Jazz / Funk / Soul

http://messengers-inc.bandcamp.com/album/soulful-proclamation wrote:In the '70s radio stations were a powerful force across the whole of the US, and anyone with a transistor radio had access all kinds of music. Live music was another matter altogether, and unless you found yourself in a major city your nights out were limited to what the local talent had to offer. This was especially so with soul and funk acts, as mainstream rock and pop was where the money was.

So for small time Oklahoma soul bands such as husband and wife Charles and Barbara Burton's groups "Messengers Inc" - and later "Burton Inc" - times were tough. However, like many purveyors of soul, tough times were no match for those with determination, persistence and a story to tell. Many artists scraped enough money together to make a 45 or two on their own label; but the Burtons took this to another level - they got themselves organised and released their own full length LPs.

With these two albums we tell the story of the Burtons and their contribution to 1970s Midwest funk and soul. Their dreams and desires, struggles and setbacks are all set out in our extensive liner notes, complete with previously unseen photos of the bands.

But above all here are two albums chock full of good music - Messengers Inc from 1972 with heavy funk & deep soul, Burton Inc from 1976 with soulful disco and boogie, including the rare title track dancefloor favourite 'LA will Make You Pay'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-Carat_Black wrote:4-Carat Black was an American soul and funk band who recorded in the early 1970s. Although they only released one album at the time, the late 1973 concept album Ghetto: Misfortune's Wealth produced and arranged by Dale Warren, their music has been sampled numerous times. A second album compiled of unreleased recordings, Gone: The Promises of Yesterday, was released in 2009.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Roach wrote:Maxwell Lemuel "Max" Roach (January 10, 1924 – August 16, 2007) was an American jazz percussionist, drummer, and composer.

A pioneer of bebop, Roach went on to work in many other styles of music, and is generally considered alongside the most important drummers in history.[1][2] He worked with many famous jazz musicians, including Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Billy Eckstine, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown, Eric Dolphy and Booker Little.

Roach also led his own groups, and made numerous musical statements relating to the African American civil rights movement.

http://www.sonnyclark.net/ wrote:Pianist Sonny Clark was a consummate hard-bopper who made only a handful of recordings as a leader, but appears on literally dozens of albums as a sideman. It can be argued that he never played a bad recording date either as a sideman or as a leader.Most of Clark’s recordings as a leader were made for the Blue Note label, and all of them were solidly within the hard-bop tradition established by label-mates Art Blakey and Horace Silver. His impressive list of credits includes sessions with John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Billie Holiday, Stanley Turrentine and Lee Morgan to mention a few. His style was largely informed by that of Bud Powell, yet showed a great deal of originality.

His playing, which was both lyrical and complex, had been much in demand. Clark was a remarkably adaptable musician, able to work in any number of settings. During his short career, which lasted less than a decade, Clark made a significant contribution to the New York City jazz scene, and although he was not recognized outside of a small circle of knowledgeable jazz listeners at the time, his fame and his influence have spread considerably throughout the years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Evans wrote:Ian Ernest Gilmore "Gil" Evans (né Green; May 13, 1912 – March 20, 1988)[1] was a Canadian jazz pianist, arranger, composer and bandleader. He played an important role in the development of cool jazz, modal jazz, free jazz and jazz fusion, and collaborated extensively with Miles Davis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Donaldson wrote:Lou Donaldson (born November 1, 1926) is a jazz alto saxophonist. He was born in Badin, North Carolina. He is best known for his soulful, bluesy approach to playing the alto saxophone, although in his formative years he was, as many were of the bebop era, heavily influenced by Charlie Parker.[1]

Donaldson attended North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro in the early 1940s. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II and was trained at the Great Lakes bases in Chicago, where he was introduced to bop music in the lively club scene there. At the war's conclusion, he returned to Greensboro, where he worked club dates with the Rhythm Vets, a combo composed of A and T students who had served in the U.S. Navy. The band recorded the soundtrack to a musical comedy featurette, "Pitch a Boogie Woogie," in Greenville, North Carolina, in the summer of 1947. The movie had a limited run at black audience theatres in 1948 but its production company, Lord-Warner Pictures, folded and never made another film. "Pitch a Boogie Woogie" was subsequently restored by the American Film Institute in 1985 and re-premiered on the campus of East Carolina University in Greenville the following year. Donaldson and the surviving members of the Vets performed a reunion concert after the film's showing. In the documentary made on "Pitch" by UNC-TV, "Boogie in Black and White", [2] Donaldson and his musical cohorts recall the film's making—he originally believed that he had played clarinet on the soundtrack. A short piece of concert footage from a gig in Fayetteville, North Carolina, is included in the documentary.[3]

Donaldson's first jazz recordings were with the Charlie Singleton Orchestra in 1950[4] and then with bop emissaries Milt Jackson and Thelonious Monk in 1952,[5] and he participated in several small groups with other jazz luminaries such as trumpeter Blue Mitchell, pianist Horace Silver, and drummer Art Blakey.[1]

In 1953, he also recorded sessions with the trumpet virtuoso Clifford Brown, and Philly Joe Jones. He was a member of Art Blakey's Quintet and appeared on some of their best regarded albums, including the two albums recorded at Birdland in February 1954 Night at Birdland.

