MUSIC

Late night '60s R&B caught on tape at Jim Kirchstein's jack-of-all genres Cuca studio. Released on minuscule pressings into the Wisconsin wilderness, these 26 sasquatch-rare tracks uncover the soulful paths between the Chicago, Milwaukee, Rockford, and Rockford scenes. Featuring Harvey Scales, Step By Step, Betty Moorer, Seven Sounds, Twiliters, Birdlegs & Pauline, Esquires, Artie & The Pharaohs, and Fantastic Six, this 2xLP tells an alternate history of soul music that could only happen in the Hinterlands on Highway 12.

Singer, actress and cultural conduit for peace, Liraz releases a new collection of four songs, primed with an intensity and a raw musical revolt, energising the Middle Eastern musical landscape, sung in Farsi and driven by her deep desire for positive energy and much needed global harmony and light. Born in Israel with Iranian roots, Liraz’s world balances on and revolves around multiple cultural circles. An actor and singer Liraz released her third and latest album Roya on Glitterbeat Records in 2022, an exhilarating blend of retro-Persian sonics, recorded in secrecy in Istanbul with her band from Tel Aviv and risk-defying Iranian musicians fromTehran. A year prior, her album Zan gave rise to the Songlines award for Best Artist leading to multiple international tours and billing on festivals like Roskilde, Womad & Rio Loco in Toulouse. Her new EP, co-written and recorded with Uri Brauner Kinrot (Ouzo Bazooka and Boom Pam) is all sung in Farsi. Lead single Haarf which translates to ‘talk’ is part disco, part rock ‘n roll with its synth lines all enriched with a pan-middle eastern touch drawing influence from Liraz’s musical worlds but just as important to the outcome was Liraz’s band. She explains, “I like to reveal the different layers of each person in my band. We’re all from different backgrounds and cultures and we’ve grown up in a complex country (Israel). We began writing ‘Haarf’ together, in a colourful time, which quickly changed and got a lot darker”. Outspoken about her desire for peace in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the song Haarf, alludes to the danger of ‘talk’, and nonsense narratives on social media or other medias that has dominated and driven the war. Indeed, it is this rise, globally, of online and real world and judgemental rhetoric that divides us and creates divisions, that the song refers to. The prose from the remaining tracks take a more reflective and relationship approach yet musically continues where Haarf left off, with garage rhythms, snappy snare drums, cosmic synths and of course Liraz’s exquisite vocals, all sung in Farsi. An artist, actor and dedicated Mom, the future holds many uncertainties, personally and globally but with poetry books of Rumi and Hafez under her arms, and with a crack band of her favourite musicians to hand, Liraz will continue with her defiant, women-centric and peace promoting call outs. Quite simply, “Now is the time to change the energy frequency”.

