Arthur Verocai - Arthur Verocai

there is only one word to describe this album: TIMELESS. yes i said it. TIMELESS. a 1972 album that was so ahead of its time that it was never given its moment to shine as one of the greatest albums of the 70s. not until he was rediscovered by music historians and was invited to LA in 2009 to do a concert of the full album. this man made a fusion between contemporary brazilian harmony, strings, electric pianos, acoustic guitars, electronic instruments, male and female singers to create a wide musical palette that is still regarded as one of the biggest achievements of the 20th century. he gave his heart and soul to create and record this album but nobody cared about it at the time of its release, so Arthur got depressed, he quit making symphonic arrangement and started making commercial jingles for tv to make money.

please donwload this album and witness the beauty of music.

sylvia

Grupo Folklorico y Experimental Nuevayorquino/Har-You Percussion Group

Two somewhat underappreciated gems from the Upper-Manhattan and Bronx latin music scene of the 60's and 70's.

Grupo Folklorico y Experimental Nuevayorquino - Concepts in Unity

"Varied fusion of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Mexican motifs by a collection of musical visionaries. Their sound is not at all limited to any one style; it jumps from traditional Cuban rhythms to Tejano accordion tunes to experimental rumba."

Har-You Percussion Group - The Har-You Percussion Group

"The Har-You Percussion Group's self-titled album stands as a testament to how exciting and profound music education can be for kids. Imagine creating this album as your homework assignment. That's just what these eleven 16- to 19-year-old boys did under the guidance of Jamaican-born percussionist Montegro Joe. Latin, Cuban, jazz, and blues influences combine to create their boogie-down melting pot of rhythm that keeps the feet moving. Tracks like "Welcome to the Party" and "Feed Me Good" are exciting dance numbers. In contrast, "Oua-Train" is an impressive tribute to Coltrane featuring Nelson Sanamiago on alto sax. This is a rare album where music informs its powerful sounds."

Sly & The Family Stone - There's a Riot Goin' On

First off, if you need proof of Sly's state of mind during this period click HERE. Dude was fucked up. During the recording of this album he was locked up in his mansion, by himself and the occasional groupie, doing massive amounts of coke and PCP. Sly was losing his mind and the band was falling appart.

Gone are the uplifting and optimistic anthems from Stand!. What you'll find here is dark soul, weird funk, and lyrics like: "feels so good inside myself, don't wanna move" and "look at you fooling you". The happy days were over motherfucker. The good times were replaced with wars, assasinations, and overall social unrest. It's one of those albums that represents the feeling of a time period and the state of mind of it's creator perfectly.

"All of There's a Riot 's pleasure centers and nerve endings are frayed from coke, dope, flesh, flash and, above all, disillusionment. Every single sound is weary, wasted, creaking, cracked and sleep-deprived, like a somnambulant zombie stumbling through the graveyard of ideals on the pavement of good intentions. The singles ("Family Affair", "Running Away") exude a façade of empty positivity, a bitter resignation to the darker forces bubbling underneath. Chicken-scratch guitars claw at caskets, human drummers meld with undead drum machines, and frightened voices fissure with the crisp horn lines, yet it all sounds incredible, prescient. Listen to the paradoxical 0:00 of the title track, to how hip-hop took that stripped drum sound and furthered Sly's bleak music, to how Miles got his groovebox back, to how the wasted Brits-- from Primal Scream to Julian Cope-- copped their dope from the grooves. Listen close, because there's no way in hell a major label will ever again let out this much horrible truth."

Family Affair

Neil Young - On the Beach

One of Neil's absolute best and part of the Ditch Trilogy.

played the silver fiddle

Guru Guru - Hinten

Mani Neumeier's barbarian rock horde in one of their more drug-blasted, wigged out efforts.

