Tracks from a career of more than forty years, several rare or unissued. The pianist/composer/arranger/producer in collaborations with Captain Beefheart, The Monkees, Frankie Laine and The Tubes, amongst others.

Plenty of killers, old friends like The Soul Children and William Bell alongside nuff new discoveries. Check the samples (if you think you’re hard enough).

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’.

‘Pied Piper Productions was a group of Detroit arrangers, writers, artists and musicians who unwittingly drew up the blueprints of Northern Soul, during their brief time together in 1965-1967. Mainstays Jack Ashford, Mike Terry, Joe Hunter and Herbie Williams were original members of Motown studio crew the Funk Brothers. This compilation features some of the biggest Northern Soul discoveries of recent times —like Nancy Wilcox and September Jones — alongside established favourites and other rarities.’

Representing every Chess artist recording at Muscle Shoals, 1967-69. The likes of Etta James, Irma Thomas, Laura Lee, Bobby Moore and Mitty Collier, in the era of the studio’s second great rhythm section, the Swampers. Plenty of unfamiliar glories, and throwing in three instrumentals by Charles Chalmers and crew.

A testament to the impeccable taste of the greatest soul singer of all time — mostly big names and classics, rounded off by gospel giant Clara Ward, and the song Aretha sang at her funeral.

‘Laura liberated musicians to employ all their influences in crafting a pop song – as she had combined jazz, folk, classical, 60s soul, the Beatles, Dylan, Tin Pan Alley… so ahead of its time it’s still ahead…’