If you can get over the disappointment that the album cover of this release has absolutely nothing to do with the music contained within and is instead someone within the record company’s idea of ‘exotic cool’, you can actually begin to enjoy the tunes compiled here. But it takes time.
It’s volume 5 of a series that began in the late Nineties chronicling rare grooves and 70’s soul from the US, the kind of smooth smoking funky grooves that give crate diggers conniptions. It’s mixed by DJ Spinna, a New York DJ/producer who has made beats for everyone from Mos Def to Michael Jackson, and he does an incredible job at weaving a seamless, subtle, yet effective passage through this 21 track tapestry of rare nuggets. That said he still manages to get into some scratching, beat juggling and vinyl trickery, it’s just that it seems to fit in so well with the deep grooves and laidback funky feel of the material.
Californian funk icons War are probably the best known here, though J Dilla has previously sampled Sylvia Robinson’s seductive, slightly breathless pillow talking Sweet Stuff, on his Crushin tune. Robinson would go on to be a driving force behind The Sugar Hill Gang and their pioneering Rappers Delight, however the tune here is a cracker in its own right. Otherwise Detroit funky guitarist Eddy Senae offers the instrumental Cameo, a chugging slice of near perfect psychedelic funk and we get the original folk funk of Get It Up For Love, not by David Cassidy, but Californian Ned Doheny, who’s version is infinitely better. The Ambassadors, a criminally forgotten Philadelphia Soul quintet also offer up a strutting, slightly nasty I Aint Got The Love, with the great line “find em, fool em, forget em, is my philosophy.”
You’re unlikely to know many of these artists, aside from the occasional grab that’s popped up in hip hop productions over the years, but that doesn’t matter. We’ve got everything from symphonic soul to bossa funk, and all these indefinable and bizarre sub genres in between. Five volumes down, this series doesn’t show any signs of letting up. And if it continues to rescue such incredible rare gems as they’ve assembled here there’s no reason why it should.
Bob Baker Fish
