MUSIC

Grammy Award-winning producer Leon Michels of El Michels Affair's new album features Shintaro Sakamoto on lyrics and vocals for one track! The track, “Indifference,” will be released domestically on 7-inch vinyl by zelone records!

Leon Michels' main project, El Michels Affair's new album, “24 HR SPORTS,” will be released on September 5 by US label Big Crown Records.

Shingo Sakamoto has contributed lyrics and vocals to one track on the new album, and the 7-inch vinyl (Japan-exclusive edition) of the track “Indifference” will be released on July 30 (Wed) via zelone records. The B-side features “Clean The Line,” a track from the album that showcases the Suginami Children's Choir from Tokyo. The zelone 7-inch will feature a fold-out artwork design by Shitaro Sakamoto.

For our 100th Eccentric Soul 45, Numero returns to our Ohio roots with three replica 45s from the Capsoul universe. Marion Black's timeless two-sider "Who Knows" b/w "Go On Fool" made a few blips upon its 1970 release, but has taken on a life of its own soundtracking prestige TV and car commercials around the globe and finally going gold after 65 years. We discovered Ron Harrington's "Because You're Mine" demo amongst the Capsoul tapes, a demo cut for founder Bill Moss that never escaped greater Columbus. The mid-tempo harmony joint "It Happened To Me Again" adorns the flip, with a lo-fi funk backbeat tossed in for good measure. Capsoul's crown jewel group harmony quartet Johnson, Hawkins, Tatum & Durr cut just two records in their short time together, but the quartet's "You Can't Blame Me" has endured as a classic example of the raw and unhinged soul sound that Numero is known for. Eccentric Soul from the heart of it all.

"My career has been a lesson in patience," says Annahstasia, having cultivated her musical language between blazes of intimacy and independence across different lives, locations, and iterations, loves lost and gained, expectations evaded and recreated. The rising troubadour's proximity to love — for and from others, in society at large, and deeply within herself — guides the spirit of her soulful, poetic folk songcraft. Love is the elemental constant, alongside her distinctly resonant voice, shading the singer-songwriter's music since her earliest self-taught recordings, back when a 17-year-old Annahstasia Enuke was discovered and propelled into the pressures of an industry that nearly stifled her greatest strengths. Artistic resilience, gratitude, and dedication to process have yielded Tether, Annahstasia's full-length debut on art-forward indie label drink sum wtr, a collection of beaming torch songs, orchestral hymns, and astral anthems that feel lived-in, drawn from the human experience and the spectrum of love.

Annahstasia assembled the pieces of Tether slowly and with deep intention; she's carried these songs with her on the road, sang them for friends and strangers, and evolved them over time alongside her personal revelations. "The song is written, and then I have to live with it and see if I really believe what I'm saying," she explains. She brought material to sessions at the storied Valentine Studios in Los Angeles, joined by producers Jason Lader (ANOHNI and the Johnsons, Frank Ocean, Lana Del Rey), Andrew Lappin (Cassandra Jenkins, L'Rain, Luna Li), Aaron Liao (Liv.e, Moses Sumney, Raveena) and a range of accomplished musicians, including featured guests aja monet and Obongjayar. The recording became instinctual, done only in live takes to capture the feeling of the room, the community of the music. The sequencing was just as essential; she arrived at a flow with shifting energies and poignant arcs. The instrumentation swells, at times understated and others supremely lush, and through each arrangement, Annahstasia's voice rings true, open-hearted, and free. "I've come into the power of my voice as a medium," she says. "As a tool of expression, I am able to shape the emotional space around me."

Lyrically, Annahstasia embraces the nuance of poetry, inviting listeners to engage in words laced with meaning, whether ruminations on romance or social constructs. She sees the opener "Be Kind" more as a poem than a song, "a reflection upon the beauty of the mundane and the grandeur of everyday life…a reminder to myself and others to be kind to each other." The track's minimalist atmosphere picks up where 2024's Surface Tension EP left off, with her vocals left bare and up-front, exploring the capacity of her gift with newfound latitude as strums, strings, and keys enter the frame.

The palette expands for "Villian," welcoming drums, brass, and horns into a sweeping nod to healing. "We are all made of both shadow and light. From some angle, we have all been the villain of the story," she adds, suggesting that often, the only way to move on is through understanding that "we are all trying our best, negotiating survival." At its triumphant peak, above gospel-like shouts, she delivers the reprise with a smile: "Take it / Take it back / This dull knife of memory / I still hear your voice inside my head / Says that I'm the villain of the story."

