LISTEN UP: NEW RELEASES OF VARYING DEGREES OF BRILLIANCE (4.23.2022)

  ROSCOE WEATHERS - I'LL REMEMBER

For every celebrated name in jazz, soul and related music, there are probably another one thousand musicians who had all the talent and potential but for whom widespread recognition remained elusive. Roscoe Weathers is one such figure, a jazzman who earned his chops the hard way, a sideman in smoky clubs from Memphis to Seattle, before finally settling in LA. He recorded a significant amount of music through the 1960s, but never found the slightest modicum of commercial acclaim nor the success that comes with it. 

Overlooked by all but the tiniest of record labels, Weathers’ released much of his material himself. Indeed, we can lay claim to be the first outside label to release any of his music since the early 1960s. That’s sixty years of being overlooked by the record industry, so we are delighted to release this first full length album of his music in a first attempt at righting that historic wrong. 

A multi-instrumentalist, Weathers mainly led on the flute in his recorded output. The music here spans the course of the 1960s, and moves from laid back beatnik jazz stylings through to percussion heavy Afro-Latin influenced workouts. As usual with Jazzman, we have not only dug deep to unearth Weathers’ music but also his background and biographical details, shining much deserved light on this enigmatic and largely unheralded figure for the first time.

LES RALLIZES DENUDES - DOUBLE HEADS 1980-81:  MAXIMUM PSYCHEDELIC BLUES

They were punk before punks, avant rockers before avant rock, noise before noise, and their on-again/off-again career, which spanned the years 1967-1996, continues to cast a huge shadow across the psychedelic underground. Between August 1980 and March 1981, Les Rallizes Dénudés (or The Naked Larrys, as the long-lost acetate they are rumored to have recorded for Virgin Records in the mid-seventies dubbed them) played seven concerts in and around Tokyo. Never officially released, illicit nth generation cassette copies circulated in Japanese fan circles for many years, attaining a whispered, Holy Grail status amongst initiates to the Rallizes cult. High quality soundboard versions were finally released by the secretive Univive label in 2005. Three of the best of these concerts were collected on Double Heads (and now this 7xLP Set), all recorded at Yaneura, a small club in the teeming neon teen shopping mecca of Shibuya in Tokyo. Together these three concerts comprise a singular pivotal moment in Les Rallizes Dénudés development -- Mainlining an elegantly wasted take on two-chord avant garage that makes direct reference to Plastic Inevitable, Velvet Underground, drone, etc.  With some of Mitzuni's most beautifully decadent fuzz guitar as well as some of the most glacially psychedelic music of their long career. As the old ESP-Disk banner used to promise, truly, YOU NEVER HEARD SUCH SOUNDS.

PHIL RANELIN - VIBES FROM THE TRIBE

The Tribe co-founder's masterpiece, lacquered directly from his master tapes in an all-analog transfer by Bernie Grundman. The defi¬nitive reissue of this spiritual jazz album, one of the most sought-after artifacts of the 1970s jazz underground. The Tribe label, one of the brightest lights of America's 1970s jazz underground, receives the Now-Again reissue treatment. This is your chance to indulge in the music and story of one of the most meaningful, local movements of the 20th Century Black American experience, one that expanded outwards towards the cosmos. In the words of the collective themselves, 'Music is the healing force of the universe.' Included in an extensive, oversized booklet, Larry Gabriel and Jeff 'Chairman' Mao take us through the history of the Tribe, in a compelling story that delves not just into the history of the label and its principals, but into the story of Black American empowerment in the latter half of the 20th Century. The booklet features never-before-seen archival photos and rare ephemera from Tribe's mid-1970s heyday.

GIUSTO PIO - MOTORE IMMOBILE

The first vinyl reissue of Giusto Pio's Motore Immobile, originally released in 1979. One of the most striking documents of Italy's minimalist movement, Giusto Pio's Motore Immobile is a masterwork with few equivalents. Produced by Franco Battiato in 1979, at the outset of a long and fruitful period of collaboration between the two composers, and issued by the legendary Cramps Records, its triumphs were met by silence, before falling from view. Emerging on vinyl for the first time since its original pressing, Motore Immobile now sits within a reappraisal of a large neglected body of efforts made by the Italian avant-garde during the second half of the 1970s and early '80s. It is singular, but not alone. It resonates within a collective world of shimmering sound, one familiar to fans of Battiato, Lino Capra Vaccina, Luciano Cilio, Roberto Cacciapaglia, Francesco Messina, and Raul Lovisoni. An exercise in elegant restraint - note and resonance held to the most implicit need. Everything between root and embellishment has been stripped away. A sublime organ drone, against interventions of deceptively simple structural complexity - executed by piano, violin, and voice. A sonic sculpture reaching heights which few have touched. A thing of beauty and an album as perfect as they come. The reemergence of Motore Immobile heralds what is unquestionably one of the most important reissues of 2017.  

ALESSANDRO ALESSANDRONI - OPEN AIR PARTY

The first ever CD issue of this Italian library masterpiece, Alessandro Alessandroni's Open Air Parade, re-released by the label on vinyl in 2019. Originally released in 1972 on the mythical SR Records. One of the Alessandro Alessandroni's most elusive, and yet sonically ambitious, efforts. The wildest and most groovy, psychedelic, easy-breezy lounge-funk session by the cult maestro. Includes two tracks by the great bassist Giovanni Tommaso who surely played in this session. A dreamy album with the top-notch, strung-out psychedelic funk sounds ever recorded in Italy during the early '70s, beat laden and groovy music with lush arrangements and insane vocal themes by Alessandro Alessandroni's Cantori Moderni chorus.