Soul Jazz Records’ new Soul Jamaica brings together a wicked selection of reggae funk and soul tracks from the legendary Studio One stable, featuring a stellar line-up of artists including Jackie Mittoo, The Heptones, The Gladiators, Sim Smith, Peter Tosh and The Wailers, Cedric ‘Im’ Brooks and many more. For a short period of time at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, nestled between the end of rocksteady and the arrival of roots reggae, Studio One released a small stream of superb soul and funk reggae tunes – covering everyone from Sly and The Family Stone, Diana Ross and The Supremes, Nina Simone, Gene Chandler, Tyrone Davis and more.
Most of the tracks featured on Soul Jamaica were only ever released on Studio One’s…
Tag Archive: Soul Jazz Records
…Soul Jazz Records delve into the vast vaults of Discos Fuentes, one of the oldest and largest record companies in Latin America, known as ‘the Motown of Colombia’. Discos Fuentes played a major role in spreading Afro-Latin sounds both to Colombia and around the world and this album explores that legacy.
Latin Fire! features legendary Colombian artists such as Fruko, The Latin Brothers, Michi Sarmiento, Afrosound, Pedro Laza, Wganda Kenya and more and showcases the wide-ranging variety of styles that Discos Fuentes made unique to their sound. The album features music from the golden era of Fuentes; from late 50s and 1960s Cumbia through to the emergence of heavyweight and hardcore salsa and Afro-funk in the 1970s…
…The album features a mixture of classic tunes and rarities from the period 1967-74, when Jackie Mittoo was at the height of his musical powers.
Mittoo’s solo career began after the end of The Skatalites in 1965. He began pushing new musical boundaries, creating a uniquely identifiable organ-led funky reggae sound that owed as much to Booker T and The MGs, Jimmy Smith, Stax and Motown as to the post-ska and emergent rocksteady island rhythms of Kingston, Jamaica.
His solo work at the legendary Studio One spanned seven albums and hundreds of singles. Aside from producer and founder Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd, it’s hard to think of anyone more central to the sound and success of Studio One than Mittoo; keyboard player extraordinaire,…
Special new 25th anniversary edition of this most popular and highly-acclaimed of all Soul Jazz Records’ Dynamite! series – 300% Dynamite is jam-packed with reggae tunes that crossed-over to become dancefloor hits and are 100% guaranteed to rock any party!
Out of print for the last 15 years, this new edition is being released in a one-off limited-edition heavyweight special-edition coloured blue vinyl pressing + download code exclusively for Record Store Day 2024.
This album is fully remastered, recut and with new tracks exclusively for RSD 24. Wayne Smith’s booming anthem “Sleng Teng”, Althea & Donna’s worldwide hit ‘Uptown Top Ranking’, Sister Nancy’s classic “Bam Bam”, Augustus Pablo…
Soul Jazz Records journey into early 1990s ragga, drum & bass and jungle. The album features all-time classic jungle anthems such as General Levy’s ‘Incredible’ alongside some serious Ragga heavyweight tunes like Cutty Ranks ‘Limb By Limb’ and Congo Natty’s classic re-make of Barrington Levy’s Under Me Sensi’. The renowned album tells the story of how Jungle developed out of acid house but with its roots in the UK Dancehall scene of the 1980s and comes with extensive sleevenotes, exclusive interviews and photography. // “Every one of Rumble in the Jungle’s thirteen tracks is brimming over with life and sonic thrills” and “some of this music was released in ‘91, but it sounds like it was made yesterday.” BBC MUSIC // “Soul Jazz’s string of success continues…
Soul Jazz give it up for DIY pop-punk’s outsiders with 15 tracks of spunky pep that fell thru the cracks in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s but still hasn’t exceeded its sell-by date.
Secret Superstar Sounds hails waves of spirit that was dashed on the shores of cultural history, but left pop-pickers and beach drifters with ample flotsam to rake over.
Unless you’re the most obsessive collector of one-hit wonders and their ilk, or listened to literally every John peel show during the period, it’s likely the majority of artists showcased will be unknown, but they all hold their own with short sharp blasts of punky power chord vamps and call ’n response choruses that live on long after the bands’ invariable demise.
Soul Jazz Records’ Studio One Showcase 45 features a roll call of classic Studio One reggae legends including Horace Andy, Cormel Campbell, Bob Marley and The Wailers, Jackie Mittoo, The Heptones, The Skatalites and more – seminal reggae artists who all launched their careers at the legendary Studio One label.
