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Way before Tony Orlando started tying a ribbon around that old oak tree, he cut some wonderful work for the Epic label – early 60s Brill Building pop at its finest, recorded with a host of top-shelf talents! Arrangements here are by Carole King, Alan Lorber, Garry Sherman, and other New York pop luminaries – all of whom cast Tony's vocals in a surprisingly soulful blend of strings with deeper drums and bass – a groove that's a bit like some of the uptown soul that was coming into play on the scene at the time, and which is a lot less than the simple pop you might expect. Orlando's presentation of the material is really great – never prone to easy gimmicks, and often with a slightly fragile style that's a far cry from his 70s fame. Titles include "Bless You", "My Baby's A Stranger", "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow", "Tell Me Where To Run To", "That Lovin Touch", "Shirley", "The Loneliest", "I'll Be There", "Accept It", "I'd Never Find Another You", "Talkin About You", and "Some Kinda Wonderful". 27 tracks in all – with great notes on this phase of Tony's career! CD

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A way way deeper set than the first volume of Bay Area Funk – and a collection that shows that things got pretty heavy on the San Francisco and Oakland scenes of the 70s! A good number of the tracks here are instrumental, and show some wonderful interplay between the trippier sides of funky jazz and the harder sides of soul going on in the Bay Area back in the day – killer music from the fringes that often got lost in the shuffle of all the better-known music coming out on the bigger labels! The work here is all from very tiny labels – expertly selected and all officially cleared by the Luv N Haight team with keen respect for the artists involved – and in a way, the package has set a new high standard for the label! A tremendous discovery, and filled with tracks we'd never heard before – titles that include "Stop Look Listen" by Primevil, "Poor Sad Child (part 1)" by The Windjammers, "Born To Live With Heartache" by Mary Love, "Move In The Room" by Dawn & Sunset, "Ebony" by Project Soul, "Acid Lady" by San Francisco TKOs, "Hip Breakin" by Little Denise Stevenson, "Devil's On The Run" by Uptights Band, "Brute Strength" by Mile Selesia, and "Lenient With My Love" by The Relatives. CD

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From its booze-soaked title cut, to its haunting selection of lonely ballads like "Midnight Sun" and "Stranger Called The Blues", this is one of the most fantastic vocal jazz albums of all time – and a record that we'd recommend instantly to anyone! June Christy has an incredibly icy tone on the record, filled with sorrow, regret, and loneliness – all of which are amplified even more deeply by Pete Rugolo's eerie, off-kilter arrangements. And, on this CD reissue, you'll also hear the pair in a whopping amount of extra material, pulled from singles and albums issued around the same time, for a total of 24 cuts in all. Titles include "Magazines", "Whee Baby", "I'm Thrilled", "Out Of Somewhere", and "The Night We Called It A Day". Fantastic stuff! CD

Arhoolie issue of material recorded by Fuller in Oakland in 1955! CD

Three great albums from Incognito – served up at a mighty nice price, and with bonus tracks too! Who Needs Love is a gem from over a decade ago – and Jean-Paul "Bluey" Maunick pulled out all the stops on this set – working with a range of vocalists that includes Joy Rose, Kelli Sae, Tony Momrelle, Joy Malcolm, and Brazilian soul legend Ed Motta! The range of voices on the set really gives it a lot of depth – moving past the easy jazz funk moments of earlier sets, and going for an all-solid, all-soulful approach that really blows our mind! Great stuff all the way through – maybe their best album in years – and a record you'll be playing into the next decade. Titles include "Morning Sun", "Who Needs Love", "Stone Cold Heart", "Where Love Shines", "Blue", "Fly", "If You Want My Love", and "Cada Dia". On Adventures In Black Sunshine, the groove is sweetly soulful, with a jazzy undercurrent that hearkens back to the best west coast soul of the 70s – and Bluey's got the group honed to perfection, playing with a razor-sharp edge that keeps the tunes as funky as they are soulful! Vocals are by Maysa and Tony Momrelle – and tracks include "Don't Turn My Love Away", "This Thing Called Love", "The Principles Of Love", "Everything Your Heart Desires", "Close My Eyes", "25th Chapter", and "Mr Jones". Eleven is a record that's a great testament to Incognito's richly-collaborative spirit – a quality that makes plenty of room here for lead vocals by Maysa Leak, Imaani, and Carleen Anderson – and which benefits strongly from some great keyboard lines by Ski Oakenfull. But as usual, mainman Bluey is the one to thank for the record – because his sense of groove, and love of classic 70s-influenced soul comes through very strongly on all tracks – hitting an on-the-money sound that makes the group, and this latest album, stand head to head with some of the best soul acts of classic years. Another winner from Incognito – not a bit of fluff at all – and a sublime batch of tracks that includes "Jacaranda", "Show Me Love", "We Got Music", "Let The Mystery Be", "Will I Ever Learn", "I'll Get By", "As Long As It's You", and "When Tomorrow Brings You Down". Bonus tracks include the previously-unreleased "To Prove My Love" and "Feel The Real" – plus "Zaius (Ski Oakenfull mix)". CD

A darkness tinged departure for Kanye West – his electro hip hop soul tome 808s & Heartbreak! Kanye's albums are always newsworthy, but this one divides opinions as sharply as any major release of 2008. That said, we'll go on the record with some real love for this sometimes confounding, often brilliant batch of tracks. Kanye is mostly singing on this one, and brazenly flaunting the Auto-Tune vocal fad to a point in which he's basically daring you to hate on him for it – but the deep, dark and confessional storytelling and mostly downbeat tone of the songs offsets the arch trendiness almost completely. It's an interesting dichotomy, but it it works, giving some fairly morose songs a needed light touch. Ultimately, this is a brave record for Kanye recorded in a year that must have been truly wrenching for him emotionally – and it's not the kind of set that most people are going to love the first time they hear it. It took us a couple spins to soak it in, but we'll call it a success! Tracks include "Say You Will", "Welcome To Heartbreak", "Heartless", "Amazing", the hit "Love Lockdown", "Street Lights", "Coldest Winter" and more. CD

