Review: Menagerie are a nine-piece 'spiritual jazz' combo from Australia, headed up by The Bamboos main man Lance Ferguson and featuring acclaimed pianist Mark Fitzgibbon, a veteran of Gilles P's legendary Dingwalls sessions. This is the fourth album and their third for Freestyle, and suffice to say fans of their previous output won't be disappointed. Nor will anyone with a taste for 'proper' jazz from the Miles Davis/John Coltrane/Ornette Coleman school of thought: the title track, with its frenetic backbeat and spoken/poetic vocal, nudges towards broken beat territory, while there's a soul-jazz feel to 'Kingdom'... the other four tracks, though, could have been laid down at any time since about 1960. In the best possible way, you understand!
Review: Freestyle bring us an extended reissue of an album that first saw the light of the day back in 2007. Burnley's Jonathan Radford AKA Diesler was a busy lad in the mid-00s, dropping long-players on the Tru Thoughts label in 2005 and 2006 before switching to Freestyle for his third. 'The Rhythm Station' features many different vocalists and covers a range of styles, from straight-up soul to broken beat and hip-hop... and that's just in the first three tracks! Elsewhere on the album there's room too for lounge-y jazz ('Dopplegang Land') and shufflin' Latino vibes ('The I In Team'), while this Bonus Edition adds in a trio of remixes courtesy of Lack Of Afro, Deela and The Jazzinvaders.
Review: T.J. Johnson was the artist alias of Thomas Julien Bedeau, who also worked as a session musician under his own name. He had a handful of releases out in the early 80s and here Freestyle reissue his 1982 debut, which originally came out on UK label Switch. 'Pretty Lady' is underpinned by a fat funk bassline, driven along by an infectious, summer-y guitar groove and topped with alternating boogie-style male and female vocals, augmented by horn blasts, while the accompanying 'Come On Let's Do It (Let's Rock') is a piano- and brass-powered affair with more hefty funk bass, and has something of a Patrice Rushen-esque feel.
Review: A must for the boogie lovers here! UK band Chequers formed in Aylesbury in 1973, initially as a reggae band. As the years progressed, they moved first into funk and soul, and then back towards their ska roots during the late 70s Mod revival. Their final release 'Hard Times', however, found them exploring the then-nascent sounds of boogie and electro - to great effect, but sadly little commercial success. Now, with copies of the original 1983 seven-inch selling online for around ?1,000, veteran funk and breaks label Freestyle helpfully bring the world this far more affordable reissue...
Review: Freestyle Records has got a brilliant and rather rare bit of boogie here in the form of Eddie Capone's 'I Wont Give You Up.' This is the first officially licensed reissue of this 1985 gem by the reggae, funk and soul mainstay of that decade. He played with various noted outfits such as Chairmen of the Board, Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come and Edwin Starr and was also in the short-lived band Casablanca. He founded the Treatment band in the early 1980s and played with a rotating cast of musicians. The tunes included on this single are some of them with Diane Jones providing vocals, which is the standout gem.
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