The Organic Music Society in super-quality audio, recorded by RAI in 1976 for Italian TV.
Ecstatic, bare-naked, free-as-the-birds music, with Cherry playing pocket-trumpet, the great Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, the Italian guitar of Gian Piero Pramaggiore, and the tanpura drone of Moki.
‘A pure hippie aesthetic, like in an intimate ceremony, filters a magical encounter between Eastern and Western civiliziations, offering different suggestions of sound mysticism: natural acoustics in which individual instruments and voices are part of a wider pan-tribal consciousness. A desert Western landscape marries Asian and Latin atmospheres. Indigenous contributions with berimbau explorations find fossil sounds of rattles and clap-hands invocations. Influences of Indian mantra singing are combined with eternal African voices or with folkish-Latin guitar rhythms, while flute and drums evoke distant dances.’
Interviewing Shirley Collins recently, Stewart Lee noted how so many of her songs are ‘stories that go back hundreds of years, and that suggests there’s a continuity to existence, which means we don’t have to worry.’ Quite different music, obviously, but Om Shanti Om is the same kind of miracle medicine.
It’s a must.

Wonderful, previously-unheard recordings by the legendary Bahamian guitarist, at his peak in 1965, made at his only New York concert, at home in Nassau, and in a Manhattan apartment. Gripping, one-off playing, continuously stepping out of line, or surprising you with accents, like Monk; rough, enraptured singing in the age-old tradition of local sponge fishermen, with startling irruptions of humming, babble and scat.

Stylishly reined-in, Southern-flavoured, churchy soul — same neck of the woods as Aretha — half recorded in Memphis by Jackie’s cousin Dave Crawford, including her smash hit Precious, Precious, with the Memphis Horns in full effect (and Dr. John, on Time); and half at Sigma, with Earl Young, Bobby Eli and co.
(Jackie Moore is well-known but under-rated. Try to track down the CD set The Complete Atlantic Recordings for a bunch of killer previously-unreleased sides.)

Perhaps his best LP, from 1975, with an ace band, including horns. Rough, raw, and emotionally gripping as ever, and slashed through with his unmistakable guitar sound, from the mean, rollicking opener Cut You Loose to the Diddleyesque, wigged-out, hard-shuffling finale Motoring Along.

‘Classic Vinyl Series.’

A second set of piano improvisations, one year after the first, now more extended, percussive, insistent, and tumultuous; explicitly enraged by the recent murder of George Jackson by a San Quentin guard, and the massacre at Attica Prison.

Brothers Nkululelo and Siyabonga Mthembu reworkimg the music of Mongezi Feza, Johnny Dyani, the Malopoets, Batsumi, and Philip Tabane.
Old wisdom in new voices, new wisdom in old voices. Tolika Mtoliki, ‘Interpret Interpreter’.
“Just brilliant,” says Gilles.

The first volume in a two-part collection of pirate radio adverts & idents, assembled from home recordings of London stations made between 1984 & 1993.

A gospelized, autobiographical collage of raps, beats, modern jazz and songs, featuring the in-demand drummer alongside an expansive roster of collaborators bringing together artists from his hometown of Houston (vocalists Corey King, Lisa E. Harris, Fat Tony, Jawwaad Taylor), those he became close to over several years living in LA (Sam Gendel, Zeroh, Mic Holden, Josh Johnson, fellow International Anthem artist Carlos Niño), and other creative partners from his life-long journey in sound (Chassol, Svet, Kenneth Whalum).
‘Rooted in his faith, Jamire opens the album with Hands Up, a devotional hymn cut against the stark reality of the modern world that sounds like an apocalyptic middle-grounding of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly and Merry Clayton’s Gimme Shelter. Whether in the rousing, spiritual Just Hold On or the fluid verses of Fat Tony on Safe Travels, the music exists in the tension between higher realms and social realities — what Jamire calls the “duality of a personal thing and what I’m seeing in my community, in the Black community, as a Black man.” ‘

Though a gold record in 1976 — with Something He Can Feel an anthem for the ages — Sparkle quickly became neglected.
It is written and produced by Curtis Mayfield, the fifth of his six seventies soundtracks, shadowing the rise and fall of the black film industry in the US during this decade. There were three more Atlantic LPs to come from Aretha, but Sparkle has a singularity and accomplishment which in retrospect take a definitive step away from her classic, southern soul sound — half-closing the church door — before Jump To It, Luther Vandross and Arista ushered her into a new era of grooving, contemporary R&B, at the start of the eighties.
The singing here is totally knockout, sparking off the sophisticated slinkiness of Curtis’ sound-world: more excursive than testifying, with a new improvisatory freedom, more warmly intimate and enraptured, over-running with sensuality, love, and expressiveness. (You get a foretaste of this from the portrait on the cover.) Mainstays of seventies Chicago Soul are present and correct, like Phil Upchurch on rhythm guitar and Henry Gibson on congas, Joseph Lucky Scott playing heavy bass, and the swirling strings arrangements of Rich Tufo.
Originally devised for a female trio — in accord with the film’s storyline, about Sister & The Sisters — the songs are all written from a woman’s point of view, and with the Kitty Heywood Singers in full effect as backing vocalists, the album is steeped in classic Chi-soul girl-group sensibilities and aesthetics, like Patti & The Lovelites in future shock. (It makes perfect sense that En Vogue would have smash hits in the nineties with both Something He Can Feel and Hooked On Your Love.)
Something He Can Feel is the killer blow, but it’s all wonderful, and over in a flash… via the dazed, defiant, junkie blues of I Get High… right through to the sultry, swinging finale Rock With Me.
A masterwork by the Queen of Soul.