Teedie Don Brown

Samantha Brown is an English female singer-songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist, arranger and record producer.
The box set has been an 18-month labour of love and has been curated by me (SDE Editor, Paul Sinclair), with the full support and enthusiasm of Sam Brown. It includes newly mastered versions of the albums Stop! (1988) and April Moon (1990) and three further discs offering B-sides, unreleased demos.

James Brown is featured here with the then newly formed J.B.'s – the maestro's second great band, including Bootsy Collins, Phelps Collins, Jabo Starks, Bobby Byrd, and Fred Wesley. Live at the Apollo had caught James Brown the '50s gospel/R&B singer; Love Power Peace captures James Brown the funkster. In the early '70s Brown turned up the funk, recording such litanies for Black America as "Ain't It Funky Now," "Sex Machine," "Give It Up or Turn It Loose," "Super Bad," "Get Up, Get into It, Get Involved," and "Soul Power." They're all here, along with revved-up, white-hot versions of the early- and middle-period classics. Brown had planned to release this as a triple album in 1971. When several bandmembers left shortly after it was recorded, Brown switched from King to Polydor Records, leading him to scrap it and record a new studio album instead. In 1992, Polygram decided to make the recording available for the first time.

Sho is Funky Down Here is James Brown’s 1971 fuzzy, psychedelic-funk album, created by his then-bandleader David Matthews. Sho is Funky is the genesis of Brown’s “Talking Loud And Saying Nothing,” later to become a hip-hop sample staple informing A Tribe Called Quest, Large Professor, Brand Nubian and others. Now-Again Records is presenting the first official reissue of the album lacquered directly from the original master tapes at Capitol Studios.

This was André Previn's second album after his long, symphonically enforced absence from jazz, and it sounds noticeably more fluid and relaxed than his first. No longer apprehensive about dusting off his old skills, Previn is delightfully confident and breezy (dig his sly turns on "Come Rain or Come Shine" and "C Jam Blues"), taking some chances as he re-phrases and paraphrases a collection of revivified standards, mostly Harold Arlen and assorted Duke Ellington. Even if Previn, that noted wit, sometimes sounds as if he is kidding the pants off these old tunes, it's great to hear him having such a good time playing jazz again. Mundell Lowe is Previn's new guitar partner, and Ray Brown returns on bass; both are right at home in this refined brand of chamber jazz grooving.