Going Home - Takuya Kuroda

Free Download: hopestreetrecordings.com/dawn

Artist: Emma Donovan & The PutBacks
Album: Dawn
Format: LP/CD/Digital
AU Release Date: Nov 7 2014
UK Release Date: Nov 10 2014
US Release Date: Nov 11 2014

Acclaimed indigenous vocalist Emma Donovan and Melbourne rhythm combo The PutBacks come together to bring you Dawn, an LP of hard hitting and heartfelt soul songs telling stories of grief, struggle and redemption. Dawn is a gritty, uniquely Australian record, simultaneously classic and contemporary. The songwriting is in turns optimistic, angry and melancholic, and on occasions bruisingly honest. The music is fluid, live and raw, recorded in one room on eight channels of analog tape and the electric connection between Emma and the band comes through in every beat.

Emma grew up singing church songs with her maternal grandparents on the North coast of New South Wales. Her first secular gigs were singing in The Donovans, a band comprised of her mother and five uncles. With her mother, Emma sang country for years, and in her youth was a fixture at the Tamworth Country Music Festival, but she always yearned for the bluesier tones of her Father’s record collection, full of American artists like Laverne Baker and Etta James and Indigenous Australian artists like No Fixed Address and Archie Roach.

Years later, after touring and recording with many of the mainstays of Indigenous music and developing as a solo artist in her own right, Emma met members of The PutBacks, and finally she found a band with the gritty blues soaked tones she had been looking for. She also found, in PutBacks bassist Mick Meagher, a co-writer and collaborator on the the soul songs she had been waiting a lifetime to write and sing. The results are well worth the wait and hopefully, only mark the beginning of this oh-so-right collaboration.

Buy Vinyl/CD/Digital

Emma Donovan & The PutBacks - Voodoo

www.facebook.com/BlackPeachesBand
www.twitter.com/_black_peaches_
 
(c) 1965 Records

Rob Smoughton is probably best known as a long-time member of Hot Chip and Scritti Politti, while his alter-ego Grovesnor has released a number of albums to critical acclaim.

Now he unveils his new band, Black Peaches.

A midway point between the swamp and the tropics, Black Peaches’ music is gloriously loose-limbed and strung-out: a psychotropic stew of country boogie, spiritual jazz and funk.

With slide guitars, Latin percussion and shimmering keyboards, the Peaches sound is a cinematic experience, the soundtrack to a bar fight at the country disco or an incantation of the black arts. At other times they swagger with the easy confidence of Little Feat, Manassas, or Dr John to create a pulsating, unwinding groove for a hot summer's day where no one is in too much of a hurry.

Black Peaches is not just a sextet, but in the mind of its skipper, Smoughton, a destination where various strands of musical flavour and colour coalesce to form a heavenly brew, equal parts melody and groove, grit and bliss, sublimely tight and gloriously loose-limbed.

Black Peaches demanded a band format so, Smoughton sent his initial demos to musicians he fancied roping in, like Nick Roberts, Grosvenor’s live drummer, and Charlie Michael (The Severed Limb, Shock Defeat), a master of Brazilian percussion. Smoughton had played with bassist Susumu Mukai in (Hot Chip frontman) Alexis Taylor’s live band. Duelling guitarist Adam Chetwood, is a fellow country and jazz fan and plays pedal steel too. Thomas Greene (Cold Specks) on keyboards completes a consummate line-up that added ideas to Smoughton’s demos, which he took away and wrote more parts for.

Inspirations include ‘70s Nashville combo Barefoot Jerry and their guitarist Mac Gaden - that combination of southern soul and country coming together, with Caribbean or South American music seeped in.

Steven Stills’ first post-Crosby Stills Nash & Young ensemble Manassas were a blueprint in terms of Black Peaches’ line-up, with percussion and pedal steel.

Then from Brazil, the rhythm section of Baden Powell Sambas’ 1966 album Os Afro Sambas and the double guitar attack of the psych-tinged Novos Baianos, alongside Chicago’s funky post-rockers 5Style and Krautrock legends Can.

After all, peaches don’t only grow in Georgia…

Fire & A Water Sign

With their first two Daptone albums – Get an Understanding, and as featured singers on Como Now – The Como Mamas established themselves as three of the strongest voices in gospel music today.
 
