Knockout, anthemic rare groove, from the 1979 album Life, Love And Harmony. Ultra-jazzy, classy, and exultant, this is Nancy Wilson at her very best. She even throws in a quickfire Louis Armstrong impression. That’s John Klemmer playing saxophone.
Backed with The End of Our Love, a northern soul floor-filler from 1968, hard to come by.
Ace.

Gorgeous, wistful, tentative two-step from her late, hard-to-find, 1974 LP Love Rhymes (with production by Johnny Guitar Watson and David Axelrod).
Bim.

‘It’s always summer somewhere, but especially so wherever Cheryl Glasgow’s carefree clubber Glued To The Spot gets a spin. An absolute ear-worm from the opening strums, Glasgow’s Sade-adjacent, jazz vocalese sweeps into a warm up-tempo groove, never breaking sweat. Issued on Ross Anderson’s short-lived, London-based Live label, Glued To The Spot swept through the club scene briefly in 1987, embarking for warmer shores when the season changed.’

Guitarist Willie ‘Junei’ Lee spent the late-seventies touring with with Albert King, Curtis Mayfield, and The Emotions, before returning home to Gary, Indiana, to focus on his own sound. ‘The only artists I listened to was Hendrix and Santana,’ he recalls.
‘The emissions coming from his home studio were entirely different, however, as Let’s Ride channels the Euro sensibilities of Kraftwerk or Italo over virtuosic guitar. ‘I just didn’t want to sound like anyone else.’
‘Let’s Ride anticipated Chicago house by a few years. Pressed in minuscule numbers in 1987 on Pharaohs Records, the 45 never connected with the nearby scenes in Chicago and Detroit where it might have found purchase in fertile soils. Decades later, though, it found new life as the bed for Kaytranada’s Scared To Death.’

Stone killer jazz funk by the All Girls Band, from New Orleans.
Like prime Blackbyrds, but young women doing it to it for a change, with a rocket launcher.

Holy grail Detroit funk recorded in 1969 for Dave Hamilton; backed with a tape-find Northern dancer.