Kathleen Loves Music

Fred Wesley & the J.B.s > Doin’ It To Death

Never was a song so aptly named. (Put it on a loop, play it all day, and I guarantee the result.)

Though the official assignation was “Fred Wesley & the J.B.s”, they could have just as easily been “Maceo & the Macks”, “The Last Word”, or just plain (not vanilla) “The J.B.s“, all essentially the later instrumental recordings of James Brown. James was in such demand twenty years into his career that the market just couldn’t absorb yet more singles, so he just kept releasing them under whatever name made sense that day.

This single just seems like a JB party from start to finish. From the opening “Hit it!” to “We’re gonna have a funky good time” through “We’re going to take you highhhhhhherrrr” everyone sounds like they just showed up, hit the deep groove and kept going all night. The fade out must [Read more…]

Front cover, The Cecil Taylor Unit, Spring of Two Blue-J’s.
Click to enlarge to printable, full size.

I can’t imagine any regular readers of this blog liking this track, but Googling will turn up quite a few passionate listeners, since this outstanding record has been out of print for over thirty years. Since I engineered and produced the original recording, I thought it might be time fans had access to it. I’ll try and update this post as I get more materials and information, so you could consider it the definitive current release.

Cecil Taylor Unit > Spring of Two Blue-J’s
This music file is very large (35 MB), so be prepared for a long loading time.

Cecil Taylor is one of the three acknowledged leaders of the progressive, free jazz movement of mid-20th century America. To a lot of folks he just plays noise and they find it hard to believe this music is composed, no [Read more…]