Album centerpiece "Slow" emerges from a chance connection with London-based Nigerian musician Steven Umoh, aka Obongjayar. After exchanging DMs, Obongjayar came to one of her shows, and the two artists talked for hours afterward; "he was like a lost brother," she says. Later, they wrote and demoed the track in the living room of her Airbnb in London, where they huddled around a single ribbon microphone. "I'm just playing the guitar, and our eyes are locked; it was very sensual and intense." Emboldened by one another, their voices orbit and coalesce, trading verses on the signals the universe sends us ("I heard it on the wind / To go slow"), harmonizing the last stanzas ("What's the worst that can happen / If we just let it happen"). Without proper album plans at the time, the song sat for a while; then, in another cosmic chance, Obongjayar happened to be in town during the Tether sessions. Annahstasia reflects, "It was a beautiful experience to have us all in the room. The artistry, the moment, a real acceptance of African art where these two Nigerian musicians are coming together and making something very tender and pretty outside genre expectations."

Later, Annahstasia finds a kindred spirit in aja monet, the NY-based surrealist blues poet and her new labelmate, who lends stunning prose and voice to "All is. Will Be. As it Was." Given only the prompt of "open air," monet wrote the lines on the ride to the studio. Together with Annahstasia on guitar and Ashley Fulton on piano, they captured the piece in its purest form as if bottling a breeze.

Annahstasia described the EP prelude to this culminating set as a "romantic war," and the artist truly thrives amidst and after drama. She taps into a punk sensibility for "Silk and Velvet" — "I'd say it's punk in the sense that it is really dry, really stark and selectively dissonant." A clashing of cello and piano mirror pointed lyrics about "living with the hypocrisy of having revolutionary ideologies but consumerist tendencies." The tension comes full circle on "Believer," a song she's been trying to get right for years, now finally recorded in the right place with the right people. Nearly every instrument on Tether returns in full force; towering percussion, jagged guitar lines, and howling singers encircle Annahstasia at the mic as she enters a fantasy of rock stardom. "I love how in making a record, you get to make a film and pick which direction to take it. Now I have this version that I blast in my headphones, play air guitar, and pretend I'm performing it for 100,000 people." The sheer power of Tether is the result of patience, and it's not hard to picture such a dream realized in good time. 

 

"My career has been a lesson in patience," says Annahstasia, having cultivated her musical language between blazes of intimacy and independence across different lives, locations, and iterations, loves lost and gained, expectations evaded and recreated. The rising troubadour's proximity to love — for and from others, in society at large, and deeply within herself — guides the spirit of her soulful, poetic folk songcraft. Love is the elemental constant, alongside her distinctly resonant voice, shading the singer-songwriter's music since her earliest self-taught recordings, back when a 17-year-old Annahstasia Enuke was discovered and propelled into the pressures of an industry that nearly stifled her greatest strengths. Artistic resilience, gratitude, and dedication to process have yielded Tether, Annahstasia's full-length debut on art-forward indie label drink sum wtr, a collection of beaming torch songs, orchestral hymns, and astral anthems that feel lived-in, drawn from the human experience and the spectrum of love.

Annahstasia assembled the pieces of Tether slowly and with deep intention; she's carried these songs with her on the road, sang them for friends and strangers, and evolved them over time alongside her personal revelations. "The song is written, and then I have to live with it and see if I really believe what I'm saying," she explains. She brought material to sessions at the storied Valentine Studios in Los Angeles, joined by producers Jason Lader (ANOHNI and the Johnsons, Frank Ocean, Lana Del Rey), Andrew Lappin (Cassandra Jenkins, L'Rain, Luna Li), Aaron Liao (Liv.e, Moses Sumney, Raveena) and a range of accomplished musicians, including featured guests aja monet and Obongjayar. The recording became instinctual, done only in live takes to capture the feeling of the room, the community of the music. The sequencing was just as essential; she arrived at a flow with shifting energies and poignant arcs. The instrumentation swells, at times understated and others supremely lush, and through each arrangement, Annahstasia's voice rings true, open-hearted, and free. "I've come into the power of my voice as a medium," she says. "As a tool of expression, I am able to shape the emotional space around me."

Lyrically, Annahstasia embraces the nuance of poetry, inviting listeners to engage in words laced with meaning, whether ruminations on romance or social constructs. She sees the opener "Be Kind" more as a poem than a song, "a reflection upon the beauty of the mundane and the grandeur of everyday life…a reminder to myself and others to be kind to each other." The track's minimalist atmosphere picks up where 2024's Surface Tension EP left off, with her vocals left bare and up-front, exploring the capacity of her gift with newfound latitude as strums, strings, and keys enter the frame.

