LP

Limited 2018 repress (500 copies with obi strip). Released on Halloween!

South African disco release. The title track ‘Dance’, written by Belgian composer Frank Degrijse, was released by Night Force and became a hit throughout Europe in 1980.In South Africa the song was released with permission at a slower tempo (the original 45rpm was ‘officially’ slowed down to 33rpm). Added to this are four tracks by Music Team’s in-house production team the Tom Cats - including dub reworkings of recent Afrosynth releases ‘Burnin Beat’ and ‘Searchin’, here released as ‘Hot Stuff’ and ‘Search For Love’ respectively. Synth-heavy oddities ‘You Are My Fire’ and ‘Shake Shake’ make up the rest of the tracklist.

Killer jazz record from instrumentalist, composer and arranger Louis Xavier. Originally released in Paris in 1981, where Louis was a prolific player in the Parisian music scene.

Amazing private spiritual jazz-funk/fusion LP, now hard to find. Finally available again, fully licensed and remastered, with original artwork. This album is magnificent in its entirety, no fillers. Very strong record in the genre.

“John Yancey” is the second album Illa J will release on Jakarta Records, following the successful release of HOME last year. The project is the second collaboration with Los Angeles based producer Calvin Valentine, who once again contributed all of the production for the long player. While “Home” was largely inspired by Illa’s native city of Detroit, “John Yancey” now focuses on his time in California.“(This album is) Definitely more personal than all of my projects, nothing specific, but I basically talk about about the ups and downs of all my relationships over the past 10 years, still grieving about my bro, etc. This one is trippy because the first single comes out a day before my 32nd birthday and the original title was 32 because this is a special year to me because my brother died at that age so it had a lot of meaning. But it makes sense that it ended up being called John Yancey because for so long in my career I felt like I was tryna be me and my brother, and I'm finally at peace, like I'm not J Dilla's younger brother Illa J, I'm James younger brother John.” While the story of the album might have changed, there are certain continuities as well, built around the strong foundation of the combination of Illa’s voice and Calvin Valentine’s soulful sample based production. The previous album already saw Illa J incorporate more singing into his raps and he goes down this path even further: “I wanted to emphasize the singing but use more of my natural singing voice, as well as rap more than on HOME.” In regards to the music, Calvin wanted to make the project sound “a bit more polished where HOME was purposely rough around the edges.” Still, the production remains soulful and rich with layers to leave things interesting for the listener, the more spins you give the record.The cover was created by Robert Winter, a Cologne based photographer who was also behind the visual appearance of HOME.

Wan Chai Records is a Hong Kong based label, specialized in rare Asian records and quality reissues.For their third release, after a few years of hard diggin and historical researches, they went deeper with HONG KONG SCORE, introspection into the music of the Chinese’s Cinema industry. A selection of tracks from Hong-Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, specially produced for movies and illustrations.The result is a compilation of 12 totally unknown gems sung mostly in Mandarin and Cantonese, from real deep instrumentals, Hip-Hop breaks, Ethio style crazy drums, to heavy Bass in the Alain Goraguer’ style. This is an amazing introduction to 60’s and 70’s Chinese music, an inspiration for beatmakers, a must have for novices or Asian vintage music lovers.

The album ‘Som, sangue e raça’ paves the way for future generations of musicians and producers of the carioca scene at the beginning of the 1970s. The lyrics that dealt with the question of race and the explosive fusion of samba, soul, jazz and funk, elaborated by Dom Salvador and his troupe, Abolição, established the bases for the development of new sounds and tendencies in Brazilian music.This isn’t just a seminal album. It is an estuary. All the black rivers that would form Brazilian funk/hip-hop flow through it. Led by Paulista pianist Salvador Silva Filho – Dom Salvador – “Som, Sangue, e Raça” from 1971, one year after the explosion of Tim Maia on the scene, catalyzed the bossa nova and jazz background of its leader with the rhythm and blues of its members like saxophonist Oberdã Magalhães, newphew of samba-enredo master Silas de Olvieira and future leader of Banda Black Rio, who since the group Impacto 8 (which had, among others, Robertinho Silva on drums and Raul de Souza on trombone) had already been trying to reconcile MPB with Stevie Wonder and James Brown. Add to all this a mixture of samba, Nordestino accent, and even the black side of the Jovem Guarda represented by the authorial presence of of Getúlio Cortes (older brother of Gerson King Combo, our James Brown “cover”) in ‘Hei! Você’. Alongside these elements and the preseence of Rubão Sabino (bass), who still called himself ‘Rubens’, drummer Luis Carlos (another member of Black Rio), the disc enlists the trumpet and flugelhorn of symphonic musician Darcy in place of the original Barrosinho (yet one more founder of Black Rio), who was traveling during the recording but would end up being a leading force of the band.