Bargain Bins #03
This third edition of BeatCaffeine’s Bargain Bins series features three great seventies-era jazz-funk selections that can often be found for five dollars or less.
Category: DIGGIN’ IN
This third edition of BeatCaffeine’s Bargain Bins series features three great seventies-era jazz-funk selections that can often be found for five dollars or less.
Are you collecting records on a budget, but you still have the itch to do some digging? The BeatCaffeine Bargain Bins series will highlight three great records on a bi-monthly basis that can often be found for five dollars or less.
Let’s play the hypothetical game. You are trapped on a deserted island. You have all the essentials to live (food, water, shelter, etc) and a record player (essential in my mind). In this, admittedly ridiculous scenario, you can only bring with you five records. What would they be?
This week (morning of August 16, 2018) we sadly lost one of the greatest vocalists and inspirational figures of our time in Aretha Franklin. The artist who has rightfully been declared the “Queen of Soul” sold over 75 million records, won 18 GRAMMYs, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 1987, became the first women to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Are you collecting records on a budget? Is the wallet a little thin this month? Do you still have the itch to do some digging? BeatCaffeine is starting a series called Bargain Bins. This new reoccurring series will highlight three great records on a bi-monthly basis that can often be found for five dollars or less.
At times written off by the genre’s purists that the 1970s were a less than remarkable time for jazz, the decade was actually an era of major exploration for many jazz musicians, incorporating elements of funk, soul, rock, and early electronic sounds into their own recordings. This expansion of musical influences and an adaptation of more electric instrumentation helped lead to what some consider as a golden time for what has been coined “jazz-funk.”
Declared by Pitchfork as “the most compelling argument that techno came from Germany,” and ranked the fourth best album of the eighties by FACT, Manuel Göttsching’s 1984 E2-E4 is considered by many to be one of the greatest electronic recordings of our time.
Before Johnny ‘Hammond’ Smith and the legendary producer tag-team of Larry & Fonce Mizell recorded the 1974 jazz-funk masterpiece Gears, the two parties first came together one year earlier to record the often overlooked album Gambler’s Life.
Starting in the mid-1970s, disco flooded nightclubs in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. From its soul and Motown roots, disco expanded dance music with complex arrangements and productions: Percussion, strings, horns, and keyboards were often played by a large team of musicians under the direction of a producer.