Don Blackman
Say You'll Be Mine

This expanded musical journey further explores the wide spectrum of the band's musical identity – with each of the five parts designed as both standalone records, while also offering a singular listening journey across the band's expansive musical world. This, the second part in the collection, draws on the band's rich influence of Ethiopian and sub-saharan soul and funk, alongside spiritual jazz, rock, and 1970s film soundtracks.

This 1975 album is one of a kind in lots of ways. First, it's keyboardist Roland Haynes' only album. But more importantly, Second Wave has a sound'and line-up'unlike pretty much any other jazz fusion album to come out before or since. Anchored by a fantastic rhythm section of Carl Burnett (Cal Tjader, Vince Guaraldi and most notably Gene Harris and The Three Sounds) and Henry 'The Skipper' Franklin (leader on a couple of Black Jazz titles still to come, plus Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Hugh Masekela, and many others), the album features dueling Fender Rhodes tickled by Haynes and Kirk Lightsey, who played with everyone from Chet Baker to Pharoah Sanders to Sonny Stitt, not to mention a bunch of Black Jazz dates. The cascading sound of the two electric pianos, one (Lightsey's) often driven through a wah-wah pedal, gives Second Wave a special vibe all its own; there are not horns or guitars getting in the way of these mindblowing keyboard jams. Some folks might hear a little '70s-era Miles Davis when Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett and/or Herbie Hancock were in the band, and Hancock's own Head Hunters album comes to mind (as well later fusion dudes like Jan Hammer and Bill Bruford), but Second Wave is sui generis. Our Real Gone reissue is remastered for CD and vinyl by Mike Milchner at Sonic Vision, with LP lacquer cutting by Clint Holley and Dave Polster at Well Made Music, and features new liner notes by Pat Thomas, author of Listen, Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975, that include a couple of quotes from drummer Burnett and bassist Franklin. First ever time reissued on vinyl!

Originally released in 2012, the second album by the São Paulo-born composer Rodrigo Campos marks a turning point in both lyrical and aesthetic inspiration. “Bahia Fantástica” is the result of the absorption of a then recent influence of soul music (especially Curtis Mayfield) and is in the middle of this path marked by an unlikely geography in the lyrical part (São Mateus, Bahia, Japan) and by an expansion of sound ( from samba to the indefinable, with a passage through black American music).The album turns ten years old in 2022 and exudes vitality. The soul reference takes on a different aroma when it passes through the filter of the composer and his band – formed by Kiko Dinucci on guitar, Marcelo Cabral on bass, Maurício Fleury on keyboards, Maurício Takara on drums and Thiago França on sax: it has Brazilian sauce, hints of afrobeat and a very particular seasoning. The lyrics bear the artist's mark: they project scenes in the listener's imagination and design the characters and environments with their own style of subjective chronicle. Bahia is both imaginary and intimate in Rodrigo Campos’s music.

If ever a record called be called a lost masterpiece then this record more than deserves that epithet. First released on an obscure French label in the 1970's it might have sunk further into obscurity and left no trace of it's passing but somehow a handful of copies turned up in various Jazz shops in London where it was snapped up by DJ Paul Murphy who was then playing to the embryonic jazz dance scene, based at the very first Jazz Room club: The Horseshoe in London's Tottenham Court Road, a decaying, seedy, sticky carpeted old West End ballroom that had seen better days. This and a select few records in a similar vein were being played to an appreciative audience who demanded tough raw percussive rhythms overlaid with some furious jazzy soloing and whenever this record hit the turntable it left even the most demanding groover sated.