Fresh and new, but rough, layered and head-nodding like classic UK street soul, this is the fifth and for us the best-yet installment in Londoner EYE’s excellent, under-the-radar series.
Slinkily slippery and hard-to-pin-down as usual, but rooted in funk and soul connoisseurship.
Two-sided this time — boozier, dizzier and more spaced-out on the flip, smudged with echo and effects, and scraps of horns and singing.
Beautifully hand-decorated sleeves as per.

This is the sublime, eleven-minute version, featuring vocalist Gavin Christopher.
Big Theo Parrish record.
Backed with the promo-only disco mix of Saturday Night, lavished with percussion by Sheila E.
Murders.

Love Punaany Bad — a tale of hard times in New York City, with a nice steelpan sample; and a badman Admiral Bailey.

A rare sighting of Eye from The Boredoms, kicking up a rumpus with Japanese noise-rock duo Gagakirise.

A beautiful, close-harmony warning — loose, mystical and heavy.
The Radics at Channel One with Scientist at the desk.

Originals, and covers of Coltrane, Horace, Shorter and co. Bobby Hutcherson’s Little B’s Poem steals the show, with the great Jean Carn singing. From 1974.

‘SK Kakraba is a master of the gyil xylophone — fourteen wooden slats strung across calabash resonators. The silk walls of spiders’ egg sacs — ‘paapieye’ in the Lobi language — are stretched across holes in the gourds, giving each note a buzzy rattle. SK learned as a child from elders in his Lobi community in the far northwest reaches of Ghana.’
Beautiful, spare, mesmeric recordings — song cycles, dirges, improvisations based on traditional songs, original compositions — newly made.

This is terrific. Rawly soulful trio jazz.
‘There’s no denying the expressiveness of Jones’ music. His sustained, lancing high notes, coarse overblowing and strategically managed vibrato can signify open pain and more complex syntheses of emotion. On No More My Lord, the sole cover in an otherwise original sequence of compositions, bassist Chris Lightcap’s bowed bass and Gerald Cleaver’s scrabbling percussion amplify the dolour and desperation in his playing…’ (The Wire).

‘Verve By Request.’