"Every day, the skies of New York City fill up with unseen clouds of radio signals spreading over immigrant neighborhoods. These culturally charged clouds of radio energy burst with a flow of content that continually shifts and transforms, following the lifecycle and rhythm of the streets. In Brooklyn, the signals alight on Flatbush Avenue, blasting from radios in dollar vans, bakeries, churches and on street corners and kitchen tables. By accessing an analog technology that (outside of the radio itself) is essentially free for the listener, economically marginalized communities avoid the subscription and data fees built in to the conveniences of the digital life. Listeners, often the elders of the community, extend metal antennas and position the radios just so, trying to catch the elusive vibrations of crucial music, news and information that are seldom felt in New York City’s legal and mostly corporate owned media soundscape. In Flatbush, stations broadcast primarily to Haitians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Grenadians and Orthodox Jews. The Haitian stations are particularly active in East Flatbush with just under a dozen broadcasting daily in Kreyol to the large Haitian community. “I came across it at a very young age. There was this really popular station back in the late 80s, Radio Guinee, and it was based in Brooklyn.” says Joan Martinez, a young Haitian-American born in the US and a former program host on some of the unlicensed Kreyol language stations. “Nobody knows where it was, there are suspicions. But all I know is from Friday night all the way to Sunday night, you would just hear a series of these stations every weekend and it would be the place where you could listen to the latest in Haitian pop music, rap music. It was also the news, my parents and their friends would all sit around the radio and they would just be politicking in the living room getting really loud, you know, dancing, singing along that sort of thing. It was just like a meeting ground and the radio was guiding it.” This phase of New York City pirate radio rose from the ashes of a previous scene dating to the late sixties: a dozen or so stations sporadically run mostly by white teenagers: a mix of hippies, radicals and electronically inclined misfits. By 1987, this loose collective of friends and rivals devolved into infighting after a short-lived attempt to broadcast from international waters off Jones Beach. This created room for new pirate radio voices from diverse communities that were increasingly being pushed off the legal airwaves by high costs, format consolidation, and “the low power desert”, an FCC-led phaseout of small community broadcasters. The local pirates joined a growing national wave of progressive pirate radio activity taking advantage of a new generation of cheap FM transmitters imported from China or home-brewed in makeshift workshops by free radio activists. By the early 90’s, immigrant community-focused broadcasters In New York City flipped the unspoken rules of the earlier pirates who broadcast mainly late at night on a few pre-determined “safe” frequencies, instead filling the FM dial from bottom to top, day and night. In 2000, under pressure from a nationwide increase in pirate radio activity, the FCC introduced a new license class: Low Power FM (LPFM) but opposition from National Public Radio and the National Association of Broadcasters shut down the issuing of new licenses. That severely limited LPFM’s availability in major urban markets due to rules requiring LPFM’s to be “three click aways” from existing stations. Local pirates felt they had no alternative but to continue broadcasting and some stations in Flatbush have been on the air for decades. Despite the passage of the Local Community Radio Act in 2011, opening a new licensing window with relaxed spacing requirements, few new frequencies were available in NYC due to an already crowded dial. The continued pirate presence is enabled by a sort of safety in numbers, an FCC enforcement team hampered by a low budget and a bureaucratic process of enforcement. Interference aside, FCC commissioners and staff publicly fume at the pirates for a range of potential public safety violations, some more theoretical than others and claim they are somehow harming their own communities, and wonder finally, why don’t they just stream on the internet. By viewing radio piracy purely from a legal perspective, critics miss the cultural and historic forces driving the Haitian pirates. During the Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986) Haitians had access to only two stations broadcasting in Kreyol, rather than French, the language of the elite. One was Radio Lumiere, a religious station and the other Radio Haiti-Inter, a fiercely independent voice whose director Jean Dominque was assassinated in 1999. “The peasant in Haiti, while he’s working on his farm you know he had a transistor.” Says Dr. Jean Eddy St. Paul, Director of the Haitian Studies Institute at the City University of New York. ‘And many peasants, they don’t have money to buy tobacco to smoke, but they will have money to buy the battery to put in the transistor. The first generation of migration, in the US, was during the 1960s and for many of those people the culture of transistor was part of their everyday life, so they’re still maintaining the culture of transistor. For them, having a radio station is very important.’ In July 2019, on a side street in East Flatbush, I met a man calling himself “Joseph” aka “Haitian” (“because I’m a pure Haitian!”), part of a group that keeps Radio Comedy FM on the air. “There’s no owners and committee. It’s a bunch of young guys”. Joseph says, “We have to do something positive for our community. Right now the Marines are in Haiti and we don’t know what’s next! CNN don’t show you this! BBC don’t show you this! So what we do, we have people in Haiti that call us and tell us what’s going on and will send us pictures. This is how we get our information. And bring it to the people…. I have family over there, my mother’s still there. So I have to know what’s going on. At this point in the digital age, it’s an open question how long these analog pirate stations will remain relevant, as their audiences age, neighborhoods gentrify and younger listeners gravitate to social media platforms. The answer seems to lie with their elderly and impoverished listeners. “They don’t have enough money to buy the newspapers understand?.” Joseph says.” For him that makes it worth it to keep Radio Comedy on the air despite a crackdown from the FCC backed by the PIRATE Act signed into law in 2020 that increases fines to $100,000 a day up to $2 million. But the legislation lacks funding to enforce the new regulations. With a federal statute still in place reducing fines down to the ability to pay, it’s unclear whether the PIRATE Act will be anything more than another in an escalating series of scare tactics. Though the FCC has recently suggested the possibility of a new round of LPFM licenses in the future, the already crowded nature of NYC’s FM band makes it unlikely that new frequencies will be made available to the current pirate stations. In addition the FCC doesn’t want to be seen as rewarding illegal activity by granting a license to former pirate broadcasters, which was a prohibition in LPFM’s earlier licensing periods. And for the moment, Joseph, who’s been running unlicensed stations since 1991 (‘it’s an addiction’) is equally unlikely to cede the airwaves. He sees Radio Comedy as not just a radio station, but a community lifeline. “You know many children we save? There was a bunch of guys…Jamaican, Trinidadian, Haitian trying to form a gang. We talked to them, bring them to the station. Most of them have a diploma now. Without the radio, most of them probably get locked up or dead.” Even with the PIRATE act on the books, the number of stations on the air in Brooklyn has remained steady with an average of about 25 per day and the advent of the Coronavirus pandemic has only sharpened their mission. In March 2020 as the spread of Covid-19 lead to NYC’s lockdown, the unlicensed Haitian broadcasters and the other West Indian stations in Brooklyn took a step closer to their listeners, increasing their air time and enhancing their formats to deliver information about the virus both in New York and in their countries of origin amid the heavy toll it took on the community."

