Likely recorded in Chicago around 1956; originally released on Saturn. Ra is co-composer on both sides; it could be him playing the harmonium.
‘I had two main vocal groups at the time,’ Ra once recalled. ‘One was called the Cosmic Echoes. And the Cosmic Rays, too. It was around the same time that John Gilmore joined the band. I saw the possibility that they could be really great so I began to coach them; they were connected with a barber shop, but I taught them other things.’ ‘We’d go down to the barber shops and rehearse some groups,’ added John Gilmore. ‘Sun Ra had them singin’ some beautiful stuff. I think he probably was saving them from themselves. He heard them, heard their potential, snatched them off the street, and started making them do something constructive.’

This expert drummer spent long stints with Archie Shepp and Sam Rivers; and he’s played with scores of other jazz greats, like Mal Waldron, Charles Tolliver, Yusef Lateef, Billy Harper, David Murray, and so on. He toured Europe with Marion Brown in 1977 — recording La Placita live in Willisau — and the following year cut Wooley The Newt for the saxophonist’s Sweet Earth label. His son Makaya sampled it recently on We’re New Again, his Gil Scott-Heron rework.
Free, grooving, spiritual jazz. Check it out.

Earl Morgan and Barry Llewellyn joined by Naggo Morris in 1978, with the genius engineer Sylvan Morris and the mighty Niney the Observer at the controls, and a crack band featuring Sly Dunbar. Every Day Life and Mr. Do Over Man Song are crucial, tip-top Heptones.

Dylan gave it to an enthused Neil Young: ‘the original wealth of our recorded music, the cream of the crop… it’s incredible. It’s in a wooden box and everything, and it’s just so beautiful.’
With a 200-page booklet (and some raw cotton).
In perfect nick. Just one.

The heaviest Cool Ruler of them all; the heaviest Joe Gibbs / Errol T dub. Murder, she wrote.

‘Japanese classical music and dance, traditionally performed by families of musicians linked to the ancient Imperial court, and later passed down in Buddhist temple ceremonies and Shinto shrines, Gagaku is the oldest of the Japanese performing arts, with a history more than a thousand years old. Founder and director of the Reigakusha ensemble, Shiba Sukeyasu descends from the Koma clan, dating back to the end of the 10th century. The recordings partly reflect repertoires borrowed from Chinese music between the 5th and 9th centuries.
‘The eternal breath of the flutes (ryuteki and hichiriki) creates a sort of suspension of time, together with the hypnotic and hallucinatory atmosphere of the mouth organs (shō). The meditative tone of the string instruments (bika and koto) that punctuate the voids and silences is impressive, as is the enigmatic percussion section, with the tolling of the gong (shōko) and the calibrated beats of the drums (taiko and kakko).’

‘Mariolina Zitta began working with natural sounds at the end of the 1980s, developing a passion for speleology. Her encounter with Walter Maioli was fundamental, guiding and influencing her definitive research into sound archaeology and the primitive sources of musical acoustic phenomena. In these recordings Mariolina conducts a magical ritual as a cave priestess, celebrating the icons par excellence of the mysteries of the night: bats. The specific frequencies of the calls of these fascinating creatures are recorded with special detectors used by ecologists, creating an organic synthesizer. The fusion with the sounds of natural objects (stones, stalactites, logs, bone whistles, Tibetan bells, mouth bows, trumpet shells) and the vocal modulations of harmonic singing allow us to travel into a still unexplored sound dimension, through an evocative experience of total sensory listening. It is an arcane landscape filled with pure vibrations, magnetic resonances and aquatic sounds; an ancestral enchantment on the border between consciousness and dreams, a symbolic liturgy of primordial reverberations, echoes and whistles.’
An edition of 200 copies.

Black Ark magic.

Combining two BBC Radio sessions, recorded at Maida Vale Studios in 1973 and 1978, with Norma Winstone, Henry Lowther, Art Themen, Tony Coe, and the gang.
Eight Garrick originals, including favourites from the Troppo and October Woman LPs, and an early, first showing for River Running and Galilee. Robin’s Rest only appears here.
‘Fabulous,’ says Record Collector.