VA - Enjoy The Experience: Homemade Records 1958-1992

Running the gamut from oddball entertainers attempting to capture/recreate their live act for posterity to home-recording outsiders hoping to create an LP-sized business card of sorts, this 2CD set documents the US private-press phenomenon in all its strange, colourful, varied and unvarnished wonder!

"[W]hile now one can upload content to platforms where it can be found with little effort by millions for free, from the late 1950s to the early '90s, aspiring stars paid out of their own pockets to press their music on vinyl. And then, without distribution, radio play, buzz or press coverage, their music languished in basements or crawlspaces, accruing dust and mold. It is the spirit of the latter that inspired the art book Enjoy the Experience: Homemade Records 1958-1992, released this month by Sinecure Books in conjunction with New York's Boo-Hooray art gallery, with a companion 2-CD set of some of the choicest bits." - NPR

"Take note: this is not a novelty freak show. Contained in this anthology are examples of some of the most highly regarded rock, soul, jazz, funk and singer/songwriter albums from the '60s through to the early '80s. From the awkward-yet-talented to the genius-yet-bizarre, one thing unites all musicians presented here: they sincerely hoped to become stars, they committed themselves to record, and they left themselves vulnerable to an industry not understanding of nuance, not appreciative of character." - Now-Again

VA - Listen, Whitey! The Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975

Soundtracking the short-lived yet historically-important Black Power movement, Listen, Whitey! is a superb accompaniment to the recently-published book of the same name. An inspiring and moving testimony to a time when demands for social change rocked America.

"Pop's fading power to shock is thrown into stark relief by this compilation, conceived as the soundtrack to a new book of the same title that charts the black power struggles of the late '60s and early '70s...The premise of Pat Thomas's handsome book is that this was an era in which revolutionaries such as Bobby Seale and Angela Davis were treated as pop cultural icons, while musicians became revolutionaries." - The Guardian

"Compiler Pat Thomas breaks with convention, avoiding a predictably narrow focus of soul and funk cuts and opting instead for a more expansive purview that encompasses spoken word, folk, rock, and other genres in the mix...Thomas is careful to distinguish his selections from contemporaneous Blaxploitation staples, as detailed annotations on each track go deep into explaining historical and cultural context." - Dusted

SARAH WEBSTER FABIO - Boss Soul / Jujus: Alchemy Of The Blues, NIKKI GIOVANNI - The Reason I Like Chocolate, VA - Poets Read Their Contemporary Poetry

 This Smithsonian Folkways Archival series reissues (mostly black) American spoken word artists in pre- and proto-hip hop forms. These readings show the roots of hip hop in Black Nationalist and Afrocentric 1970s poetry, before Jamaican ex-pats in New York added the dub DJ element not to soon afterwards. With a strong recent return to form for MC forefather Gil Scott-Heron, this is as good a time as any to check out some other key influences on rap music.

Both Nikki Giovanni and Sarah Webster Fabio appeared on last year’s Fly Girls! B-Boys Beware: Revenge of the Super Female Rappers set on Soul Jazz, which chronicled the rise and fall of women’s place in hip-hop. Boss Soul: 12 Poems By Sarah Webster Fabio Set To Drum Talk, Rhythms & Images (1972), summing up the key ingredients of hip hop in its title alone, is, along with Fabio’s Jujus: Alchemy Of The Blues (1976), a model prototype of righteous rap.

Nikki Giovanni’s The Reason I Like Chocolate (1976) features the funky peacock (peahen?) strut “Ego Tripping”, one of the revelations of Fly Girls!, while the rest is a set of short unaccompanied pieces that are begging to be sampled. Any takers?

Poets Read Their Contemporary Poetry is a live recording sponsored by the multi-ethnic Before Columbus Foundation. The performances are charged with a political/didactic edge, climaxing in a jaw-dropping reading by Amiri Baraka (see also our writeup of his '60s writings on jazz, Black Music, here) of his unflinching diatribe “Dope”, in which he conflates drug addiction (in this case, heroin) and the religious belief (and subservience) of Black America through the wild ravings and twisted rationality of a madman. You really must hear it.

PATTI SMITH & KEVIN SHIELDS - The Coral Sea

One to follow his muse in a supporting role no matter how much his popping up in the wings may frustrate those longing for him to retake the spotlight, it's no surprise to hear Kevin Shields' glide guitar relegated here to volume-pedal swells and accents. This is Patti Smith's show, after all, an hour-long spoken-word prose poem written to honour the late-'80s passing of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, evocative fantasies (that "sea of possibilities" so famously sungspoken on Horses) spilling out from death's sad, final truth, recorded on stage at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall in 2005, then 2006.