Eddie Harris’ bassist with an effects box and guests like Lester Bowie and Phil Upchurch. Same vibes as Charles Stepney, the best Ramsey Lewis Cadets, early Earth, Wind And Fire…
‘Verve By Request.’
Three hours from the legendary Festival — Rance Allen, The Emotions, The Temprees, The Soul Children, Isaac Hayes, Richard Pryor, The Staples Singers, The Bar-Kays, Rufus Thomas and the rest.
Feeling, folkey soul from 1977, with Skull Snaps and Jimmy Castor crew.
Not for the faint-hearted — dark and dirty psych improv from Chie Mukai, Eric Cordier and Seichi Yamamoto (Boredoms). Moody, subterranean squalls and drones, blowing up like a bad-tempered Fushitsusha.
A four-tracker nodding to the Revolutionaries’ late-seventies instrumental EPs out of Maxfield Avenue.
A double whammy of knockout dubs.
First, a head-turning brace for all darker-than-blue massive. A down-to-the-bone version of Pam Hall’s haunted Lovers take on The Stylistics’ Children of the Night; and the startling dub of Junior Moore’s lovely cover of The Isley Brothers’ Voyage to Atlantis. In both the scraps of singing are deadly.
Then two evilous dubs of classic Hopeton Lewis roots, saturated in classic Channel One hard-grooving intensity. Like the opener, never released before now.
Sweet, heavy lovers, with Perry’s genius touch, from early 1978 — concluding the singer’s illustrious accomplishments at the Black Ark, recently including backing vocals on Chant Down Babylon Kingdom, for Yabby You, Travelling, behind Deborah Keese, and the classic Freedom, under his own name.
Hymning the power of reggae, over a re-licked, surging Conquering Lion, with worrisome Tubbys bass. The dub is here.