The third in a new series from Jazzman featuring selections from Greasy Mike, the notoriously shady Super Spiv from the dark underworld of super rare records! After many years in hiding, we've finally persuaded Greasy Mike to open up his vinyl dungeon, and we were first to raid it! We have left no box untouched, no crate unrummaged, no pile unpilfered! Just the greasiest and grimiest, the most shocking and sordid 45s have made it onto our black wax long player vinyl editions. Watch out for more!!! In this adventure Greasy Mike finds himself lost in the wilderness; hot, thirsty and alone under the unforgiving desert sun. He's been days without food and water; the heat of the day stifling almost beyond endurance, the cold of night a trial of torment. Survival seems impossible - or does it? Staggering across the sandy plains, the eerie yet unmistakable sound of a snake charmer's reed curiously winds its way into his ears. Instinctively he turns his head towards the sound - and lo! An oasis just ahead! Music, laughter - and belly dancers!!!

Greasy Mike is back with LP number four! Another rambunctious array of wigged out mayhem! Don't worry, there aren't any silly jokes on this record. It's all music with a wiggle and a giggle. In fact, it's 14 frantic flippers fraught with frivolous fun-filled frolics. All good clean fun. Featuring: Pat & the Wildcats, Bobby Bunny & the Jackrabbits, Jim Doval & the Gauchos, Johnny Beeman, Diablito, Adolphus Bell & the Up Starts, The Apollos, The Royal Jokers, Lue Renney, The Zanies, Hank Mankin, Sid Ramin, Jim Backus and Friend, and The Fabulous Continentals.

When Greasy Mike returned from his travels in East Asia he brought back sixteen slices of sizzling spices in a sleazy Szechuan sauce... he may be greasy but he's certainly not greedy - all are shared with you here! No artificial flavourings required, this is raunchy rott n' roll with a rambunctious mix of sweet, sour n' saucy - tasty treats from our friends in the Orient!

Kentish town siblings Kitty, Daisy and Lewis have rightfully earned themselves a reputation for being a group of highly talented and original masters of transcendent rock n’ roll. They have cast their distinct musical spell over listeners and critics alike with a sound that whilst deeply rooted in the past hurtles towards an interminable and effervescent future.

Ten years after our initial survey of Afro-Latin accented rhythm & blues from the mid-century, Jazzman proudly presents a fourth installment, packed with as many musical surprises as the first. With music plucked from an era spanning the late 1940s into the early 60s, Jukebox Mambo IV highlights yet again the unparalleled musical creativity of the post war era, and shows how the infusion of afro-latin rhythms was key to these revolutions. Lovingly and painstakingly researched and curated, the album boasts 23 tracks, many previously uncompiled, touching on jazz, blues, doo wop, calypso, rock & roll, gospel and more. Featuring individual track notes for every song along with some never seen before photographs of the artists, Jukebox Mambo Vol IV maintains the same high production values of each previous volume, and indeed the wider Jazzman catalogue.

Ike & Tina Turner's Kings Of Rhythm, a rhythm & blues/rock'n'roll group formed in Clarksdale, Mississippi in the late 1940s, released their 1961 album "Dance" as an vinyl reissue from . It is a piece full of rock R&B magic, and includes the original hit version of "It's Gonna Work Out Fine".