Jon Franklin

Music from Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, Aretha Franklin, and more – 100 tracks in all.

20 CD Box Set. All Original Recordings from the 60s, 70s, 80s. Released by BMG in 1995.

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.

Freddie Hubbard got a bad rap from jazz critics while at Columbia – most absolutely hated the music he made there because it indulged pop, soul, funk, and even disco abundantly. He got the last laugh, though. The critics were wrong. Great Britain's BGO offers proof in this two-disc set that contains Hubbard's first three Columbia albums from the mid-'70s: High Energy (1974), the provocatively titled Liquid Love (1975), and Windjammer (1976). Hubbard employed his own quintet on High Energy (something he couldn't do previously at CTI), which was comprised of Junior Cook, George Cables, Kent Brinkley, and Ralph Penland.