The palette expands for "Villian," welcoming drums, brass, and horns into a sweeping nod to healing. "We are all made of both shadow and light. From some angle, we have all been the villain of the story," she adds, suggesting that often, the only way to move on is through understanding that "we are all trying our best, negotiating survival." At its triumphant peak, above gospel-like shouts, she delivers the reprise with a smile: "Take it / Take it back / This dull knife of memory / I still hear your voice inside my head / Says that I'm the villain of the story."

Album centerpiece "Slow" emerges from a chance connection with London-based Nigerian musician Steven Umoh, aka Obongjayar. After exchanging DMs, Obongjayar came to one of her shows, and the two artists talked for hours afterward; "he was like a lost brother," she says. Later, they wrote and demoed the track in the living room of her Airbnb in London, where they huddled around a single ribbon microphone. "I'm just playing the guitar, and our eyes are locked; it was very sensual and intense." Emboldened by one another, their voices orbit and coalesce, trading verses on the signals the universe sends us ("I heard it on the wind / To go slow"), harmonizing the last stanzas ("What's the worst that can happen / If we just let it happen"). Without proper album plans at the time, the song sat for a while; then, in another cosmic chance, Obongjayar happened to be in town during the Tether sessions. Annahstasia reflects, "It was a beautiful experience to have us all in the room. The artistry, the moment, a real acceptance of African art where these two Nigerian musicians are coming together and making something very tender and pretty outside genre expectations."

Later, Annahstasia finds a kindred spirit in aja monet, the NY-based surrealist blues poet and her new labelmate, who lends stunning prose and voice to "All is. Will Be. As it Was." Given only the prompt of "open air," monet wrote the lines on the ride to the studio. Together with Annahstasia on guitar and Ashley Fulton on piano, they captured the piece in its purest form as if bottling a breeze.

Annahstasia described the EP prelude to this culminating set as a "romantic war," and the artist truly thrives amidst and after drama. She taps into a punk sensibility for "Silk and Velvet" — "I'd say it's punk in the sense that it is really dry, really stark and selectively dissonant." A clashing of cello and piano mirror pointed lyrics about "living with the hypocrisy of having revolutionary ideologies but consumerist tendencies." The tension comes full circle on "Believer," a song she's been trying to get right for years, now finally recorded in the right place with the right people. Nearly every instrument on Tether returns in full force; towering percussion, jagged guitar lines, and howling singers encircle Annahstasia at the mic as she enters a fantasy of rock stardom. "I love how in making a record, you get to make a film and pick which direction to take it. Now I have this version that I blast in my headphones, play air guitar, and pretend I'm performing it for 100,000 people." The sheer power of Tether is the result of patience, and it's not hard to picture such a dream realized in good time. 

 

Yowzers is a new album by Chicago composer, improvisor, instrumentalist and musical folklorist Ben LaMar Gay. The twelve track collection is a leap forward in the lexicon of Gay’s recorded output, and a veritable masterwork of ancient inner-body rhythms and intuitive melodic storytelling.

It’s worth mentioning that a leap forward for Gay is no small feat. The musical ground he has covered in the last decade, both as a bandleader and collaborator, is immense. His de facto debut album—the 2018 compilation Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun—properly introduced the world to Gay by placing fifteen stylistically diverse tracks from seven then-unreleased albums next to one another, letting the populace outside of Cook County in on an unintentionally best-kept-secret that Chicagoans had already been marveling at for quite some time. That secret has become even more open in the years since, with the full unveiling of those seven previously-unreleased albums, the release of his critically-acclaimed 2021 song cycle Open Arms To Open Us, and the explosive free sonics of 2022’s Certain Reveries.

In addition to being featured on a staggering number of International Anthem releases (including albums by Makaya McCraven, jaimie branch, Damon Locks, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly), Gay is one of the most prolific collaborators in creative music today. He makes active contributions to Mike Reed’s Separatist Party, Joshua Abrams’s Natural Information Society, Theaster Gates’s Black Monks, and many more. He is also a long-time participant in Chicago’s legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Suffice to say, his credentials are astonishing and the scope of his interests and abilities is seemingly limitless, with Yowzers representing the latest redrawing of that ever-expanding creative borderline.

