entirely of one piece. Underpinned by cosmology, held in place by meditation, swirling with notions of history, science, theology, ancestry — this is a heady conceptual brew. But the music speaks loudest: ‘the sound of surprise’, magnificently retrieving Spiritual Jazz from the knacker’s yard.
It’s a deeply Chicagoan record. “It’s got the vibe of the lake,’ continues trombonist Cid, “the vibe of the prairies opening up to the west.” Also the Sun Ra albums recorded there in the 1950s, and — of course, being the dad of all seven ensemblists — Phil Cohran’s wonderful albums from the 1960s.
“You know, it’s tough trying to satisfy everybody with our music. It’s hard enough satisfying ourselves, let alone the jazz scene, the hip hop guys, what have you. With this album we just dropped all that as a consideration, and tuned into deeper principles.”

Tear-up bad-boy brass-band scorchers. Just like dad crossed Sun Ra with Kool And The Gang, this crashes funkdafied New Orleans street jazz into hip hop. With Flea, Damon, Tony Allen, Malcolm from The Heliocentrics.

‘This thirteen-track compilation exhumes forgotten brilliance from the Afroamerican underground of the 1970s. Awash in fuzzed-out guitars, wah-wah pedals, lysergic-soaked grooves, and enough inflation depression to fill the tank of a shag wagon, If There’s Hell Below imagines a world where Hendrix lived on and Funkadelic never crawled out of the garage.’
Transparent red vinyl.

Startlingly hot, raw, late-sixties funk and soul scorchers by this Arkansas band, named after the Stevie Wonder song, but evidently inspired by James Brown. Mostly out here for the first time, so this is terrific work by AOTN, who says it’s maybe the best LP they’ve released so far.
Warmly recommended.