At their chilliest, most magnificent and dread.
Brilliantly remastered; one-sided.
Jubilant jazz-oetry cut-ups of Weldon Irvine and John Lee Hooker.
Live, organic, cosmic house from the master for the fiftieth SS. Slow-burning electro-boogie — synths over a clicking, swaying, volatile beat — and a more uptempo jazz trip, with dusty, wacked-out breaks.
Killer, mournful roots. Plus Pablo on xylophone, over his own awesome rhythm.
‘Classic Vinyl’ series.
Not disco at all — rather a fully rounded excursion into mid-70s dancefloor funk and jazz-funk, by an orchestra of crack NYC musicians originally known as the Smokin’ Shades Of Black.
Like previous Jazzman revives by Sounds of the City Experience and Ricardo Marrero, this reissue saves from obscurity some wonderful music wilfully squandered at the time in the service of tax scamming. The booklet tells the full story.
Bangers drawn from the bootleg compilation LPs — ‘pirata’ — which were all the rage in 1980s Mexico City, The hottest, rarest hits from Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and beyond — edited, tweaked, EQ-manipulated and pitched-down, to suit the sonideros running the city’s mobile soundsystems.
‘Eighteen dedications, each hybrid and different, but driven by an utterly personal approach to bebop, Brazilian jazz, Africa and Brazilian roots; thronged with his signature battery of whistles, screams, scales, keyboard, kettles, spoons, squeeze toys, children’s voices, prepared piano and geese calls; with the band adding native instruments like pandeiro, surdo, caixa, apitos, bonecos and agogos, besides saxophones, flute, electric piano, electric bass and so on. Musicians and genres such as Terry Riley, Frank Zappa and Weather Report, Javanese gamelan and Indonesian kulintang come to mind, but there is no real overlap: Pascoal has his own special brew.’
His first recording with his band in fifteen years. “My music is not commercial; it’s not like selling bananas or soap. I’m not in a hurry to record.”