‘Home to Cuca Records and hundreds of Nashville-fantasizing pluckers and singers, Wisconsin’s Driftless region was a hotbed of country music in the 1960s. Influenced by old-timey ethnic songs, Bakersfield outlaws, countrypolitan rainbows, and the lonesome twang of every rural route roadhouse, these seventeen Driftless Dreamers washed up at Jim Kirchstein’s Sauk City record plant with little more than $100 and a longing.’

Ten issues.

Ten issues.

Ten issues.

Ten issues.

Like The Last Special, this was recorded at Johannesburg’s Video Sounds Studios in December 1974, in the depths of the apartheid era, by a twelve-piece touring band from California which immediately moved beyond the segregated hotels and ballrooms to build links with local South African players and audiences.
Featuring pianist Kirk ‘Habiba’ Lightsey, Rudolph Johnson from Black Jazz, and Billy Brooks, both records are superbly arranged slabs of peak 1970s funky big-band soul jazz, with tasteful Latin inflections and more than a nod to South Africa’s upful township jazz sound.

Try Hamba Samba!

Blue Mabone!

Terrific selection of Joe Gibbs productions from 1970, featuring a clutch of killer Upsetter-influenced instrumentals, Niney and Andy Capp, and ace deejaying from Lord Comic.

Stunning piano improvisations — mostly solo, though peppered with tombak, violin, and scraps of poetry — using his own tuning system, recorded for Iranian national radio between 1956-1965.