The album was previously only ever released as a long-deleted limited-edition seven-inch box set for Record Store Day. This album has now been expanded into a super double-vinyl album edition as well as first time on CD, with both featuring a massive eight bonus tracks of wicked Studio One classics and rarities. The album also comes with newly commissioned sleeve and track notes by Noel Hawks.
Superb rare independent funk and soul album originally released in the USA in 1977 issued for the first time ever on Soul Jazz Records. This lost album is a classic, packed full of spaced-out funk, soul, boogie, jazz-funk and more.
In similar vein to groups such as Mandrill, Jimmy Castor Bunch, The Blackbyrds, Pleasure and Kool and the Gang, Tribe blends together elements of funk, jazz, rock, latin and soul music into a unique sound (their first album was aptly named ‘Ethnic Stew’).
This album includes the much sought after ‘Vulcan Voyage’ which featured on our first Space Funk collection and has been out-of-print for an incredible 45 years!
Tribe was the brainchild of multi…
Unbelievably killer and super, super heavy brand-new Cosmic Psyche album from Brown Spirits, new on Soul Jazz Records!
Brown Spirits’ current album on Soul Jazz Records delivers a raw, heavy and hypnotic blend of psychedelic rock and krautrock. Hailing from Melbourne, Australia, the trio channels influences from Neu!, Miles Davis, Soft Machine, Gang of Four and Hendrix, creating a unique sound that combines progressive intensity with punk and post-punk energy. Their stripped-down lineup of bass, drums, guitar and keyboards is reminiscent of classic acts like Cream and Hendrix, but with a DIY, lo-fi edge. The album features powerful, fuzzed-out guitars, tough basslines and pounding drums, complemented by analog…
Trees Speak return with TimeFold, their sixth release on Soul Jazz Records, further expanding their ever- evolving sonic universe. This new album builds on their signature blend of hypnotic krautrock rhythms, post-punk angularity, and experimental soundscapes while venturing into new terrain by blending influences from avant-garde electronics to ceremonial sound forms.
On TimeFold, Trees Speak (comprised of the Tucson-based duo Damian Diaz and Daniel Martin Diaz) push their musical boundaries from expansive, intergalactic landscapes to eerie, imagined 1970s Italian and French sci-fi horror film scores. The album seamlessly weaves John Carpenter-esque synthesizer motifs with ambient sound sculptures, conjuring…
Oneironautics, as any good classicist can divine, is the practice of being a dream traveller, a voyager in the unconscious, a somnial spaceman. These days, we’d call it lucid dreaming, the supposed ability to control where your reveries are taking you, perhaps to avoid turning up at work naked or, more mind-expandingly, to explore mad, trippy vistas that only our unpoliced brainwaves can create. And it is, of course, the kind of thematic choice that lends itself very well to psychedelic, prog-tinged electronica, like Silver Apples, Tangerine Dream – and Hawksmoor.
Bristol-based oneironaut James McKeown kept the name Hawksmoor from an it-turned-out eponymous 2018 release, one of those soundtracks to an imaginary film you’re always…
Rediscovered bouquet of cult, florid ‘early ‘70s folk-rock-pop, reissued with bonus demo songs produced by an ex-Yardbirds founder and surely welcomed by admirers of Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan, Christine McVie, Cat Stevens…
“Singer/Songwriter Juliet Lawson’s album, ‘Boo’, was released on the Sovereign label in the UK in 1972. The album was the confident debut of a young British artist and featured twelve of Lawson’s own compositions. In the same wave of early 1970s English singer-songwriters such as Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan, Christine McVie and despite being described at the time as ‘Britain’s answer to Joni Mitchell’ ‘Boo’ was to prove her only major label release with limited commercial success. Over the next 50 years…
“Since the early 1960s Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd had established Studio One as the unparalleled leader in reggae music in the world. In the years that followed he established the careers of countless reggae legends – Bob Marley & The Wailers, Marcia Griffiths, The Skatalites, Horace Andy, Dennis Brown, Burning Spear and many more.
From its inception Studio One had been at the forefront of every major development in reggae music – ska, rocksteady, roots, DJ, dub and, starting in the second half of the 1970s, dancehall.
Having attained such great success, by the late 1970s Clement Dodd was free to enjoy Studio One’s now firmly established supremacy in reggae music. He released a series of stunning new albums at the end of the decade…
Electro special from Soul Jazz, spanning 13 rarer examples of the early ‘80s phenomenon in transition from boogie to its full fledged forms between ’82-’89, leaving disco for dust and steeling streets for the future.