Donaldson has recorded in the bop, hard bop, and soul jazz genres. For many years his pianist was Herman Foster. He was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame on October 11, 2012.[6]

http://www.last.fm/music/Donny+Hathaway wrote:Chicago, United States (1945 – 1979)
Donny Edward Hathaway (October 1, 1945 – January 13, 1979) was an Grammy Award-winning American soul musician. He signed with Atlantic Records in 1969, and with his first single “The Ghetto” (1970), Rolling Stone magazine marked him as “a major new force in soul music.” His collaborations with Roberta Flack took him to the top of the charts and won him the Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for the duet “Where Is The Love” in 1973. On January 13, 1979, his body was found outside the luxury hotel Essex House in New York City; his death was ruled a suicide.

Hathaway, the son of Drusella Huntley, was born in Chicago, but spent most of his youth in St. Louis. He lived with his grandmother, Martha Pitts, also known as Martha Crumwell, in the Carr Square housing project. Hathaway began singing in a church choir with his grandmother, a professional gospel singer, at the age of 3. He also played the ukulele and, fascinated by Liberace, began studying piano as a child. Hathaway began singing professionally as “Donny Pitts, The Nation’s Youngest Gospel Singer”. By the time he was a student at Vashon High School, he was known as a piano prodigy, which earned him a fine-arts scholarship to Howard University in 1964 where he was initiated into Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. He attended Howard for three years and performed with The Ric Powell Trio, a jazz trio. Hathaway received so many job offers that he left Howard without a degree in 1967.

https://www.ubiquityrecords.com/shop/products/AFRODESIA-%252d-THE-AFRO%252dSOULTET.html wrote:Having released several albums this band would later become the Afro Soultet. The liner notes to their Afrodesia album state "This is Afrodesia! A Musical collage of many peoples. . .it comes from Africa and from Arabia, from the South Seas and from Asia." Living up to the promise of those notes Afrodesia mixes Latin Jazz, with straight jazz, worldly percussion, surf, rock, funk, oddball sound effects, a touch of lounge, and some hints of tropicalia. Millman produced and released the Afrodesia album on his own Banyon label sometime between 1968-1971 (no release date is listed on the record, and Millman cannot recall a more exact date.)

Somewhere between 500 and 1000 LPs were pressed on Banyon. The album was licensed non-exclusively to Betty Chiappetta (of Vee-Jay fame) for a period of time, but it is possible that the record only saw release as a test pressing during the license, and that no official release was made commercially available. After their short stint as the Afro Soultet, the band morphed one more time into The Afro Latin Soultet releasing records with pianist Phil Moore III at the helm.

http://overdoseoffingalcocoa.blogspot.com/2009/08/mother-night.html wrote:Mother Night were a 9 piece 60-70's soul/funk group band from New York. There is an amazing amalgamation of sounds here, like Tower Of Power, Blood Sweat, & Tears, Average White Band, War, Jimi Hendrix, Sly & The Family Stone, and countless more. A good album from a very obscure band.

Ray Barretto ‎– Barretto Power wrote:While Ray Barretto's congas have graced more recording sessions than virtually any other conguero of his time, he has also led some refreshingly progressive Latin jazz bands over the decades. His records often have a more tense, more adventurously eclectic edge than those of most conventional salsa groups, unafraid to use electronics and novel instrumental or structural combinations, driven hard by his rocksteady, endlessly flexible percussion work. This no doubt reflects Barretto's wide range of musical interests and also the fact that he came to Latin music from jazz, rather than the usual vice versa route for Latin-descended musicians. Indeed, he has said that he learned how to play swing-style before he came to master Latin grooves.
Read more at http://www.artistdirect.com/artist/bio/ray-barretto/401407#6JmBuPpTFwiovzUu.99

http://www.last.fm/music/Dave+Pike+Set wrote:The Dave Pike Set was a jazz band that existed between 1968 and 1972 featuring Dave Pike on the vibraphone, Hans Rettenbacher on bass and cello, Peter Baumeister on drums, and Volker Kriegel on guitar and sitar. They are best known for their Indian-vibe hit Mathar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Duke wrote:George Duke (January 12, 1946 – August 5, 2013) was an American musician, known as a keyboard pioneer, composer, singer and producer in both jazz and popular mainstream musical genres. He worked with numerous acclaimed artists as arranger, music director, writer and co-writer, record producer and as a professor of music. He first made a name for himself with the album The Jean-Luc Ponty Experience with the George Duke Trio. He was known primarily for thirty-odd solo albums as well as for his collaborations with other musicians, particularly Frank Zappa.

http://www.last.fm/music/Lloyd+Miller wrote:Lloyd Miller (b. 1938) is an American musician who is well known for his research work on Persian music.