Much of the music on Yowzers features his working quartet with Tommaso Moretti (drums, percussion, voice), Matthew Davis (tuba, piano, bells, voice), and Will Faber (guitar, ngoni, bells, voice). But the unlisted feature here is Gay’s own ability to summon and unleash the unique strengths of his collaborators. The quartet material leans into a vocabulary that the group has developed over the course of several years together on the road; and the repertoire delivers an arresting cocktail of pulsing and free rhythms that somehow swing alongside a gathering of melodic phrases that sweep the outer-reaches of harmony with nostalgic echoes of family songs from the living room.

“Building a language, or taking a while to build a language—it’s like every other thing,” says Gay. “These stories are passed around through melody. You write a story and you share the story with individuals, and then you allow their individuality to embellish the story and take it on in another way. That person is a whole universe. It’s about trusting these people—trusting the people you leave something with, just like people trust their kids and their grandkids to carry a thing on. To not give it all away. To keep it in this tightly-knit body and to just keep it going.”

It’s not a new concept for Gay. One uniting factor in his deep, multi-faceted discography is a never-ending commitment to taking the stories of the past and pushing them outward, filtered through a sense of self, to keep that information moving.

Information moves through Yowzers via the intuitive physicality of Gay’s creative polyrhythmic constructions as he covertly delivers familiar folk tunes and tales. “It’s the most natural thing,” says Gay. “That’s how the world is. There are overlapping rhythms all around us, and so it reminds you of the reality of the world when you hear them. It’s a loop and the loop is always changing.”

Yowzers is ripe with the fine mash of that loop’s changes and diffusions, recalling the high-minded freedom of Liberation Music Orchestra, the abstract boom-bap balladry of Georgia Anne Muldrow, the unbridled rhythms and sandpaper bellows of Bukka White, the harmolodic cartoon glory of Arthur Blythe’s Illusions, or the oft-copped but rarely distilled patterns of Naná Vasconcelos. More amalgam than pendulum swing; a fresh thought made up of old ideas, like some imaginary Sacred Heart Ensemble led by Elvin Jones and Rashid Ali. It’s all there, filtered through an improvisational approach and a lifetime of stories and secrets embodied. For a man who has inhabited and traveled these continents so extensively, it’s safe to call this work true Americana, despite what that word might mean to the average white person in the United States.

“A big part of the language this quartet has developed is spatial,” says Gay. “It’s seeing and hearing it live.” Translating that language to a studio situation is a tough task, even for a seasoned crew. “You’re dealing with a thing that is older than the industry that sells it, and if you’ve never experienced those bodies in a room there can be a disconnect.” Striving to document the magic of those live moments, to great end, Gay chose to track the quartet pieces (“the glorification of small victories,” “there, inside the morning glory,” “I am (bells),” and “cumulus”) for Yowzers live, in real time, seated with his bandmates in a small circle at Palisade Studios in Chicago.

The spectrum of the album is widened by a batch of music created via Gay’s highly successful approach to composing in-studio, augmented with contributions from his bandmates, instrumentalist Rob Frye, and a mini-choir comprising vocalists Ayanna Woods, Tramaine Parker, and Ugochi Nwaogwugwu. This straying from the quartet material throughout the course of the record acts as an expansion of detail rather than an interruption of continuity.

All together, the pacing and flow of Yowzers is proof-positive of Gay’s practiced grasp on how the album format can traverse such a breadth of atmospheres. The titular album opener “yowzers” is a simple, soulful, three-chord piano and vocal repetition nestled in the hypnotically swelling effect of the Woods/Parker/Nwaogwugwu choir. The undecorated lyrics leave ample room for a listener to comprehend references to the binding existential crises of our times. It’s a Blues that everyone in the world should feel in their bones:

Ain’t gon snow no more x4

Rain gon pour and pour x4

Fire don’t stop no more x4

“for Breezy”, a could-be New Orleans dirge, straddles the deep sigh of a heavy sadness and the sweet lift of a fond look back, echoing the most contemplative moments of Duke Ellington’s small group arrangements. Gay’s clustered synth chording sets the scene while Frye’s breathy flute and Moretti’s delicate brushwork are positioned front-and-center along with a synthetic static—the nagging question of darkness even as beauty blooms. Gay’s flugelhorn enters at the 1:35 mark, maneuvering slowly around Frye and locking the vibe into place. It’s a gorgeous and fitting tribute to an old comrade.