Expert compilers Soul Jazz swerve better known bits in favour of private pressings and indie electro jams that fell thru the cracks, but were nevertheless instrumental in the sound’s development across a PCB-like map of USA in the ‘80s that joined its urban Afro-Latin bastions with jolts of funk. Happy to say most of the material on board has previously escaped our attention, at least, and turns up some absolute jams in the likes of Jazaq’s slow and heavy acid electro monster ‘All Systems Go’ (1985), Pretty Tony’s laser-shotting zinger…
Soul Jazz Records’ new Miami Sound 2 is a superlative collection of 70s soul, funk, disco and boogie featuring tracks from legendary artists such as Betty Wright, Timmy Thomas, Gwen McRae, Milton Wright, T-Connection and many more, all released on the mighty TK Records musical empire based in Miami, Florida. Throughout the 1970s founder Henry Stone’s TK Records rose up to be one of the most important forces in black music, successfully pioneering the evolution in musical fashions from the early gritty funk and soul at the start of the decade to the arrival of disco in the mid-70s. This album is a rollercoaster journey across soul, funk, disco and boogie, a party-rocking dancefloor-filling collection of monster tracks that includes million-selling…
Compiled by legendary producer Arthur Baker, Breaker’s Revenge is a near-definitive collection of original Funk, Soul, Latin, Disco and Electro classic tracks from 1970-1984. These tracks, a combination of classics and obscurities, have all since become legendary to Breakdancers everywhere. First played at South Bronx block parties, community halls and park jams in the 1970s and 80s, spun endlessly by the first three major hip-hop DJs – Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa – and found in the record crates of any DJ of note ever since.
Seminal funk and soul tracks such as Dennis Coffey’s ‘Scorpio’, The Jimmy Castor Bunch’s ‘It’s Just Begun’, James Brown’s ‘Get on the Good Foot’, The Mohawks’ ‘Champ’ sit side-by-side…
Drummer and Composer David Lee Jr.’s stunning and rare album Evolution (1974) blends the deep experimentalism of John Coltrane and Sun Ra with the pulsating second-line and parade rhythms of New Orleans to create a stunning sonic and rhythmical tour de force.
In a lineage of incredible New Orleans drummers that includes James Black, Idris Muhammed, Zigaboo Modeliste of The Meters, and stretching back to Earl Palmer and Baby Dodds – David Lee Jr. stands out for his fire, experimentalism and an out-there-ness like no other.’Evolution’ is a super deep, ‘lost classic’ radical and groundbreaking deep spiritual jazz album.
Originally released in New York in 1974 (400 copies only ever pressed!), ‘Evolution’ is an…
Soul Jazz Records’ Down Beat Special is a roller- coaster Greatest Hits ride through many of the all- time classic tunes hand-picked from across the mighty vaults of, without doubt, Jamaica’s finest ever record label and pioneering powerhouse of reggae music.
Seminal tracks such as Michigan and Smiley’s ‘Nice Up The Dance’, Dawn Penn’s ‘No, No, No’, The Wailers’ ‘Simmer Down’, The Eternals’ ‘Queen of the Minstrels’… and on it goes. Non-stop big tunes – ‘Down Beat Special’ is an essential primer to Studio One Records.
Originally released as a one-off pressing limited edition (long-since deleted) 7” box set, this new edition is fully remastered and expanded to a massive 18 rare and killer cuts from the Studio…
Soul Jazz Records’ new 10th anniversary edition of their long-out-of-print Punk 45: No Such Thing As Society. This new edition is fully remastered, repackaged and includes five new tracks from 23 Skidoo, Notsensibles, Pretty Boy Floyd, The Astronauts and The Impossible Dreamers.
The album charts the rise of underground punk and post-punk in the UK from 1977-81.
There Is No Such Thing As Society is a collection of seminal, classic, obscure and rare punk and post-punk singles from the likes of The Mekons, Johnny Moped, The Killjoys, The Rings and many more which all chart the rise of independent music and Do It Yourself culture that exploded in the wake of punk and during the years of Britain under Margaret Thatcher.
Soul Jazz Records’ 200% Dynamite! set the benchmark for reggae meets funk compilations that has never been bettered. Out of print for over 15 years this new 2023 edition contains new tracks and is being released in a one-off limited-edition heavyweight red/blue vinyl pressing with a download code, exclusively for Record Store Day 2023.
Jam-packed with reggae tunes that crossed-over to become dancefloor hits such as Tenor Saw’s sound boy anthem ‘Ring the Alarm,’ K.C. White’s classic cut of the seminal ‘No, No, No’ and Augustus Pablo’s ‘Rockers Rock’, 200% Dynamite explores the links between reggae, jazz, funk and soul. Carrying on perfectly from 100% Dynamite, this second compilation continues to trace the history…
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