Entries associated with the tag "Dusty Groove":

For this week's paper I wrote a Best of Chicago blurb about Dusty Groove, but I didn't mention that this excellent record store has also become a reissue label. Last month DG released an album I'd never heard before, a recording both bizarre and ultraprescient. Badfoot Brown and the Bunions Bradford Funeral & Marching Band is one of a handful of noncomedy records credited to Bill Cosby over his long career--some of the others were cut with Quincy Jones and with Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band--and it originally came out on UNI back in 1971.

I remember hearing a mediocre straight-ahead jazz record from Cosby in the late 80s, but it didn't prepare me for this--Badfoot Brown has taken my head off. I know that some serious heads have long sworn by this joint, and I was aware it had been sampled plenty of times, but it had never crossed my radar until I heard it playing in Dusty Groove not so long ago.

The album credits Cosby with writing, producing, and performing the music "with help from assorted mysterious musicians" (he plays electric piano himself), and in his own liner notes he cites the electric work of Miles Davis (which was then contemporary) as a key influence. You can definitely hear the groove-intensive jams of electric Miles in these two side-length instrumental tracks, but this is no wan imitation--or if it was, time has ripened it beautifully, so that it's no longer possible to tell.

"Martin's Funeral" is the track I first heard, and it made me think of an early masterpiece by DJ Shadow, except it was much stranger, a kind of avant-garde trip-hop (except better than such a silly genre name could ever imply). It almost sounds like two different albums playing simultaneously, and the way it overlaps rhythms, melodic lines, and off-kilter harmonies certainly supports Cosby's claim that he was digging those organic, free-form, episodic Miles classics. "Hybish Shybish" is even odder, dipping into sonic darkness, but its appealing murk is periodically interrupted by a fierce, chugging groove. For 20 minutes the piece keeps cycling through these two patterns, with new and shifting details emerging with each pass.

Today's playlist:

Frank Denyer, Music for Shakuhachi (Another Timbre)
Ana Moura, Para Além da Saudade (World Village)
Carlton Patterson & King Tubby, Black & White in Dub (Hot Pot)
Dislocation Dance, Music Music Music/Slip That Disc! (LTM)
Franco Battiato, Melle Le "Gladiator" (BMG, Italy)

Already a great record shop and mail-order service, Dusty Groove in Wicker Park recently expanded its business even further, becoming something of a record label. In the last couple of months it’s released five out-of-print albums on CD, all of them licensed from Universal Music. If any retailer is in a position to start a label, it's Dusty Groove. The store sells tons of second-hand vinyl all over the world, so it has a pretty good idea how much demand there is for a particular item, and owner Rick Wojcik routinely tracks down releases from all over the planet—Brazil, France, South Korea—so he’s got a pretty good handle on what’s available.

The first batch of releases, unsurprisingly, appeals to a very particular niche market, and Wojcik considers it as a test run to determine whether it's worth doing more in the future. An album like Seasons by keyboardist Pete Jolly (a jazz-fusion record marked by a wide array of electric piano, organs, and Wurlitzer) is the kind of music only a crate-digger could love, but titles like Funky Skull by Melvin Jackson (who plays an almost psychedelic, effects-heavy upright bass over taut, heavy grooves) and The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby (a trippy and funky jazz session inspired by the work of Omar Khayyam that features Ashby on untypical string instruments like harp and koto) deliver a broader, if still limited, appeal.

To me the new label is already a success, if for no other reason than its reissue of Força Bruta, a brilliant 1970 album by Brazil's Jorge Ben and the first of his many collaborations with the funky soul group Trio Mocoto. Ben's ability to transplant samba tunes into deeply soulful, often funky settings was simply stunning. Gorgeous string arrangements swaddle many of the tunes, but it’s Ben’s characteristic acoustic-guitar riffs and Mocoto's jacked-up grooves that make the record tick. Ben never had the greatest set of pipes, but few musicians have turned an imperfect voice into such a valuable asset, reinforcing the rhythmic agility of his songs with pin-point phrasing, surprising intervallic leaps, and a plaintive kind of moan.

I was asked to write some liner notes for the reissue, but I ended up passing on the offer, partly because information about Ben’s career and development is practically non-existent in the States, aside from thumbnail bios that only offer the slightest insight. It’s astonishing, really, that Ben—one of the most successful, deep, and influential musicians to emerge from Brazil in the last four decades—hasn't been the subject of more substantial analysis. Hell, a bunch of his classics from the late 60s and early 70s remain unavailable. I sure hope that if Dusty Groove continues its reissue program, more albums by Jorge Ben will see the light of day.