★Real Gone Music
Shri Camel
Terry Riley’s Shri Camel is a meditative masterwork blending the feeling of eastern music with repetitive electronic patterns, obtained using a modified Yamaha YC-45D combo organ tuned in just intonation and augmented with digital delay. In C and Rainbow in Curved Air get all the ink (inc?), but its own somewhat subtle way, 1980’s Shri Camel, the last of the three brilliant albums Terry Riley recorded for CBS, is every bit as groundbreaking as its hallowed predecessors. Not content to rest on hi…
Reads Kaddish - A 20th Century American Ecstatic Narrative Poem
Along with Howl, Kaddish stands as one of Allen Ginsberg's most illustrious creations. Always a follower of popular trends in music, Ginsberg had spent parts of 1958 digging into Ray Charles' 'I Got A Woman' -- occasionally doing so while on morphine and methamphetamine. One evening, in this drug-induced state while cranking some Ray, Ginsberg began discussing his mother Naomi with his pal Zev Putterman. Putterman in turn, began reciting the traditional Hebrew 'Kaddish' prayer for mourning the d…
Seeds on the Ground - The Natural Sounds of Airto
Airto's second album, and second and last release for the Buddah label, brought back largely the same crew that appeared on his debut record Natural Feelings (also reissued by Real Gone): vocalist (and wife) Flora Purim, composer and multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal, and bassist Ron Carter, with contributions from Dom Um Ramão (who later replaced Airto in Weather Report) and Severino De Oliveira a.k.a. Sivuca. Given Airto's connections to Miles Davis, Weather Report, and Return to Forever, …
Songs of the Great Mystery
Robbie Basho was one of the big three American acoustic guitar innovators, John Fahey and Leo Kottke being the other two. Basho was the least commercially successful of the three, but his influence and reputation has steadily grown since his untimely death in 1986 at the age of 45. And with good reason; for Basho's deeply spiritual approach, intellectual rigor, and formal explorations (among his goals was the creation of a raga system for American music), present a deeply compelling, multi-facet…
The Giant Is Awakened
The title of Horace Tapscott's debut release is apt, if not self-referential, for indeed a giant of West Coast jazz had awakened with this, the pianist / composer / bandleader's 1969 album for the Flying Dutchman label. Tapscott went on to form two groups crucial to the flowering of modern jazz in the Los Angeles area, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (or P.A.P.A.; the name is an homage to Tapscott's predecessor and peer, Sun Ra), which eventually became part of a larger umbrella organization, U…
Music To Eat
"Why would we reissue a record that is reputed to be the second worst-selling release in the history of Columbia Records? (Legend has it that it was undersold only by a yoga instructional album.) Well, because in the 47-some years since its release, the Hampton Grease Band's Music To Eat has steadily ascended the list of Greatest Cult Records of All Time so that now it resides at the tippety-top. Indeed, modern-day jam bands genuflect at the sight of the trippy cover art alone (Col. Bruce Hampto…
The Deviants #3
**1000 copies, white and black splatter vinyl, gatefold cover!** The Deviants were the closest thing the '60s British rock scene had to The Mothers of Invention, with a Stooges-like fondness for fuzz guitar freakouts thrown in. And playing the Frank Zappa role as lyricist, singer, and provocateur was Mick Farren, one of the most intriguing figures to emerge from the UK underground. Farren actually had a much longer and distinguished career as a writer than he did as a musician - he penned a tota…
Natural Feelings
**500 copies** First vinyl reissue in over 45 years for a long-lost, pivotal jazz fusion record! This album, originally released in 1970 on the thinly-distributed Skye label, marks Airto's debut as a bandleader and captures the percussionist right at the time he recorded Bitches Brew with Miles Davis, and right before he joined Weather Report for their first album. Indeed, the line-up on this album reflects the fact that Airto had one foot in the NYC jazz scene and one foot in his native Brazil,…
Cleopatra Jones (Soundtrack) LP
One of the best of the blacksploitation scores of the early 70s – a masterpiece of music that we rate every bit as high as Shaft or Superfly – maybe even higher! The music here is incredible – a surprising funky turn for JJ Johnson, who most folks know for his straighter jazz work – and like Marvin Gaye, Barry White, and others who were surprising the world with their ability to score music for a full film during the early 70s, JJ really knocks it out of the park with this one – coming up with a…
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out
One part psychologist, one part psychonaut, and one part huckster, Dr. Timothy Leary was one of the most fascinating and enigmatic figures to emerge from the '60s, and the fact that he released a soundtrack to a film that nobody ever saw fits right in with his modus operandi. Indeed, mass confusion reigns as to the origin of the tracks found on Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. First of all, Leary had released an album by the same name a year earlier on the ESP-Disk label; that one was a spoken-word r…
Sweet Child
**Limited 50th Anniversary Sky Blue Vinyl Edition** Sweet Child, released in 1968, at the peak of Pentangle's career, is probably the most representative of their work. A sprawling two-record set, half recorded in the studio and half live at the Royal Festival Hall, showcases just how versatile Pentangle was in their unique brand of English folk, jazz, Celtic, blues, and pop styles. Some of the live covers are easily their finest performances. Furry Lewis' "Turn Your Money Green," sung by the de…