Lloyd Miller received a doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of Utah. His thesis was entitled “Music and Song in Persia”. While writing his thesis, he spent 7 years in Tehran as an arts writer for several publications and a PR person for the Center for Preservation and Propagation of Iranian Music.

He is native in English and fluent in Persian, Dari and French, and during the 1950s and 60s, Miller played with top jazz artists in Europe like Don Ellis and Eddie Harris. Miller was interested in eastern culture and music. He moved to Iran and mastered Persian music as well as Iranian folk music genres under the supervision of masters Dr. Daryush Safvat and Mahmoud Karimi.

Dr. Miller is also known as Kurosh Ali Khan, a name he used while hosting a prime-time television show in Tehran, Iran in the 1970s. The program was known as Kurosh Ali Khan va Dustan, or Kurosh Ali Khan and Friends, a variety show with music.

His mother, Mrs. Maxine Adams Miller, was the author of Bright Blue Beads: An Amrican Family In Persia, and Dr. Miller is the author of Music and Song in Persia: The Art of Avaz published by Curzon Press London and also by University of Utah Press.

https://matthewhalsall.bandcamp.com/album/when-the-world-was-one wrote:Manchester based trumpeter, composer, arranger and band-leader Matthew Halsall is one of the rising stars of the UK jazz scene.

http://psychedelicobscurities.blogspot.gr/2009/07/bill-plummer-1967-bill-plummer-and.html wrote:You might not be aware of it yet, but you've come to the Psychedelic Garage today to become a fan of Bill Plummer and the Cosmic Brotherhood. I'm willing to say this obscure sitar-infused psychedelic jazz album is one of the absolute best I've heard from the legendary Impulse! jazz imprint. Why they haven't reissued it yet is beyond me. Bill Plummer's primary trade is in the string bass, which does provide the awesome backbone for all of these songs. But someone must have tossed Mr. Plummer in a vat of acid (almost like Jack Nicholson in the 1989 "Batman") before the making of this album. With it's layers of Eastern gauze, occasional blasts of spoken word and free jazz, and oddball covers, this is the most ear pleasingly far-out legitimate jazz album I've come across (the wild fury of John Coltrane's Om, also on Impuse!, is probably the most far out, but it's not easy to listen to).

http://www.last.fm/music/Bill+Plummer+and+the+Cosmic+Brotherhood wrote:

Bill Plummer, is a master of the String Bass. Any kind of Bass Instrument, and any style of music. Upright Bass, Contra Bass, Double Bass, Electric Bass, and East Indian Sitar, Bill Plummer has had a legendary career performing with such noted artists as The Rolling Stones, Miles Davis, Nancy Wilson, Tony Bennett, Willie Nelson, Ry Cooder, Pat Boone, Paul Horn, Spanky & Our Gang, Charles Lloyd, and The Jazz Corps just to name a few.
He studied under Ravi Shankar and Herman Reinshagen, principal bassist for the New York Philharmonic, and has been an instructor of String Bass, Guitar, and music theory for the last forty years.

http://www.dustygroove.com/item/56684 wrote:A holy grail of funky music – the one and only album ever cut by Marie Queenie Lyons, a heck of a hard soul single who's best known for her rare funky 45s! The album is stunning – every bit as great as any of Marie's singles, and with an incredibly unified sound that should have made the album an instant soul classic as soon as it was released. Think Marva Whitney, Vicki Anderson, Lyn Collins, and other sock-soul divas – and you've only got part of the picture! Plus, some of the tracks on the set were written by a young Don Pullen, who supposedly also played on the record – in a rare funky appearance in his pre-avant jazz days. Includes a funky remake of "Fever", plus the cuts "I Don't Want Nobody To Have It But You", "Your Key Don't Fit Anymore", "You Used Me", "Daddy's House", "See & Don't See", "Your Thing Ain't No Good Without My Thing", "I Want My Freedom", and "Try Me".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Train_(Oscar_Peterson_album) wrote:Night Train is an album by jazz pianist Oscar Peterson and his trio, released in 1963 by Verve Records. It was one of Peterson's most commercially successful recordings. The Penguin Guide to Jazz included it in its core collection, claiming "it's one of the best long-players of the period" and that Peterson's playing is "tight and uncharacteristically emotional".

Album producer Norman Granz had sold the record label Verve, but remained Peterson's manager, and so supervised the Night Train recording session. The brief duration of many of the tracks has been attributed to a desire to have them played on commercial radio, which was reluctant to play any tracks longer than a few minutes.

Ed Thigpen's rivet cymbal, recorded at very close range, is prominent on all issues of the album.