★Antarctica Starts Here
Eternity
2023 Repress. Released in 1976, Eternity was Alice Coltrane's first album for Warner Bros. after eight wondrous records on Impulse! Combining the drones and textures of India, the gospel and R&B of her Detroit youth and the dissonance of modern classical composition, Coltrane's music in the '70s would become increasingly difficult to categorize. Having moved a few years earlier to California (where she founded the Vedantic Center, an Ashram for spiritual studies), Coltrane stretches out on Etern…
Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana
Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana was the first of two albums Alice Coltrane released in 1977 (the other being Transcendence). Coltrane's music during this period grew out of an epiphany in which she would renounce secular life and don the orange robes of a swamini (spiritual teacher in the Hindu tradition). Musically, this meant leaving jazz behind (at least partially) and embracing the chants and rhythms of devotional music. The first half of Radha-Krsna is mostly filled with simple arrangements of …
Transfiguration
** Much-needed 2023 Repress **By the late '70s, Alice Coltrane had largely gravitated away from jazz, incorporating Hindu chants and hymns into her music to reflect a newfound sense of creative omnipotence. However, in April 1978, she would return to her roots, performing at University of California, Los Angeles to make her first and only live album. Transfiguration, featuring drummer Roy Haynes and bassist Reggie Workman, showcases Alice's many compositional talents and fierce improvisatory abi…
Transcendence
**2023 Much-needed Repress** Transcendence was not only Alice Coltrane's last studio album for Warner Bros., it would also be her last studio work for nearly three decades. While Eternity and Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana followed the composer's muse through an exciting range of musical styles and influences, Transcendence is perhaps the most fully realized of the three LPs, synthesizing the best elements of each into a monumental whole. Side one consists of intimate compositions with Alice's poin…
Jackson C. Frank
2022 Repress Jackson C. Frank’s eponymous album is the embodiment of folk legend. Issued in late 1965 on the UK Columbia label, it was for many years more famous for its producer (Paul Simon) and the musicians who would go on to cover its songs (Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny) than for the hauntingly beautiful music contained inside. Frank’s backstory certainly adds to the legacy: born in Buffalo, New York, he used the settlement from a childhood accident to sail to London where he quickly…
Since There Were Circles
Singer-songwriter Bob Lind will forever be immortalized by his 1965 hit, »Elusive Butterfly«, but his career is so much more interesting than the fading wonder of that one hit. Once a hard-partying buddy of Charles Bukowski, Lind was the inspiration for the character »Dinky Summers«, a down-on-his-luck folk singer in Bukowski's 1978 novel Women. Lind also doubled as a writer, penning a number of novels and plays as well as serving as a long-time staff writer at the lowbrow tabloid Weekly World N…
Seke Molenga & Kalo Kawongolo
Over the years, they would come to say that the Africans just appeared one day in Jamaica. That two Congo men somehow materialized on the streets of Kingston sometime in 1977, almost as if by magic, speaking not a word of English or patwa. The duo, they say, were musicians brought in by a Jamaican promoter – a woman who ditched them, leaving them to fend for themselves, stranded in a strange land.
What really happened is harder to fully divine. The two young Africans – Molenga Mosukola (aka Seke…
Alice Coltrane bundle
**In process of stocking** of Alice's four extraordinary albums Eternity, Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana, Transcendence and Transfiguration in bundle. With liner notes by Mark Richardson and rare photos by Gary Heery and Ginny Winn. Alice Coltrane was a pioneer - one of a tiny number of women in 1960’s jazz to be allowed through the door – wielding her instrument with a force and artistry which couldn’t be ignored. It was her visionary mind which helped push her husband toward the astounding sonic …
Crossings
Crossings was the second release by the Herbie Hancock Sextet lineup known as the Mwandishi Band, following 1971's Mwandishi which stretched Hancock's already-adventurous writing and expanded the music through post-production. This approach would play an even larger role on Crossings, the pianist's final album for Warner Bros. For two of Crossings' three pieces ('Quasar' and 'Water Torture'), Hancock took basic instrumental tracks to Patrick Gleeson's Different Fur Studios, hoping to learn how t…
Mwandishi
After releasing their Warner Bros. debut, the Herbie Hancock Sextet underwent a major transformation in the early '70s. Over the course of a year, every member was replaced (except Herbie Hancock himself and bassist Buster Williams) and each adopted Swahili names. (Williams even led the group in occasional sessions of Buddhist chanting.) Hancock chose the moniker Mwandishi (meaning 'composer'), and the Sextet became unofficially known as the Mwandishi Band. The lineup's first album -- simply tit…
Fat Albert Rotunda
If Fat Albert Rotunda sounds like the most fun Herbie Hancock had in
his early years as a band leader, it should. He composed the music for
the pilot of the children's television show Fat Albert, redirecting the
post-bop jazz he honed in a five-year stint with the Miles Davis Quintet
towards the R&B and funk styles with which he was becoming
enamored. The result was a playful, joyous album in which Hancock
clearly had a great time.The same goes for the rest of his Sextet, which by the time…
Pass The Distance
Few albums define a genre as succinctly as Simon Finn’s Pass The Distance does for psychedelic folk. Not even landmark recordings by Pearls Before Swine or Skip Spence can stand up to the sheer madness of Finn’s sole LP, originally released in 1970. After moving to London in 1967, Finn busked around town for a couple years before entering Camden’s Chalk Farm Studios, best known for producing a string of reggae hits. Pass The Distance, however, would become more than a solo-acoustic project. Back…