Gorgeous, unheralded, sweet soul from Chicago.
School-friends Clifford Curry and LaSalle Matthews started the group in 1965, with Walter Jones and Robert Thomas, all in for the long haul. They waited till 1970 for a hit — I’m Still Here, produced by Syl Johnson for Twinight — and had to ride out the label’s demise before signing to Curtom’s new Gemigo imprint in late 1973. (Super People was 1975.)
Unmistakably Chicagoan and stamped by Curtis, classically schooled but on the cusp… with its roots in the chivalric harmonies of doowop, its bad self in dapperly distraught r&b balladry, and its eye on the new social consciousness of soul and funk.
Typical Numero loveliness.

A Stones Throw project.

Chilled, underground, DIY fusion from eighties America, rolling up together jazz, new age, and pop. Music for a burgeoning managerial middle class, says Numero; pitched rather hopefully at ‘the new commercial audiences held captive in dentist offices and waiting rooms across America’.

A compilation of the best of their Westbounds.

Expert, ecstatic, technicolour disco from the Orlando Riva Sound.

As if Sam Cooke came back as a vocal group, this is wonderful hit soul music from early-seventies Memphis, the outfit’s second coming.

Militant jazz, fusion, funk and soul from mid-seventies Manenberg, outside Cape Town, with a set of roots in club dance traditions like ballroom (‘langarm’), Khoisan hop-step and the whirling ‘tickey draai’ (‘spin on a sixpence’) of the mine camps; others in jazz-rock and the New Thing.