J. L Beck

Comprised of three former members of the Ohio Players, Shadow is a mostly self contained R&B group singing mostly midtempo tunes. They almost sound more like a Confunkshun offshoot than Ohio's finest funk group. Good even soul music. The first song, Mystery Dancer is the best jam. Nonetheless, the entire album is worth the listen.

Perception Productions, a New York based label that ran from the late 60s through until 1974, was a strangely eclectic affair. Its roster stretched from a radical Afro-American poet through to the pop band King Harvest whose hit ‘Dancing In The Moonlight’ became a massive hit for the UK band Toploader a couple of decades later. The inbetween points covered jazz, funk, vocal harmony soul and proto-disco. In fact distilled down into this compilation the label provides us a view of Manhattan’s black music scene of the period, from the established greats to the fresh young things who would make their mark in the coming years. The two men who ran the label, President Terry Phillips and Boo Frazier burned brightly for that half a decade before almost entirely disappearing from the music scene.