J.J. Cale's debut album, Naturally, was recorded after Eric Clapton made "After Midnight" a huge success. Instead of following Slowhand's cue and constructing a slick blues-rock album, Cale recruited a number of his Oklahoma friends and made a laid-back country-rock record that firmly established his distinctive, relaxed style. Cale included a new version of "After Midnight" on the album, but the true meat of the record lay in songs like "Crazy Mama," which became a hit single, and "Call Me the Breeze," which Lynyrd Skynyrd later covered. On these songs and many others on Naturally, Cale effortlessly captured a lazy, rolling boogie that contradicted all the commercial styles of boogie, blues, and country-rock at the time. Where his contemporaries concentrated on solos, Cale worked the song and its rhythm, and the result was a pleasant, engaging album that was in no danger of raising anybody's temperature.

For some reason, the second Elf record, 1974's Carolina County Ball, was released under the title L.A./59 in the United States and Japan, while the more widely accepted title was used in the U.K. and Europe. The Ronnie James Dio-led outfit was becoming increasingly entwined with Deep Purple – Roger Glover was producing the band, they appeared on the Deep Purple-owned Purple record label in the U.K., and the group was working frequently with Ritchie Blackmore – and their music began taking on a more powerful, more complex, more Deep Purple-like sound because of it.

Ptarmigan were a Psychedelic Folk Progressive rock band from Vancouver Canada who released a genuine beautiful album in 1974. Ptarmigan’s debut album resonates with a highly unique charm and character with very few true comparisons. Without a question there is a strong Native North American Indian feeling to this album with flute, hand drums and lots of acoustic guitar.

What might have been simply seen as an agreeable enough debut album has since become something of a notorious legend because Kraftwerk, or more accurately the core Hütter/Schneider duo at the heart of the band, simply refuses to acknowledge its existence any more. What's clearly missing from Kraftwerk is the predominance of clipped keyboard melodies that later versions of the band would make their own. Instead, Kraftwerk is an exploratory art rock album with psych roots first and foremost, with Conny Plank's brilliant co-production and engineering skills as important as the band performances. Still, Hütter and Schneider play organ and "electric percussion" – Hütter's work on the former can especially be appreciated with the extended opening drone moan of the all-over-the-place "Stratovarius" combined with Schneider's eerie violin work. But it's a different kind of combination and exploration, with the key pop sugar (and vocal work) of later years absent in favor of sudden jump cuts of musique concrète noise and circular jamming as prone to sprawl as it is to tight focus.

Lovecraft was a spin-off group from the original H.P. Lovecraft, who released two albums for Philips Records, of the original line-up, only drummer Michael Tegza remained, though George Edwards was with the group briefly, the remaining members were former Aorta guitarist Jim Donlinger, ex-Buckinghams' multi-instrumentalist Marty Grebb, and future leader of the Call, Michael Been. The LP bears little resemblance to the the original H.P.Lovecraft, but that doesn't mean this album isn't entertaining, with a tighter sound that blends hard driving drums and guitars with more delicate, harmony vocal accented songcraft! It's a far cry from the psychedelic experimentation of HP Lovecraft - but it's actually a pretty impressive rock record in its own right - prefiguring the later 70s rock sounds long before the better known giants of the decade!

Barclay James Harvest was, for many years, one of the most hard luck outfits in progressive rock. A quartet of solid rock musicians – John Lees, guitar, vocals; Les Holroyd, bass, vocals; Stuart "Wooly" Wolstenholme, keyboards, vocals; and Mel Pritchard, drums – with a knack for writing hook-laden songs built on pretty melodies, they harmonized like the Beatles and wrote extended songs with more of a beat than the Moody Blues…

Many English bands tried to blend folk music with progressive rock with various degrees of success. Most of these relied on old, traditional themes with elements of progressive rock being added to produce the desired effect. Fuchsia is quite different as there are almost no traditional influences at all. Take a whimsical, eerie, gentle folk theme, with acoustic guitar and soft voices, both male a female, throw in cello, harpsichord, and then run it through a fiery electric guitar along with a solid rhythm section and you have Fuchsia. The music is sublime, the melodies are gorgeous and the playing is top notch…

Lightshine were one of the many shortlived underground Krautrock bands that left behind this great debut album for all to discover. This album features the solid musicianship of 5 proggers who have crafted 2 sides of some pretty dark yet melodic music. Lightshine drip Ash-Ra like guitar solos, space keyboards and flute over a dark full bodied bass and drum foundation. Their music is aggressive yet very much contained. According to the liner notes these guys played along with the likes of Jane, Hoelderlin and the Scorpions. "Feeling" contains 2 epic tacks which really give the band some room to experiment and wind out their solos onto. Overall a great album to play and enjoy again and again and a great find in the lot of 70's Krautrock.

Entertainment! is one of those records where germs of influence can be traced through many genres and countless bands, both favorably and unfavorably. From groups whose awareness of genealogy spreads wide enough to openly acknowledge Gang of Four's influence (Fugazi, Rage Against the Machine), to those not in touch with their ancestry enough to realize it (rap-metal, some indie rock) – all have appropriated elements of their forefathers' trailblazing contribution. Its vaguely funky rhythmic twitch, its pungent, pointillistic guitar stoccados, and its spoken/shouted vocals have all been picked up by many. Lyrically, the album was apart from many of the day, and it still is.

In 1974, Richard Thompson and the former Linda Peters released their first album together, and I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight was nothing short of a masterpiece, the starkly beautiful refinement of the promise of Thompson's solo debut, Henry the Human Fly. In Linda Thompson, Richard found a superb collaborator and a world-class vocalist; Linda possessed a voice as clear and rich as Sandy Denny's, but with a strength that could easily support Richard's often weighty material, and she proved capable of tackling anything presented to her, from the delicately mournful "Has He Got a Friend for Me" to the gleeful cynicism of "The Little Beggar Girl." And while Richard had already made clear that he was a songwriter to be reckoned with, on I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight he went from strength to strength.

George Duke - Brazilian Fusion (2013) {Wounded Bird Records WOU 7001 rec 1977-1984}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 541 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 172 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 13 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1977-84, 2013 Wounded Bird Records / Heads Up / Epic | WOU 7001
Jazz / Fusion / Jazz Funk

A dream of a set – at least to our Brazilian-loving ears – a special package that brings together all the best Brazilian-flavored cuts from George Duke's late 70s run on Epic Records! The package is filled with wonderfully sunny grooves throughout – tunes that sparkle and soar with mighty nice rhythms – topped with loads of keyboards from George, and vocals that often have a scatting, breezy style that's plenty sweet – American soul influenced by Brazilian grooves, in a sound that's a bit like the feel of Earth Wind & Fire's "Brazilian Rhyme".

In 1973, Argentinean saxophonist Gato Barbieri contemplated a move to a more commercially viable, accessible sound, one that appealed to both North and South American audiences. He moved from the jazz vanguard toward it's exotic center (and finally into the commercial world altogether) with a number of records, including this one, which explored the various rhythms, melodies, and textures of Afro-Cuban and Latin American sounds. Bolivia features Barbieri immediately prior to his Impulse recordings that resulted in the celebrated four-chapter Latin America series.

While it's true that the first chapter in Gato Barbieri's musical life – at least on records – had been that of an explorer, from his vanguard outings on ESP with Don Cherry and Dollar Brand to his showcasing the music of his native Latin America on Impulse, Fania, and Flying Dutchman as it intersected with modern jazz, it is the third chapter that concerns this release. Barbieri became deeply interested in commercial music and its possibilities for Latin jazz and the funk and salsa scenes in the early and mid-'70s.