Tunes The Residents

Remastered, expanded, and pREServed for future generations – this is the latest in a series of archival Residents reissues that will continue throughout 2019 and beyond.

In Detroit, 1971, trombonist Phil Ranelin and saxophonist Wendell Harrison started a band, a recording company, and a magazine, and called them the Tribe. Though the three organizations lasted until 1978, Ranelin's Vibes From the Tribe, issued in 1976, was the last of eight records issued by Tribe/Time Is Now Productions. Musically, this is not only a solid portrait of Detroit's jazz scene in the mid-'70s, but is also a definitive portrait of its cultural mentality. While everyone in the nation had written off the city as a wasteland, a space devoid of anything worth celebrating, its residents were in the process of creating some of the most vital jazz, literature, and art in its history. Vibes From the Tribe is a wildly diverse collection of tunes to be on a single long-player…

Sax infused house is something Hed Kandi know a thing or two about. With The Lovely Laura among their residents, you can be sure to hear plenty of classic sax numbers and jazz reworks at their glamorous Saturday night affairs at Es Paradis. So who better then to hand pick some of these dance floor anthems for your listening pleasure? Hed Kandi presents their new compilation Summer of Sax…

Brownswood are proud to present ‘Indaba Is’ – a compilation of current South African improvised music and jazz – released January 29th 2021. The project is a collaboration with 2 luminaries of the South African Music scene pianist / songwriter Thandi Nthuli and The Brother Moves On’s Siyabonga Mthembu who act as curators / musical directors on the project.

It's often been said that if an R&B act didn't have a lot of dancefloor appeal in the late '70s, it could forget about being commercially successful. That isn't necessarily true; Frankie Beverly's Maze, just to give one example, was never a dancefloor favorite – and yet, all of its late-'70s albums went gold. Nonetheless, having disco appeal certainly didn't hurt. When Brainstorm's second album, Journey to the Light, failed to sell, some people reasoned that it was due to a shortage of up-tempo material. So with its third and final album, Funky Entertainment, the Detroit band decided to go for maximum disco appeal and make up-tempo songs a top priority.