Musical life has begun again.

We have been updating some things at home, and now with the construction (Ikea assembly) of a new entertainment center my record player has stopped skipping, and music is back for us. I know it is hackneyed to the nth, but there really is something different about putting on a record and sitting back to actually listen. I love the portability of my mp3's, and there is nothing wrong with having 32 gigs of music trapsing around with me in my pocket, but sitting back and listening to a great record is a totally unique and mystically enjoyable experience.

To welcome ourselves back to the world of vinyl we listened to a number of albums that I had collected since the debacle of the "shelf that makes the records skip" came into our home, and was pleasantly surprised. A band that I found through Thrift store purchases was the amazing funk band Slave. I originally bought their self-titled album when I saw the back cover with a collection of amazing pictures of individual members, as well as their sign and parts. (See above) Last night I pulled out another Slave album that I found at a thrift store, 1978's "The Concept".

Where the self-titled LP was pure unadulterated funk in the vein of earlier Funkadelic and Parliament releases, the Concept was just what the name promised. Slave was a collection of uber-talented musicians who truly melded their myriad sounds into beautiful harmonies. The Concept album used vocoder technologies that were popular with musicians like Peter Frampton, while staying true to the funk sensibilities that made their first album such a mainstay of my heavy rotation last year. I highly recommend any Slave releases that you can get your hands on, and enjoy some masterpieces of funk.

Cymande: Music you never knew you knew.

Happy New Year to everyone out there reading my first blog post. I have been waiting for the right music to post about to start my music blog, and thanks to my father-in-law's Christmas present it dropped right into my lap.

Cymande. The best band that you know the music of, but know nothing about. This band was formed in the early 1970's in London, England when a group of musicians from Guyana, Jamaica, and St. Vincent got together, led by guitarist Patrick Patterson (not the current UK basketball player or the famous Cricket bowler of the 1980's) and Bassist Steve Scipio. Patterson and Scipio co-wrote the majority of the band's music, developing a sound that fused the Funk, Soul, and Rock sounds of the UK and American scenes with the Calypso and Reggae influences of the members' upbringing in the Caribbean.

The results of this fusion were tremendous to say the least. One of the best tracks the band laid down had to be Dove, with lead guitar that rises and falls over calypso beats that remind you of what might have happened had Santana recorded at the Ark in Kingston, Jamaica with Peter Tosh and Bob Marley. At times, the band embraced the psych movement of the late 60's and early 70's, with minimalist beats and beautifully repetitive horn loops. A great example of this is the track Genevieve, which is reminiscent of one of my favorite Dr. John cuts, Gris Gris Gumbo. Perhaps the most well received of the band's offerings was The Message which climbed all the way to number 20 on the US Pop and R&B Charts.

All of this was made possible by a happy coincidence, when producer John Schroeder of Janus Records showed up at a Soho club for a show that was cancelled, and heard the West Indian musicians rehearsing in the basement. He immediately signed them up on Janus, a division of Chess Records, and the band subsequently recorded The Message. While the group toured the US with such legendary acts as Al Green and Mandrill, their greatest commercial success was seen almost twenty years later when their records were sampled in various forms.

Many of the songs were used by Hip-hop and Electronic artists for their beats and breaks, beginning with NYC legends Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash who had their own Caribbean roots in Jamaica and Barbados respectively. De La Soul sampled the track Bra on their 3 Feet High and Rising anthem Change In Speak, and was also featured in the Spike Lee film Crooklyn. However, that was not the only Spike Lee joint to be blessed with a Cymande track, as The 25th Hour featured The Message, a song also sampled by the Fugees, with their own connections to Haiti, and French Rapper MC Solaar on his hit Bouge de La. Through an entirely new musical genre, and the attention of such luminaries as Spike Lee, Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Wyclef Jean, a nearly forgotten record from the early 70's got new life, and became the best album you never knew you knew.

Link for the Cymande album: http://drop.io/w21tlng#

CD's can be ordered via reprint from Collectible Records in Pennsylvania:
www.oldies.com
60 Portland Road
W Conshohocken, PA 19428-2717
(610) 649-7650