Groove Diggers Japan Vinyl & CDs

Review: Trombonist Phil Ranelin alongside Wendell Harrison founded Tribe as a community enterprise and record label in Detroit in the 70s that went on to have a huge impact. Its musical legacy lives on through plenty of vital albums, not least Vibes From The Tribe. The Japanese Edition of the original album now arrives on Groove Diggers complete with an obi-strip and six spellbinding tunes that have all been remixed and remastered from the original multi-track tapes or lacquered directly from master tapes. It is as good as spiritual jazz gets, frankly.

Review: Light In The Attic do the preservative god's work of reissuing the rare Going To My Baby's Place by West Coast funk and soul singer Vernon Garrett. His debut album, released in 1975, this is a dynamic, un-fluffed funk breakthrough, following an extended panhandle of 45s that characterised his rarefied career for almost a decade before he moved onto full-lengths. Expanding the bittersweet mood that had characterised his career until this point in time, we hear the likes of 'Something Went Wrong', 'Don't Do What I Do', 'One Man's Loss' and 'Going To My Baby's Place', across which we hear a consciously stoic Garrett duly acknowledge the natural peaks and troughs of life, through which he recognises that it's all necessary for one well lived. Vernon's wild and powerful songs come backed by incandescent performances by members such as Jimmy Gough and Leon Kittrell, who would later form L.T.D. and David T Walker.

Review: American jazz drummer Roy Brooks lit a fire under his career when he joined the Horace Silver Combo in the early 1960s; such was the foot in the door that it allowed him to join a multitude of later bands and projects of esteem, including those led by Stanley Turrentine, Yusef Lateef and Charles Mingus. Perhaps it was this early exposure to multiplicity that saw to his incredible collective magnum opus (by then having formed his own band, the Artistic Truth), Black Survival, a live album recorded in 1974 that outwardly heard Brooks' then newfangled sense of spirituality at the time, not to mention his anti-war thematic focus, overflows of emotion, and glorious monologues in favour of peace and unity. One for the spiritual jazz heads, we'd say you can hardly call yourself one if you haven't checked this one out.

Review: An Evening With The Devil is regarded as one of the Tribe Records label's finest ever releases - an unrestrained free jazz expression from Wendell Harrison that is packed with forward-thinking grooves. The Detroit reedman was always in a class of one and he showed it here with a record so heavy it was way ahead of its time. Now though it's regarded as a classic with trumpet from Marcus Belgrave, Charles Eubanks on keyboards, Ike Daney on drums, and Will Austin on bass. There are also some spoken word passages from the Black Messengers making this a jewel of the jazz underground.