We are delighted to present the incredible Gary Bartz who has teamed up with Uk band Maisha to record a wonderful New Spiritual Jazz album. I was privileged to see these guys play together at the London Jazz festival last autumn around the time when they recorded this album and they really captured the spirit of Bartz early to mid 70’s work with Ntu Troop, whilst keeping it fresh, dont miss out on this !
Smooth & Turrell have made a very good Soul/Disco album and The Devonns have a good retro sounding Chicago soul album. Natalie Slade keeps the flag flying for Neo Soul with her own twist.
There are some great 45’s this week, a great ballad from Gold, correctly mastered pressings of the Barrett Strong 45 and a major warehouse find of some long deleted fantastic Modern Soul Essentials from Outta Sight in small quantities whilst they last ! Also the Childish Gambino modern day funk/soul classic album from a few years ago is back in stock for the moment.
Pre-order
Pre-order for next week for Boney James, Connie Han. Under the Influence 8, Kahil El Zabar and some great 45’s including the very in demand tracks by Earl White on Soul Brother and Brenda Jones on Expansion. We have also loaded up some other great albums for pre-order over the next month, see all the pre-order titles here.
BEST SELLERS
Check out the best selling albums and singles this week at this link
WE ARE NOW MAIL ORDER ONLY UNTIL RESTRICTIONS ARE LIFTED
As you may know the shop is now closed for walk in business to conform with the Government Covid19 regulations but we are still operating mail order services, and will do as long as we are able to. Future release dates are likely to be changeable as product supply especially from USA and Europe become harder to source due to flight restrictions.
**************We can now take pre-paid orders for shop collection at an arranged time). Hopefully we will be able to re-open the shop in the not too distant future, albeit with some restrictions to ensure safe social distancing.*****************
Album of the day
We featured some more great albums this week including
Thanks for the great feedback that you have given to this feature.
POSTAL DELAYS
We are aware that some deliveries are taking longer than usual – from what we hear this is due to a mix of Royal Mail staff shortages and industrial action. Please bear with us – these are factors that are out of our hands. The backlog of post appears to be clearing and parcels sent this week have been arriving in about 48 hours, some even the next day.
Most parcels seem to be getting to customers in 2-3 days but there are some areas where there are still backlogs and delays of up to 10 days.
We are also running on the absolute minimum of staff so order turnaround times may also be affected for more complicated orders. Thanks for your understanding.
SOUL JAPAN PRESENTS PORTRAIT
The Ultimate Soul / RnB Quarantined Delivered Event is coming ! 90’s Legendary RnB group PORTRAIT in concert !
To access the concert follow this link. Also, checkout their latest album ‘Soul Trees’ here
RSD 20
Record Store Day has now been postponed again and will now take place on three days , 29th August, 26th September and 24th October. The lists of which titles will be each day will be published on 1st June. Hopefully by that time we will be able to invite you to the shop , but keeping social distance and on-line from 6pm on each day for what titles are still available.
‘Fill the Gap’ – classic album son vinyl…
In the meantime you can see our ‘fill the gap’ feature here
We are now back in stock of the majority of Bill Withers Lps and CDs which you can see in our feature here. Also the fantastic 9cd set of his complete albums is now in stock.
An introduction to Blue Note – 10 albums you must hear
Arguably Blue Note is the greatest Jazz label ever and was responsible for releasing so many classic albums over its 80+ year history. Its halcyon era was 1950’s/ 1960’s, when it pioneered Hard Bop. At various times, its roster included the likes of Art Blakey, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan and Horace Silver plus geniuses such as Miles Davis. The label recorded the first albums by a host of legends – for example, Jimmy Smith, Herbie Hancock and Freddie Hubbard to name just a few. The label remained active in the Jazz Funk era and Donald Byrd’s 1973 album ‘Black Byrd’ was not only ground-breaking but was Blue Note’s biggest selling LP at that time.
Selecting 10 classic albums (100 would be hard enough) is a challenge, but this introductory selection is just a taster. See the list here
Collector’s vinyl
Recent original Vinyl Soul and Jazz LP arrivals can be seen here, there are some great collectors items still available.
Recent Original vinyl 12″ singles and Original vinyl 45’s here.
The massive range of Outta Sight Modern and Northern Soul 45’s can be seen here.
Our current best selling albums and singles can be seen here.
Radio Show
Our usual spot on Solar will be suspended for the time being as we practise responsible social distancing by not putting ourselves or others at risk, both by travelling to the studio and also being in the studio. We think that the health of ourselves and others while also protecting the NHS is important at this time.
We are however going to continue to bring you the best weekly releases and collector’s pieces with a weekly two-hour mix that you can find on our Mixcloud. At present we don’t have the facility to record voiceovers, but hopefully you can still enjoy the music.
We timestamp the playlists and provide a download link so you can listen any time, anywhere.
Find the latest show here.
Have a great weekend.
Laurence and Jason
