Month: March 2009

It had been years since I last visted Soultex Records’ owner and Dallas studio veteran Roger Boykin’s Duncanville home, but I hadn’t realized that it had been nine years. His ranch house, neat as always, was exactly as I remembered it – down to the Soultex records pinned into the wall in a arrangement that reminded me of a cross. “Man, I never got that Savoir Flair 7,” I jokingly complained, until Roger went into the kitchen and, grabbing from the stash he’s kept atop his oven for the past 18 years, brought me back the last copy he had. Too bad he hadn’t kept a copy of Soultex 102 – his ex-wife’s brother Terry Brooks solitary release. I’d never even seen a copy previous to that day, not even in Roger’s home.

Being the gentleman that he is, he agreed to let me peruse the records I hadn’t seen the previous trip, which was a blast. Roger’s a packrat, and amidst copies of his own releases, he had healthy amounts of Strata East albums (“You can only have ’em if I have ’em on CD.” he said), a mass amount of early 80s Dallas boogie 45s (Roger played on nearly every early 80s soul record to originate in this city, it seems), acetates, test presses and – this one floored me – psychedelic high school band albums. Go figure.

Before leaving, we sorted through some reel to reels of his early 80s jingles, as he played me the final mixes on cassette. “That sounds like Savoir Flair,” I said. Roger then explained how many of the Savoir Flair tunes began as jingles, and that he’d tape looped the one minute backing tracks to create new instrumentals for that album.

Gotta get those multi track reels transferred. Who knows what lies in store?

P.E. Hewitt’s Winter Winds is one of the rarest damn-good 70s jazz albums you could ever hope to come across. That’s a subtle, but important distinction. There are many rare jazz albums in every imaginable subgenre – funk, free, fusion… But Hewitt, a composer, arranger, vibraphonist, pianist and pilot, helmed a crack group of musicians and recorded a damn-good album… Without ever taking the time out to name his record company. His three albums – pressed in a maximum run of one hundred pieces per album – recently surfaced after Bay Area collector Chris Veltri re-discovered an old find and sent music detectives on the hunt. You see, Hewitt’s “Winter Winds” album so damn-good that neither a micro press nor forty years of silence could suppress its reemergence.

“Bada Que Bash,” a song from the album, will appear on Now-Again’s forthcoming partnership-release with Jazzman Records – the expanded version of the label’s Spiritual Jazz anthology. Now-Again’s comprehensive P.E. Hewitt anthology, which will contain all of the music from his three albums, will see release in summer 2009. In the meantime, Now-Again and P-Vine Records has reissued Winter Winds on CD – but only in Japan.