Tag: Funk
Toronto based record label We Are Busy Bodies has recently reissued the rare 1980 recording by the collaborative supergroup ensemble Eboni Band, featuring musicians from Ivory Coast based Eboni Records and prime Motown session players, including funk legend and longtime JB’s bandleader Fred Wesley.
Over the last two-plus years, UK’s SAULT has been the most innovative collective in all of music, releasing four groundbreaking full length albums including last year’s highly acclaimed UNTITLED (Black Is) and follow-up UNTITLED (Rise) (BeatCaffeine’s #1 and #3 Favorite Albums of 2020), which centered around subjects of police brutality and racial injustices. The thought-provoking group, which features producer Dean “Inflo” Wynton Josiah, vocalist Cleo Sol, rapper/vocalist Melisa Young (aka Kid Sister) and numerous other guests and collaborators, returns with another brilliant recording, titled NINE, which according to the band, will only be available to download or stream digital for 99 days from it’s release date of June 25, 2021.
Matsuli Music has been the leading label over the past decade for quality South African jazz and rare groove reissue recordings. The UK label continues to build on their strong reputation with the recent reissue release of two essential mid-seventies Afro-rock albums from the highly influential South African band Harari, who also went by previously as both The Beaters and Rhodesia (named after the Rhodesian township).
For the last two decades, the German-based label Analog Africa has consistently released some of the best compilations and retrospective recordings, highlighting the many unique styles of music that have come out of both Africa and South America. Continuing to dive deep into this exploration, they have just released volume 1 of their much-anticipated Edo Funk Explosion compilation series, highlighting some of the greatest recordings from the genre’s pioneers, Osayomore Joseph, Akaba Man, and Sir Victor Uwaifo.
Earlier in the year, London’s Cordial Recordings put out a full-length album featuring previously unreleased material recorded in the 70s from an Oakland based funk and soul group Family of Swede, titled Family Album. Due to high demand and heavy rotation from Gilles Peterson and others, the long version of the brilliant soul track “Set You Free”, which was originally only included on the CD version, has been released as a twelve-inch single.
London’s cosmic-jazz-meets-psychedelic-funk group The Heliocentrics continue to push their otherworldly sound into new orbits on their second full-length release off of Madlib’s Invazions label.
“Do you remember?” … Over the years, September 21st has kind of unofficially become Earth, Wind & Fire Day due to the opening lyrics to their 1978 smash disco-funk hit “September” where bandleader and founder Maurice White references this exact date: Do you remember the 21st night of September? / Love was changing the mind of pretenders /
While chasing the clouds away.
On the same day that the group’s groundbreaking UNTITLED (Black Is) album was released on vinyl (released digitally back in June), SAULT has surprised us once again by releasing a brilliant complimentary new full-length record, titled UNTITLED (Rise).
Following the publishing of the now out-of-print Wamono A to Z records guide book by the renowned remixer, compiler, and producer DJ Yoshizawa Dynamite and fellow DJ/record collector Chintam, the two have teamed up again to release a series of compilations highlighting “the Wamono sound,” featuring some of the most rare jazz, funk, soul, and disco music to come out of Japan since the sixties.
Finnish multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer Jimi Tenor returns following the release of the his outstanding 2018 full-length Order of Nothingness and last year’s single Vocalize My Luv, with a great new 7inch single on Max Weissenfeldt’s Berlin-based Philophon label, titled Sugar And Spice.
