Reliving the high life, plus jazz essentials from some of our favourites and early Grouper.
We start this chilly new week with seminal sounds from the golden age of Ghanaian music and the absolutely splendid Ghana Special: Highlife. Compiled and released by the always and ever so reliable Soundway label, we’re talking Highlife, rock, and soul with the odd funk slap, too. Constant highlights and so many good vibes, this one is an absolute party starter.
This special vinyl edition is produced in conjunction with the James Barnor archive, featuring a previously unpublished 1976 photo from the archive of Ghana’s most famous photographer.
We have two absolutely excellent jazz reissues under the Original Jazz Classics banner.
Sonny Rollins’ Plus 4 was originally released on the Prestige label in 1956 and features Rollins playing with the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet. The whole record has such a lush bounce to it, gorgeous lightness. It’s quite mischievous stuff!
You all know we are big Wes Montgomery fans, an absolute maverick of lightning fretwork. We have a new edition of his 1963 LP, Boss Guitar (which is such a flex of a title!) and there are some proper magic moments, especially the fast chord changes with Melvine Rhyne’s organ. All the moves.
Both records are on 180-gram vinyl, pressed at RTI with all-analog mastering from the original tapes at Cohearent Audio and a Stoughton Tip-On Jacket.
Also pressed nicely this week is Jackie McLean’s soulful and searching One Step Beyond. Inspired by Ornette Coleman, there are plenty of more avant-garde colours bleeding into the mix, but the band - Grachan Moncur III, Bobby Hutcherson, Eddie Kahn, and Tony Williams - keep it swinging too.
+ Stereo, all-analog, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes, and pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal.
The Paisley Park estate releases a really nice set of editions to celebrate Around the World in a Day, the seventh studio album by Prince, and the second to feature his backing band The Revolution. Released in 1985 it is chock-a-block with prime cuts, including the all-time Raspberry Beret.
+ Available on limited Blue Marble vinyl.
We have anniversary editions of Goldfrapp’s era-shaping Supernature (which turns 20 and receives a very impressive double “Peacock” colour vinyl edition) and Malcolm Middleton’s second LP - Into The Woods - which is also sounding handsome on its twentieth birthday. It features the cream of the Scottish music scene in sublime form.
Looks like we might even have a couple of signed copies of Shygirl’s Alias in the shop too. Come and see us!
Lastly this week, magical whispers with Grouper’s absolutely amazing debut LP Way Their Crept pressed on Kranky for the first time in about fifteen years. It’s just all so intimate, as the songs start and stop and evolve in waves of tape hiss and reverberating white noise. For us, no one comes anywhere close to the emotion that Liz Harris is able to capture in her music. Stunning stuff. Depressingly limited.