“John, John Henry” begins with doomy oscillations and click-clack electronic rhythm loops hovering atop a contextually disjointed swing beat from Moretti. Enter Gay and his choir, digging into a take on the dusty-yet-timeless tale of man versus machine, an update we didn’t know we needed and an entrance we didn’t know we wanted. The way the group’s vocal rhythms hit here is a classic example of the Gay conundrum: an idea that reads as challenging on paper but sounds simple to the ear and feels intuitive to the body. With spectacles underfoot and charts out the window, the listener sings along, unencumbered by know-how. It’s all in service of Gay’s ongoing exploration and expansion of folklore in his work—arguably the one concept that bridges the gap between all of the disparate elements of his oeuvre.

This bottomless bag of tricks never induces fatigue, instead allowing for breaths and bites as needed—the quick-vibe banana peel windup of “rollerskates”; the endlessly psychedelic metallic rhythm chant of the album’s centerpiece “I am (bells)”; and the triumphant free-folk shouts of “the glorification of small victories,” which is a drastic and collaborative quartet rework of a composition originally recorded for Gay’s album Grapes that serves as further evidence of his steady crew’s interpretive powers.

How, though, does Gay end a collection that covers so much ground? The sweetest sendoff is often the one that sounds like a beginning. The album closer “leave some for you”—a balladeer’s kiss as the sun comes up—pairs a deeply disintegrated series of rhythmic loops with a diddley bow shuffle, ushered by the sturdy-yet-understated swing of Moretti’s kit. Gay’s sweetly intoned low-register lilt is front and center with an affirmation delivered as an earworm. The simple melody carries it home:

You look brand new today

Not cause you need it

Just cause you want it

New

In commemoration of soul singing legend Ural Thomas's 85th birthday, Cairo Records and The Albina Music Trust present Nat. - Ural! This giant tribute to Ural's 70 year music career includes an LP, a 7", a thirty six page 12 X 12 full color book, five postcards, a newspaper fold out, a 11 X 17 poster and beautiful printed inner sleeves.

Here's a detailed description of the contents -

THE LP - These 8-track recordings are from the early 90s - possibly some begun as early as late 80s. There are synthesizers, drum machines, a chorus of vocal overdubs, guitars, bass, drums...a full band all Ural, recorded at home and now for the first time on LP.

THE 7" - Two songs Ural recorded in the early 1960's at home with a bunch of kids from the neighborhood. Side A is the avant garde funk masterpiece Fade Away - featuring kids blowing into ten foot long bed posts outfitted with trombone slides. Side B is the sweet, simple soulful and life affirming ballad, "Smile".

THE BOOKLET - This 12 X 12 full color book features a long interview with Ural, interviews with his contemporaries and tons of great photos. It covers his whole career as a soul singing legend.

THE POSTCARDS - Five postcards featuring pictures of Ural from various stages of his career.

THE FOLD OUT NEWSPAPER - An old article about Ural's struggles with the city of Portland and a new article about how great Ural is on the other side.

THE INNER SLEEVES - Two large beautiful alternate covers for Nat - Ural are printed on the inner sleeves.

THE POSTER - Full color promo shot of Ural in a mesh outfit hanging out in a birdbath. 

The First Lady of New Orleans Soul, Irma Thomas' career had many stops and starts; she never caught on with a big label, and bounced between smaller concerns, being most famous for how deft of a live performer she was than her studio output, a superstar in Louisiana, but a curio outside it. 

In 1967, after moderately successful albums with the local Imperial, she went north from New Orleans to record at the FAME studios in Muscle Shoals where Aretha Franklin became a star at the behest of Chess Records, who aimed to turn her into the next Etta James. For reasons that are not clear, Chess released a couple singles from the FAME sessions, but never actually put all the songs Thomas recorded there in LP form. It would take until a Japanese release in 1984 for these songs to see full release; it is  a drop-down soul classic, an impactful, fantastic album that is a giant what-if? Thomas might have gotten her flowers much sooner if this had come out back then. You can fix that now.

The single release from Jimi Tenor’s supcoming second thematic album titled “July Blue Skies” on Timmion Records offers two very different moods. “Summer of Synesthesia” takes us back to those dreamy summer days, a natural overpour of sensations mixing together, sounds becoming colors before turning into flavors. Synthesizers grow into delicate layers over Cold Diamond & Mink’s rhythm, and when your heart can hardly bear the beauty of it all, Tenor’s soft lyric places the cherry on top.

