www,twitter.com/knoxbrown
www.facebook.com/knoxbrownmusic

Harry's Code

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

Eddie Bo - Check Your Bucket

How Emmanuel came to Earth

Release Date: 04/29/2016

Digital Buy Links: radi.al/GoodbyeWorldDigital
Amazon: amzn.to/25NvU4z

"I got a little more work for you to do."

That's what the late Reverend Gean West sings—or rather testifies—on the opening track of Goodbye World, the new and deeply emotional album from the triumphantly unlikely gospel funk band the Relatives. The group started working on the record in the summer of 2014, but Gean was able to lay down his signature gravelly vocals on only two songs before he became ill and fell into a coma. He remained unconscious for twelve days, and it was during that time he heard God's voice telling him to get back to work. "Don't let me down, son," the voice commanded.

Buy on Bandcamp

The Relatives - Goodbye World

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

Perception Productions, a New York based label that ran from the late 60s through until 1974, was a strangely eclectic affair. Its roster stretched from a radical Afro-American poet through to the pop band King Harvest whose hit ‘Dancing In The Moonlight’ became a massive hit for the UK band Toploader a couple of decades later. The inbetween points covered jazz, funk, vocal harmony soul and proto-disco. In fact distilled down into this compilation the label provides us a view of Manhattan’s black music scene of the period, from the established greats to the fresh young things who would make their mark in the coming years. The two men who ran the label, President Terry Phillips and Boo Frazier burned brightly for that half a decade before almost entirely disappearing from the music scene.

Matrix - Dizzie Gillespie

Midnight Movement / The Rain Song

The Olympians - Midnight Movement

Little One

Little One (Live in Auckland, 2001)

"Total Explosion" re-issued on vinyl.  In stores March 05 on Hi Records/Fat Possum Records.

Buy on iTunes

Syl Johnson "I Only Have Love"

Crossover

Emma Donovan & The Putbacks - Yarian Mitji

Fat Freddy's Drop’s pirate soul train, resolutely independent, worldwide.

Formed in 1999 in Wellington, New Zealand our sound draws inspiration from almost every part of the black music lexicon. Soul drenched vocals and jazz harmonies collide with tape delays and echo chambers, underpinned by a rhythm section as comfortable laying down a throbbing, techy soundscape as they are a swampy blues stomp.
