Soul-Jazz/Jazz-Funk/Fusion

Post-Mwandishi Herbie Hancock is all pretty decent, especially Thrust.

The JB's/Maceo crew material is all pretty tight, check out the Soul Pride: The Instrumentals double disc comp.

The Brazilian jazz-funk comps I've heard lately like Black Rio and Samba Soul 70! have some really cool stuff on them.

I OD'd on this stuff a few years ago, there's just so much out there it all starts to sound kind of mediocre after awhile. It's harder to keep things interesting over a one chord funk vamp than over rhythm changes, I think (which is why most jam bands=suck).

The Mastercuts Jazz Funk comps are good - certainly the first 4 are worth getting but maybe not for full price, though 1 is classic. And it has Lonnie Liston Smith's Expansions on it. One of the most essential tracks of jazz funk ever. Put that top of your list.

Mizell Brothers productions are generally nice,Bobbi Humphrey's "Blacks & Blues" and Donald Byrd's "Spaces & Places" are 2 of the best.

Roy Ayers albums are also great.

Grant Green's track "Cease the Bombing" is especially good.

Miles' 70's stuff is fairly heavy and not really very relaxing but is clearly excellent. In A Silent Way is a good starting point but after that there's loads of interesting stuff.

Yours
Jan
My page on it: http://www.jahsonic.com/JazzFunk.html

Sorry for the yelling/caps, I feel that strongly.

is it tho'? Stuff like Bitches Brew is in the 'cannon' surely.

I'm seeing a lot of "Well, Norah Jones isn't really jazz" -- which to me isn't a reason not to like her (why can't a jazz fan like pop music with a little jazzy phrasing? Why be a genre-snob all the time?), but it's more helpful if the critic can say exactly what jazz is and why Norah Jones is such a big scam. Also I wonder why it's so important for critics to point out that she isn't jazz -- it seems to say a lot about the critic wanting to protect himself from allegations that HE'S not jazz either.

I'm gonna post this on the Norah Jones thread, too.

(By the way, the Samba Soul 70 and Black Rio comps are excellent -- so are the Latin Jazz Experience and Coolin: A Soul Jazz Journey comps.)

a good label to start with is CTI Records. it was started by Creed Taylor, also the founder of one of the best spiritual / free labels Impulse records. some artists to check out from this so called Golden Era of soul-jazz on CTI are:
+ Bob James - his first four albums are classics. some kinda nasty shit on them, but overall, pretty good. Check out tracks like "Natilus" and "Mardi Gras". Staples in early hip hop samples. shit, even Missy is still sampling the break off Mardi Gras for her new album.
+ Freddie Hubbard - along with the aforementioned "Red Clay" go searching for "Straight Life" and "Keep Your Soul Together". hubbard kicked ass.
+ Grover Washington Jr. - get the album "Feels So Good". he later slipped into new age-y jazz, but this album has his two classic songs _Hydra_ and _Knucklehead_.
+ Wes Montgomery put out a few really funky albums on CTI

some artists from this period that were putting out great records on other labels:
+ Donald Byrd - most everything this man put out was funky. "Stepping Into Tomorrow" has the amazing track _Think Twice_ that has been sampled numerous times by Tribe Called Quest and Main Source, and recently replayed on Jay Dee's BBE album. also his work with the Blackbyrds is worth hunting down.
+ Roy Ayers was very similar to D.Byrd. very funky, but also very pop (in a good way, sometimes not). albums to search for "Red, Black and Green" and "Everybody Loves the Sunshine". also look for his work with the group Ramp

some other notable names in this genre that i love are Grant Green, Ramsey Lewis, and Bobby Hutcherson.

other labels worth checking out are Blue Note (duh), Black Jazz Records, Tribe Records, Mainstream, and Strata East

I have Mystic Voyage by the Roy Ayers Ubiquity (it's the only Ayers I own) but it's a little too fusionish for me.

Also, his Places and Spaces album gets poor reviews but I think it has a very distinctive sound -- the AMG sez "Philly soul, lite funk, and proto disco" and I would add that it takes those posh elements of fusion and gives them a sort of '70s inner-city credibility.

1. Memphis Underground: Herbie Mann. Psych-soul fluteyness w/ Roy Ayers on vibes, and both Sonny Sharrock and Larry Coryell on gtr. A long versh of 'Hold On I'm Coming' is prob. the highlight.

2. Stoned Soul Picnic: Roy Ayers. Herbie M, Sonny S and Linda S all appear on the cover of this one: Herbie Hancock plays electric keyboards throughout. The opening track is quite 'avant', the Laura Nyro cover isn't so much. Still gd, tho'.

