Street Lady (Sacd)

£16.99

Format: CD

Out of stock

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Format: CD
Grade: New (About gradings)
Number of discs: 1
SKU: 101981
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Donald Byrd’s album Street Lady was the second album he released in 1973, closely following the ground-breaking jazz-funk record Black Byrd that straddled both the R&B and jazz charts, although derided by many jazz purists as a sidestep away from “real” jazz. Street Lady was recorded by a cohort of young music students of his and alumni from the fabled Howard University in Washington DC—an institution that churned out talent with conveyor-belt regularity from Donny Hathaway to Leroy Hutson—where Byrd was the chairman of the Black Music Department, overseeing a large pool of talent which he would expertly recruit. The crossover between Byrd’s solo output on Blue Note and his Blackbyrds project on Fantasy (a project that was part of his PHD studies) fuses often at times and employs the same student names, overlapping personnel and a distinct sonority, brought together by the glue of the Mizell Brothers’ distinct production nous and slick musical direction, as well as Byrd’s easy-going and uniquely melodic compositions.

 

By the turn of the early seventies, Byrd had already begun exploring other avenues of contemporary black music and experimental trends in jazz: his albums Fancy Free, Electric Byrd and Ethiopian Knights are good examples this fusion and would be the bedrock for his subsequent jazz-funk output, harnessing the contemporary energy of black America and current trends in music to construct a new and refreshing sound, modelled around soul, R&B and funk, while stemming from a jazz enlightened approach. The session is comprised of reliable workhorses who would serve on all of Donald Byrd’s Blue Note output throughout the 1970s; the rhythm section of Chuck Rainey (bass) and Harvey Mason (Drums) are practically symbiotic at this point, their muscle memory firmly imprinted on each other’s playing as if they are joined at the hip. Jazzman Roger Glenn gifts a touch of class on flute, Reggie Andrews chips in as a musical consultant, David T Walker adds some rhythmically inspiring guitar licks, and brothers Larry and Fonce Mizell produce the session, adding additional instrumentation and a dusting of studio magic.

 

Street Lady is written as an ode to the hot heat and hard walk of an urban street walker, performed in somewhat of a similar musical style to the many of the blaxploitation soundtracks from this period that addressed ghetto politics and aspects of the urban black American experience. The output is written through a contemporary earpiece; soulful, funky, grooving and danceable, although it demands more from its musicians than the average soul record, featuring more cerebral musicianship, solo sections and diverse instrumentation, structures that stemmed from practices grounded in the jazz tradition.

 

Highlights include the joyously upbeat Lansana’s Priestess, an all-weather dancefloor favourite and a trademark Floating Points record that seemed to be a perpetual selection for him during formative DJ sets. Miss Kane strikes a moodier tone, a percussive and elastic jazz-funk cut overscored with lyrical flute playing by Glenn that accents the track’s heady groove, alongside distinctive synthesiser and organ work. Sister Love is a trademark Mizell Brothers production, a number that truly encapsulates what they were about during the early to mid-seventies, a clean, layered and rich soundscape with an unremitting groove and well-arranged musicality. For many, the apex of the album is Woman of The World, a low-down and groovy tune with some clear as day horn from Byrd alongside impassioned vocals, a lullaby for the unknown street lady to whom the album is dedicated.

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