“Tsicroxe” on the flipside couldn’t be more different, kicking into gear with a demonic organ arpeggio that sounds like you’ve just been dropped into a Dario Argento scene. Even though the familiar funk from Cold Diamond & Mink eases the dread a bit, when Tenor busts in with the eerie flute solo, the ritual closes in on its conclusion.

The contents of the backwards vocal bits at the end shall be saved for your turntable so make sure to rewind that track, selector!

Sometime in 2005, a lone box of master tapes escaped an estate sale and made its way through a network of collectors, record dealers, and “junkers” into the hands of leading Ohio soul expert Dante Carfagna, who linked them to Columbus, Ohio’s mysterious Prix label (See: Eccentric Soul: The Prix Label). A bit of research turned up Prix proprietor George Beter, who identified most of the unlabeled material. All it took was an endless series of phone calls and letters and two fields trips in Columbus. But one complete mystery wended its way onto our final Prix compilation. “You and Me,” a simple but irrepressible demo credited only to Penny & the Quarters, was found tacked onto a mixed studio reel. Our survey of every willing lifer left on the Columbus soul scene, including retired DJs, producers, and important local artists, produced not so much as a glimmer of recognition at the name Penny & the Quarters. Though we loved the song from the first play, it may’ve ended up a bit buried on our original compilation, as #18 of 19 tracks.

Four years later, Eccentric Soul: The Prix Label hadn’t exactly become a huge seller, although listeners had repeatedly told us that the unfiltered studio demos that fill out the record’s back half were true diamonds in the rough. But neither Penny nor her Quarters had appeared to claim credit for their efforts. Then, completely out of left field, we heard from respected screen actor and avowed Numero fan Ryan Gosling that Penny’s piercing bit of stripped down doo-wop was being considered for inclusion in Derek Cianfrance’s indie-weeper film Blue Valentine. What we didn’t know was that “You and Me” had won a major role in what became an indie circuit hit, and that Penny & the Quarters would instantly assume the role of world’s most famous unknown doo-wop group.

Every week is a slow news week in Columbus, Ohio, and early January 2011 found the city recovering from the thrill of elevating Ted Williams - the formerly homeless guy with the awesome voice for radio - into a national news sensation. But both major daily newspapers in town, as well as the city's alternative weekly, also ran stories about how a lost and unknown Columbus soul group had become the musical centerpiece of a film already garnering Oscar buzz. That mainstream spotlight aimed at Blue Valentine and Penny & the Quarters did the trick: we finally made contact with the widow of Jay Robinson, lead Quarters' singer and songwriter. Robinson, it turned out, had also been the leader of Columbus doo-wop pioneers The Supremes (later known as "The Columbus Supremes," for reasons which should be obvious). Jay Robinson never did give up on the dream of writing a hit record; even so, the posthumous realization of his dream is cold comfort for his widow and daughter. With their blessings, we returned to those estate sale masters and pulled down another neglected track ("You Are Giving Me Some Other Love") from the still-unknown Penny and her now-partly-known Quarters. "You and Me" is a song that could not be suppressed: not when Prix failed to release it; not when Penny & the Quarters were forgotten; not when Numero stuck it at the bitter end of a much overlooked compilation. Its evolution from estate sale trash to silver-screen gold has finally returned it to big-hole 45, where it probably should have lived all along. 

10 Anos Depois is the tenth album by Brazilian musical artist Jorge Ben, released in 1973. It is a collection of popular songs from the first decade of his career re-recorded as medleys.

Whipped up in the dust of Rene & Rene's Tejano tornado "Angelito," the Dynamic label was just one among San Antonio record and real estate mogul Abe Epstein's enterprises. Dynamic's flagship outfit, the Commands, marched "No Time For You" up to the middle of the charts in 1966 with performance chops honed jet-sharp by the demanding Air Force Base circuit. That takeoff paved a runway for 20 more soulful Dynamic singles over an impressive 30-month campaign. Epstein's open-door policy brought a diverse cross-section of Texas talent into convergence within his General McMullan Drive studio, as whites, blacks, and Latinos alike suited up for service in whichever new group the call of duty called for. Epstein’s Alamo City melting pot is ladled out here in 28 of Dynamic's most intriguing dishes by the Tonettes, Little Jr. Jesse & the Tear Drops, Don & the Doves, Willie Cooper & the Webs, Bobby Blackmon & His Soul Express, and Doc & Sal. Our deluxe 2LP edition gatefolds into Lone Star pic sleeves, full-color dancehall photography, and rich ephemera, planting a new flag for soul in soil that’s seen its share of hoisted banners.