"'Hinten' was the second album by the three-piece Guru Guru comprised of: Mani Neumeier (voice, electric drums, cymbals, gong, contact microphone, kalimba, sounding being, zonk machine); Uli Trepte (bass, radio) and Ax Genrich (guitar.) And here they sound less lumpen/trudgin' than on their stellar "UFO" LP but every bit as Frei-Rock and exploratory. But unlike "UFO","Hinten" exhibits a more flexible and plastic structure: it's loose, yet tight. It's free flowing, yet scripted enough to accommodate a freefall of freak outs and it allowed themselves all the space in the universe yet managing to combine together with such effectively precise riffing JUST off enough to allow all concerned to wander off the path as many times as they liked without leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind AND NEVER GETTING LOST. There are also more vocals present here, but only if you can call murmuring song titles over ten-plus-minutes' worth of an ensemble jumble of detuned, skittering guitars shrieking and groaning feedback with an overlay of contact microphone hi-jinks with jarring percussive strikes "vocals". And this was presented in a far clearer sonic image than ever before, courtesy of its self-production ably assisted by engineer Conrad Plank.

Even though the performance was several notches up on the tightness scale from "UFO", the chaos remained unchecked to an extreme because for all its pre-planned boundaries (which they wound up pushing through or just plain ignored for most of the time) the end result was a loose and gigantically sprawling, avant-proto-metal improvisatory monster that for all its audio strength caught the trio completely in the raw...And speaking of which, the cover's got that, too. What cheek. And when I say "cheek" I mean that literally cos it's a four times repetition of a photograph of a guy's backside with the word "GURU" painted twice across his bared glutei. Although it seems a long way round to go just to riff off the album's title, it did effectively scream "FREAK" before anyone got to hear it and the music sealed the whole deal with so many instantaneous stops-and-starts, false endings, guitar solos and outright freakery it both roots you to the spot and sends you off into a zone of anarchic mind-warp all at once. Makes you crack up at inopportune moments, too." - The Seth Man

Bo

Cortijo & His Time Machine - Cortijo Y Su Máquina Del Tiempo (1974)

Legendary album where the master Rafael Cortijo leads a killer group that mixes Latin jazz, salsa, and 70's soul instrumentation. Fresh, tight and groovy as fuck! Prepare to get schooled by the master!

baila y goza!

Albert Ayler - Love Cry

"Of all the protagonists of free jazz, Ohio-born tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler (1936) had the shortest career (he first recorded in 1962 and committed suicide in 1970 at 34), but he nonetheless managed to articulate one of the most radical aesthetics, second only to Cecil Taylor's. He often sounded like someone who wanted to create a virtuoso art out of anti-virtuoso playing. Ayler started out playing rhythm'n'blues. By the time he landed in New York, he had developed his idiosyncratic style (notably via an unrecorded European experience with Cecil Taylor in 1962). A quartet with trumpeter Norman Howard, drummer Sunny Murray and bassist Henry Grimes recorded Spirits/ Witches and Devils (february 1964), that contains four lengthy pieces: Spirits, the twelve-minute Witches and Devils, the eleven-minute Holy Holy and Saints. Each of them sounded like it was coming from a distant past, from a remembered childhood, as it incorporated simple, naive, catchy melodies. The performance was ferocious, though, as if Ayler wanted to contrast innocence and experience, or European order and African disorder. The live Prophecy (june 1964) introduced his trio with double bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, and added Ghosts (his most famous theme), Wizard and Prophecy to his exoteric canon. That trio was responsible for one of the most revolutionary recordings of the era, Spiritual Unity (july 1964), the (brief) album that made it explicit how Ayler was not interested in creating music out of notes but out of timbres, how his music was not a harmonic construction but a "soundscape". These new versions of Ghosts, Spirits and Wizard were delivered according to an apparently demented logic that mixed melodies inspired by folk tunes and nursery rhymes with emotional bursts of saxophone noises simulating the human voice. Murray's percussions (more cymbals than drums) had little to do with keeping the time: they produced a flow of disorienting noises that intersected and amplified Ayler's saxophone noises. By now, Ayler had refined his melodramatic vibrato. The "free" approach permeated the two side-long improvisations of New York Eye And Ear Control (july 1964), AY and ITT, with the trio augmented with trumpeter Don Cherry on cornet, Roswell Rudd on trombone and John Tchicai on alto, although the result was far less tight than on Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (1960), proving that Ayler was a different spirit from the free-jazz crowd. The trio and Don Cherry returned to a humbler format with Vibrations/ Ghosts (september 1964), that added Children (actually just a fast variant of Holy Holy), the moving ballad Holy Spirit (with a spectacular Cherry solo), Vibrations and Mothers to the canon, and The Hilversum Session (november 1964), that introduced Angels in a tense mid-tempo version. Donald Ayler replaced Don Cherry for the one-sided LP Bells (may 1965), containing just one 20-minute track (fundamentally a madcap medley of marches and nursery rhymes) also featuring altoist Charles Tyler and bassist Lewis Worrell besides Sunny Murray. Spirits Rejoice (september 1965), particularly its title-track (performed by Donald Ayler, Sunny Murray, altoist Charles Tyler, bassists Henry Grimes and Gary Peacock), marked a transition towards a more religious mood and a regression towards the collective improvisation of New Orleans' brass bands. Spirits Rejoice basically revisited the format of Bells in a more organic and structured way, picking up along the way an impressive amount of debris of musical stereotypes. Holy Ghost (july 1967) documents a live performance with Don Ayler on trumpet, Michel Sampson on violin, Bill Folwell on bass and Milford Graves on drums (particularly Truth Is Marching In/Omega and Our Prayer). Ayler considerably toned down his music on In Greenwich Village (december 1966) and Love Cry (august 1967), that featured Donald Ayler on trumpet, Call Cobbs on harpsichord, Alan Silva on bass and Milford Graves on drums, and eventually returned to his rhythm'n'blues roots. After some kind of hippie-like spiritual crisis, Ayler turned to jazz-rock, soul and funk music, adding lyrics by a vocal singer, notably on Music Is The Healing Force of the Universe (august 1969). By employing a virtually unlimited repertory of tricks and a rich vibrato, Ayler expanded the vocabulary of the saxophone, but, most importantly, he did so while staging a multi-dimensional regression to a simpler age of music (whether the catchy folkish melodies or the military tempos or the collective improvisation of the marching bands). Ayler seemed to fuse the musical background of the pre-industrial society with an impulse towards the expressionistic cacophony of the industrial society. At the same time, his saxophone often seemed to intone shamanic invocations except to derail into frenzied explosions of vitality. Underlying all these contradictions was Ayler's exploration of sound for the sake of sound, that accounted for a completely new idea of music, away from the pillars of harmony, melody and rhythm. That was, ultimately, an exploration of the human psyche. Thus, at several levels of introspection and metaphor, Ayler's art was a mirror of society. Ayler's was the music of the collective unconscious." - Scaruffi

