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Abbey Lincoln & Hank Jones – When There Is Love (1993)

Abbey Lincoln – Hank Jones
When There Is Love
1993 Gitanes Jazz Productions / Verve Records – 314 519 697-2
Genre:Jazz || Style:Bop, Post Bop

I have been wanting to do some posts about the great Abbey Lincoln ever since I started this blog, and yet for some reason it’s never happened.  Let this be the year, then.  I also never would have imagined that I would choose this atypical album as her first entry here.  But there is something very warm, charming, and relaxing about this collaboration with Hank Jones that seems to fit the mixture of exhaustion, laziness, and regeneration of energy to face a new and unknown world that’s marked these first few days of 2019 for me.  We can get into Abbey’s more intense material later, but right now this will do just fine.Abbey Lincoln & Hank Jones – When There Is Love (1993)

Help Yourself – Help Yourself (1971) (2017 Music On Vinyl)

Help Yourself – Help Yourself
Vinyl rip in 24 bit 196 khz | Art at 600 and 300 dpi |
24-bit 192 khz 1.37 GB |24-bit 96 khz – 714 MB |16-bit 44.1 khz – 271 MB
Original Release 1971 Liberty | 2017 Music On Vinyl MOVLP 2044 |   Psychedelic Rock / Folk-rock |

Dr. Vibes’ 12 Days of Christmas – Day 8 – As a teenager in the US, I discovered Help Yourself in a second-hand record shop in the late 1980s, and thought that “Strange Affair” was their first album for the next twenty years. At the time Al Gore hadn’t invented the internet yet, and if you could find any mention of the band in  music encylopedia / anthology-type books, it was as a footnote to the more famous Man band from Wales, which Help Yourself frontman Malcolm Morley joined for a while. But they had their own sound, and their own cult following in the UK.  This debut album is inferior to the ones that followed it, but rare as hen’s teeth as an original pressing, so I was pretty excited when I saw that reissue label Music On Vinyl had chosen to release it.Help Yourself – Help Yourself (1971) (2017 Music On Vinyl)

Marvin Gaye – Midnight Love (1982)

Marvin Gaye – Midnight Love
1982 Columbia FC 38197
Vinyl rip in 24 bit 192 khz | Art at  300 dpi
24-bit 192 khz – 1.68 GB | 24 bit 96 khz – 830 MB | 290 MB 16-bit 44.1 khz
Soul – Funk – Disco – Electro

Dr. Vibes’ 12 Days of Christmas – Day 6 – Marvin’s first record for Columbia after getting out of his Motown contract. Sadly it was his last completed work although Harvey Fuqua and Gordon Banks would go on to fulfill his contract by ‘cooking’ some unissued recordings for the ‘Dream of a Lifetime’ album. My vinyl copy is mint, so all stray clicks or pops were removed by hand. It’s so clean you can clearly make out the “It’s not good to masturbate..” in the fade-out of “Sexual Healing.” Modern medicine has proven him wrong about that, by the way..

Marvin Gaye – Midnight Love (1982)

João Donato & Deodato – DonatoDeodato (1973)

João Donato & Deodato – DonatoDeodato
1973 Muse Records MR 5017
Vinyl rip in 24 bit 192 khz | Art at  300 dpi
24-bit 192 khz – 1.22 GB | 24 bit 96 khz – 645 MB | 220 MB 16-bit 44.1 khz
Jazz-Funk – Latin – Brazilian

 

Dr. Vibes’ 12 Days of Christmas – Day 5:  Quite a lineup on this short gem of a record. I mean, if I could have added Chuck Rainey, Idris Muhammad, and Phil Upchurch to it, it would have been PERFECT but heck, I’ll take this…  This is a nice, short, mildly psychedelic jazz-funk gem, if not quite the explosive results you might expect for a meeting of the minds like Donato & Deodato.  Ray Barretto and Airto are kept on kind of a short leash, for example.  Considering the total album time clocks in at around 30 minutes, one wonders why they couldn’t have stretched out a little more on a few of these tunes.  The band surely could have handled it.

João Donato & Deodato – DonatoDeodato (1973)

Universal Togetherness Band – Universal Togetherness Band (2015)


Universal Togetherness Band – Universal Togetherness Band
Vinyl rip in 24 bit 192 khz | Art at  300 dpi
24-bit 192 khz – 1.57 GB | 24 bit 96 khz – 838 MB | 281 MB 16-bit 44.1 khz
Numero Groupo NUM57 | Released 2015 | Funk – Soul – Jazz-Funk

Dr. Vibes’ Twelve Days of Christmas – Day 4:  Numero Group are the reigning kings of releasing “lost” music. I have joked in the past, among select company of course, that on occasion some of that music probably could have remained lost. But it is clearly a labor of love for them, and the fine attention to detail in the research, liner notes, rare photos, and decent audio restoration and mastering more than compensates for the occasional lackluster release (and, of course, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure etc.) But whereas a great deal of Numero’s lost music is usually comprised  7″ singles by singers or groups who may have had a local or regional fan base, released by indie labels in numbers small enough to be destined for 21st-century audio archeologists, The Universal Togetherness Band is another story – an entire album of material, recorded in pristine quality as a student project through the audio engineering program at Columbia College in Chicago (a small arts college with a strong practical, ‘hands-on’ component, for kids who can’t afford the elite Art Institute down the street..).  The end result was top-notch jazz-funk-disco-soul that would have fit nicely with any of the groups on the De-Lite Records roster or a similar outfit.  Universal Togetherness Band – Universal Togetherness Band (2015)