A masterpiece from the legendary SF rocker Steve Miller – and a perfect summation of the years of blues, soul, funk, and rock he'd been soaking up in the Bay Area scene – served up here with an edge that's still very firmly in place! Miller was already plenty great before this set, but somehow the record really pushes Steve into perfection territory he'd never hit before – able to cross over big with a few key tracks, but still have this sharpness in his guitar work and sense of charm that never seem to die! The album crossed over instantly with the massive cut "Fly Like An Eagle" – already great on its own, but supported here with the massive "Space Intro", which adds an extra minute of cool electronics to the tune – and other great cuts include the amazing funky rocker "Take The Money & Run", which has a break that never gets old – plus the hit "Rock N Me", and the cuts "The Window", "Wild Mountain Honey", "Sweet Maree", "Blue Odyssey", "Mercury Blues", and "Dance Dance Dance". Expanded CD features remastering, a bonus DVD interview, and 3 bonus tracks – demos of "Fly Like An Eagle", "Take The Joker & Run", and "Rock N Me (slow)". CD

A pretty interesting album – one in which a host of jazz and rock players pay set music to texts written by consciousness-raiser/sci-fi author Ishmael Reed. There's a few goofy moments on the set, but if you've read Reed's work, you'll also know that goofiness and oddity are part of the package – elements that are handled nicely here by musicians like David Murray, Allen Toussaint, Arto Lindsay, Milton Cardona, and Kip Hanrahan, who put the whole thing together. Reed himself is also on the record – and titles include "Jes' Grew", "Oakland Blues", "Dualism", and "Dualism (2)". CD

An incredible album – and a landmark session that showed that the bossa nova was still alive and well in the 1970s! The album pairs the breathy jazz vocals of Elis Regina with the booze-soaked warmth of Antonio Carlos Jobim – in a set of spare arrangements that feature a lot of touches from Cesar Carmargo Mariano, whose work on Elis Regina's 70s sessions is still the stuff of legend! Elis' vocals dominate, but when Tom comes in, the result is even more spectacular – especially given the generally light instrumentation used on most tracks – which means that the vocals carry the bulk of the sound on the set! Includes the pair's sublime duet on "Aguas de Marco", plus the tracks "Fotografia", "Brigas, Nunca Mais", "Retrato Em Branco E Preto", "Chovendo No Roseira", "Modinha", and "Triste". CD

Two classic albums from Tower Of Power – back to back in a single set, and with bonus tracks too! On the first album, Bump City, Tower Of Power move down to Memphis for the recording – and almost pick up a bit of Stax Records vibe in the process! The Memphis location is a key hint to the groove going on down here – a sound that's steeped in southern elements, even though the group themselves hail from the Bay Area – carried off with a quality that's a wonderful blend of funky rhythms, jazzier horns, and even a bit of fuller touches from the Memphis Strings. Legendary guitarist Steve Cropper helps the group out a bit on the session – and the album's got a sweet southern funky groove that sits nicely with the Bay Area groove of the group. Titles include "You Got To Funkifize", "Flash In The Pan", "Down To The Nightclub", "You Strike My Main Nerve", and "Of The Earth". Next is Tower Of Power – one of the harder funk albums by the legendary Oakland combo – done with a hard-driving horn-heavy groove, slathered up in East Bay Grease! The group's got a bit of the stoner funk sound that shows their Bay Area roots, but they're also a lot tighter than most of their California contemporaries, and feel more like some of the groups coming out of Memphis and Muscle Shoals at the same time. Lenny Williams is on lead vocals, Chester Thompson plays organ – and tracks include "Soul Vaccination", "What Is Hip", "So Very Hard To Go", "Just Another Day", "Clean Slate", "Get Yo' Feet Back On The Ground", and "Clever Girl". Bonus tracks include single versions of "What Is Hip" and "You're Still A Young Man". CD

A killer collection of funk and soul from an ultra-hip Bay Area label of the 70s – Oakland's enigmatic Brown Door Records – headed up by funk maestro Marvin Holmes! The music's got a beautifully sunny vibe – all the best Bay Area elements of the time, reflected in the scene-crossing, genre-stepping modes that often made the East Bay way more exciting than anything going on in San Francisco – particularly in the cool crossbreeding that would happen between Berkeley, Oakland, and other communities. Holmes' cuts here are a great example of that – still the funk and jazz of his late 60s music for bigger labels, but also pretty stretched-out and open too – filled with an all-encompassing spirit that rivals the best music from the Fantasy studios at the time – but with a hipper, indie vibe all the way through. This spirit also steps over to the work by other artists on the collection, too – and is told in the rich notes and images included with the heavy booklet – both in English and Japanese, at a level that shows the Shout Productions folks stepping into Numero territory. A wonderfully deep compilation – filled with great cuts that include "You & Me", and "Goin Home" by Faye Marshall, "Making New Friends" and "Trippin On The Sounds" by Jeanie Tracy, "Cain't Get Anuff" by Bill Bell, "I Can't Go Without You (parts 1 & 2)" by Doroth Morrison, "Love Yo Love" and "Confess Your Love" by John Turk & The 3rd Street Annex, and the tracks "Kwame", "You Better Keep Her (7" version)", "Find Yourself (parts 1 & 2)", "Gimme Some Tonight (parts 1 & 2)", "Feel So Good (inst)", "You Girl", "Tell The Truth", and "Kimani Mdogo" by Marvin Holmes & Justice. CD