He once said the patch in his goatee was evidence that God had marked him as someone who would change the course of history. He was right.

Love Cry

Fania All-Stars - Live at the Cheetah Vol 1 & 2

I was digging through my Dad's closet a few weeks ago looking for any old records he had. Amongst the big pile of shit that is Boston, REO Speedwagon, and Kenny G I found a few gems. A live Donna Summers record, The White Album, an old Menudo album (mine when I was little), and Vol 2 of this legendary piece of music. 

Recorded live at the NYC club the Cheetah, a few years prior to their famous Yankee Stadium gig, it features one of their best line-ups ever performing so tight even the paraplegics must have been dancing. Larry Harlow, Ray Barretto, Willie Colon, Johnny Pacheco, Roberto Roena, and Bobby Valentin all provide the musical backdrop with their coke fueled grooves while Hector Lavoe, Ismael Rivera, among others provide the vocals.  

Here we have both Vol 1 and 2 originally released as separate records. There's a reason they became some of the highest selling Latin music albums ever.

Quitate Tu

Eddie Palmieri - Live at the UPR

One of The Sun of Latin's Music most zonked out sets. Palmieri punishes that Fender Rhodes into pure utter craziness and conjures some nasty Tropical Cosmic Grooves with his scorching ensemble. Features white hot versions of "Bilongo" y "Pa' Huele". Features his brother Charlie "El Gigante de las blancas y las negras" on equally demented electric organ. Personal fave: "La Malanga". Respect to a true master of Caribbean Music.

Un Cachito

Funkadelic - One Nation Under a Groove

More Funkadelic for yo' ass. The fuzz and freakness is toned down a bit here, but it more than gains in pure ass-shaking grooving, incredible songwriting, and a bass player nicknamed Bootsy. Listen to "Into You" and "One Nation..." and let the Funkentelechy grab you. Plus a very good live version of "Maggot Brain" (no Eddie Hazel here folks, sorry, but Gary Shider does an impressive job).

Get it