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.

A Bengali-Italian collaboration — nurtured by Rimini’s Associazione Ardea, for refugees — psychedelically combining ancient folk and cosmic synth exotica.
Entrancing, fresh renditions of mystical Baul songs, with Md After accompanying himself on
harmonium and two headed pakhawaj drum, over Andrea Rusconi’s warm Crumar synth and veena string drones.
Check it out.

Links was an artists’ cooperative, formed in 1968 by The Gaylads, Ken Boothe, The Melodians, and Delroy Wilson, fed up with getting ripped off by Studio One and co. They did everything themselves — hiring Dynamic / Wirl studios, printing up labels, organising the pressings, and distributing in person to Kingston record shops — in the teeth of peeved obstructiveness from other labels, producers, and radio stations. Many of their 45s were blanks, hand-stamped with BB Seaton’s home address: ‘Links Records, 39 Wildman Street, Phone 24954’.
The backing band was probably Lynn Taitt & The Jets to start, giving way to the Conscious Minds (with Joe White and Ken Boothe on keys), whose instrumental Something New is one of the highlights here, featuring killer guitar and trombone by Harris Seaton and Derrick Hinds.
Links was short-lived; ironically unable to cope with the success of a Melodians’ hit entitled It Comes & Goes.
It’s a fascinating story, and this is top-notch rock steady; the first compilation of the dozen or so Links releases. Scorchers by Conscious Minds, The Melodians, Randall Thaxter, and Ken Boothe — doing his best Otis Redding — steal the show.

This saxophonist came through with the likes of Roy Ayers and Joe Henderson in the sixties, before hooking up with Steve Lacy in Paris in 1973. In this soundtrack composed for a film by his friend Joaquin Lledó — entitled Le Sujet Ou Le Secrétaire Aux Mille Et Un Tiroirs — he was joined by members of the group around Lacy, and diverse co-conspirators including friends from the funk outfit Ice, French accordionist Joss Bassellion, and none other than Jef Gilson at the mixing desk. It’s a dazzling, intensely entertaining blend of modal, cosmic and spiritual jazz, free funk, dirty grooves, heavy jams, bistro boogie and Javanese wah-wah.

‘Alone at night. Large church room. Lots of air. Stone. Wood. Glass. Quietness. Stillness. The dead and the alive. Surroundedness.
‘Existentialistic matters spinning. Peaceful state of mind. The dialectic equilibrium of complete stillness and deeper thoughts on contra-resistance on local and global levels. Fighting (y)our stupidities. Contra.
‘I have never ever before gotten myself into such an unusual setting for a recording project. And yet, so simple. So naked. So peaceful. Alone at night. As we all are.
‘I borrowed the keys to the beautiful church of Gustafsberg, from my neighbor Rune.
‘I went there at midnight. Set up my recording gear. Old school DAT machine, tube pre-amps and two AKG 414s in an extreme stereo set-up, close to the horn. The horn of choice. The contrabass sax. The monstrous sax-machine “Tubax” made by the German engineer Benedikt Eppelsheim at the turn of the century. I sat down in the first row of benches. Breathing. Preparing. Contemplating. The saxophone positioned in the very middle of the church, close to the altar. More than 6 hours straight of low-end sax noise and many breaks later:  the sun set. At around 7 am… I was done. I was alone the whole night. And yet, not all alone. Some things were going on in that church. In that room. I kid you not. Never audible. But strongly felt. Whatever presence of the old or new gods - old and new dreams - it effected the music and my mind. I let it happen. I let it all flow.
‘Alone at night. There is nothing to explain.’

Legendary jazz fusion of Indian, Caribbean and Eastern influences, from 1969.
With Joe Harriott, Ian Carr, Bryan Spring, Dave Green and Norma Winstone.

‘The Musiques Vertes project began in south east France during the late 1970s, spearheaded by Christine Armengaud, who was investigating a long tradition of musical instruments made with organic materials and plants. With the help of elderly people in the region, she was able to construct 240 instruments, long used for bird calling, dancing, as the toys of young shepherds and children, and much more, but which had been lost to common usage following the First World War.
‘In 1980 Jean-Yves Bosseur initiated a programme of collective music-making using the instruments reconstructed by Armengaud. Rather than working with professional musicians, he preferred locals and children he encountered in Aix-en-Provence between 1981 and 1982. Recorded by the legendary French ornithologist and wildlife field recordist Jean-Claude Roché, the Musiques Vertes album presents eleven musical excursions, utilising a series of instructions or games set up by the composer to encourage collective musical exchange, as well as a dialogic exchange between this practice and active listening within a natural environment.
‘Bubbling textures and atonalities, blended with sounds from the natural environment, intermingle with staggering birdsong-alike tonalities and rattling percussive passages, producing striking moments of abstraction that retain a remarkable sense of humanity and ease. A document of pure sonic magic and stunningly organic creativity.’

Intensely evocative, meditative duets by modular synthesizer and viola, interwoven with field recordings — birds, the sound of forests — encapsulating sojourns on the Åland archipelago in the Baltic Sea, between Sweden and Finland.

Sparse, contemplative, classy, playful, deep jazz, recorded in 1983, with the focus on Tapscott’s brilliant piano-playing, accompanied by Aubrey Hart and Kafi Roberts on flute and saxophone. All-analogue; cut directly from the original master tapes. Tip-on sleeve.