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.

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.

Firing interpretations of Curtis, full of funk and soulfulness, grooving jazz fire, and good old-fashioned revolutionary politics, by this octet with Hamid Drake, Dave Burrell, Leena Conquest, Amiri Baraka.
Dynamite twenty-minute version of (Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Below, We’re All Going To Go.

One of their best, most diverse LPs: gritty soul, country hillbilly, raucous funk — the classic Nothing Before Me But Thang — and bagpipes galore on The Silent Boatman.

Gene Russell signed Kellee Patterson to Shadybrook in 1976, after the demise of his Black Jazz label.
Three years on from her Maiden Voyage LP, he engineers and plays piano, but Kellee is running the show, with her own arrangements and production.
More bang-on covers, including a killer, sleazy Barry White and a rough Mister Magic (both revived by Jazzman a decade ago), to put a dip in the hip of all b-boys and girls, and I Love Music on speed.
William Upchurch is here, from Motown; Marlo Henderson, who plays guitar on Off The Wall; Don ‘Tabu’ Cunningham…