In December of 2015, they cemented that reputation by taking their first trip from their home in Como, MS up to Harlem, NY to crush the Apollo Theater as part of the Daptone Super Soul Revue. Taking full advantage of their presence in town, the Daptone crew brought Ester Mae Wilbourn, Della Daniels and Angelia Taylor into the House of Soul the week after the show to join forces for the first time with the musicians and studio that has defined their label’s sound.

Jimmy Hill, Thomas Brenneck, Homer Steinweiss, and Bosco Mann, all stalwarts of the Daptone stable, came together as “The Glorifiers Band,” to put down a churning musical foundation for these amazing singers. The results are some of the heaviest tracks that Daptone has cut to date. If you don’t like raw, soulful gospel music, you’re really gonna hate this one. Move Upstairs is a REAL mother!

Move Upstairs

The Como Mamas - Move Upstairs

In celebration of their 20th anniversary, Basin Street Records has announced forthcoming the collaborative album between its two most recorded artists, Kermit Ruffins and Irvin Mayfield, A Beautiful World, out October 13. 

A Beautiful World is a collaboration between two friends, Kermit Ruffins, the big easy ambassador of good times and Rebirth Brass Band co-founder, who has appeared on HBO’s Treme, Bravo’s Top Chef, Late Night with Stephen Colbert, and the soundtrack for Disney’s Jungle Book in a duet with Bill Murray and backing Christopher Walken, and Irvin Mayfield, two-time Grammy-award winner, Billboard Music Award-winner, author, and producer. Combined, the two musicians share a staggering output of nearly fifty records, the majority released on Basin Street Records, an international independent music powerhouse that asked its two most recorded artists to collaborate on this centerpiece of the label’s 20th anniversary celebration. A Beautiful World is the ultimate party in record form. Producer Mayfield worked tirelessly to translate the eclectic soul of Kermit Ruffins to twenty-six tracks. On the process of making the album, Ruffins explains, “Good food and good music are my passions. I wanted to make a record people could eat.”

Mayfield realized that vision by bringing in 57 musicians arranged in four configurations built around a jazz structure: big band, traditional jazz marching band, chamber orchestra and an amended funk ensemble. Some Basin Street Records artists joined to accomplish this goal: The king of New Orleans brass, Rebirth Brass Band; the professorial clarinetist Dr. Michael White; the musical genius, Jason Marsalis; and world-renowned percussionist, Bill Summers. Other notable featured artists include: Haley Reinhart of American Idol, Cyril Neville (of the Meters and Neville Brothers), New Orleans bass legend George Porter Jr. (of The Meters and countless other bands), Tremé-crooner John Boutté, the inimitable and monstrous voice of Glen David Andrews, The King of Tremé Shannon Powell, a nine-piece string ensemble, and the silky-smooth spoken word bass of New Orleans-born actor Wendell Pierce (USA’s Suits, HBO’s The Wire, HBO’s Tremé).

A Beautiful World will be available on October 13, 2017 on all digital platforms and on CD and Vinyl (includes free digital download)form your local record store.  The album will be available on physical in new Orleans October 13, 2017. Additionally, in conjunction with the album, Basin Street Records will release a companion graphic novel by writer Amen Neville—more details to come soon. Finally, a documentary about Kermit Ruffins is also in the works, and is slated for a 2018 release.

A Beautiful World

Well, Alright

The James Hunter Six's cover of The Five Royales' "Baby Don't Do It"

Baby Don't Do It

The James Hunter Six - Baby Don't Do It

Off of Charles Bradley's upcoming album Black Velvet, out now.
LP/CD/Box Set/Digital: https://ffm.to/charlesbradley 

November 5, 2018 would have been Charles Bradley’s 70th birthday. In celebration of his extraordinary life, Daptone imprint Dunham Records has released his fourth and final album. Black Velvet features ten studio recordings never before included on any album.
 
Black Velvet is a celebration of Charles Bradley, lovingly assembled by his friends and family at Dunham/Daptone Records. Though chronologically the material spans Charles' entire career, this is no anthology, greatest hits or other shallow rehashing of the songs that already made him famous. Rather, this album is a profound exploration through the less-travelled corners of the soulful universe that Charles and his longtime producer, co-writer and friend Tommy "TNT" Brenneck created in the studio together over their decade-long partnership.

The Como Mamas - Move Upstairs

Daptone Records

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