3. Spaces: Larry Coryell. Apart from his tasty contribs to the Jazz Composers Orchestra dbl and the aforementioned Mann rec, this is far-and-away Coryell's best alb - a post-Hendrix/Miles/Stockhausen/SlyStone/Django psych freak-out w/ battlin' John McLaughlin on 2nd gtr, and Chick Corea on electric keyboards.

4. Super Nova: Wayne Shorter. I always bang on abt this one, but man, it's just such an overlooked late period Blue Note gem - Sonny Sharrock, John McG, and Walter Booker go Gtr mental all over it, there's really wigged-out singing from Maria Booker, PLUS you get proto-fusiod excitement from Corea, Jack DeJohnette, Airto Moreira, Mr Weird himself Wayne S, and the fantastic Weather Report bassist Miroslav Vitous, whose first solo alb is tough to find but well worth snappin' up if you happen to see it (I cld use a copy or two myself.)

5. Sextant: Herbie Hancock. The 73 Headhunters rec is undeniably groovy, but sometimes I prefer this Hancock rec, made the year before. It's stuffed full of really dense keyboard sounds, farty electronic effects, superb reed bleating from the underrated Bennie Maupin, and general post-'Bitches Brew' electro-swamp fug. Great cover, too.

6. Anthology - David Axelrod. This producer-guru has been sampled to death already, and his albs are generally far more patchy than his celeb admirers ever let on, but at his best (ie on most of this comp - the second vol is pretty mediocre, I wld say) his tracks still sound like nothing else, both psych-twee other-worldly and breakbeat superfunky, sort've as if Curt Boettcher had been mashed up w/ Bernard Purdie. Axelrod worked a lot w/ the great alto player Julian 'Cannonball' Adderley, who also recorded tons of early of 'soul-jazz' recs w/ ppl like Joe Zawinul and George Duke. In the same style, 'Hot Dog' by Lou Donaldson is a good'un.

7. Sweetnighter: Weather Report. The first six or so WR albs all have good stuff on them, plus a fair amount of tedious prog-fusion noodle-wanking, but this one gets the nod for Zawinul's 'Boogie Woogie Waltz', a total dancefloor killa. 'Jaco', the first solo alb by Vitous-replacement bassist Jaco Pastorius, is a bit too chop-showing-off even for me, but it does feature such key funk-fusion players as the Brecker Bros, Hubert Laws, Hancock and Shorter, and Sam and Dave!

8. The Infinite - Dave Douglas. There've been an awful lot of awful Miles trib albs in the last few years - Hancock/Brecker/Hargrove's ponderous 'Directions in Music' tour/alb, Mark Isham's 'In A Silent Way Project', that ho-hum Kaiser/Smith dbl 'electric' CD, Donald Harrison's pointless 'Kind of Blue' trib, Tommy Smith's overly cocksure nod to the Davis/Evans collabs, etc. etc. As a great modern jazz trumpeter, Douglas has almost made of point of avoiding the Miles style/tone, but this 2002 alb sort've 'references' the whole seventies electric-Miles period without actually sounding much like 'Bitches Brew' etc. at all. The key musician is keyboarder Uri Caine, giving up all that Bach-goes-Jazz stuff to play some really scorching Fender Rhodes keyboard stylings (he does the same kind of thing, more obviously but less effectively, on the recent 'Philadelphia Experiment' funk-jazz trib rec.)

9. 'Leaving the Planet' - Charles Earland. One of the trio of great Hammond players - along w/ Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff - who can generally be relied upon to always deliver a gd alb's worth of funked-up keyboard wah-wah. I like this Earland in particular 'cos it has loads of 'futuristic' space sounds all over it; the earlier 'Black Talk' is prob. his best 'straight' ahead bluesy-funk rec.

"a good label to start with is CTI Records"

There's a good compilation that came out last year called 'CTI - The Master Collection'. I think they reissued a bunch of other CTI albums at the same time.

Herbie Hancock - Headhunters
Chick Corea - Light as A Feather (for more of a Brazilian vibe)
Miles Davis - Live Evil

..And there's a Howard Wales/Jerry Carcia "Side Trips" album that's real slick, too.

Ellery Eskelin - The Sun Died

Lou Donaldson's stuff with Idris Muhammed, Lonnie Smith, etc. is what I think of when I think of "soul jazz". Fusion would be post-Miles stuff such as Chick Corea and Weather Report. I guess "jazz-funk" that's somewhere in between might include Herbie Hancock's headhunters material, and some of the CTI stuff, and certain Donald Byrd records.

Anyway, a not-so-common soul jazz record I really like is Lou Donaldson's "Pretty Things," which features a rare appearance of the late Ted Dunbar on guitar (who also happened to be my teacher.)

soul jazz sucks for not using the full 9 minute "dancing in outer space" for the "british jazz funk" comp