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.

Promotional Only. Free with your purchace of the Whitefield Brothers In The Raw LP.

Side A:

1. American Nightmare

Side B:

2. Dreads

NA71019 7″ 2009

Produced by Oh No. Taken from Oh No’s remix of Guilty Simpson’s Ode To The Ghetto, Ghettodes.

Buy it here.

01. In The Raw (Whitefield Bros./Roth/Sahm)
02. Sol Walk (Whitefield Bros./Roth/Sahm)
03. Eji (Whitefield Bros./Roth/Sahm)
04. Prowlin (Whitefield Bros./Roth/Sahm)
05. Weiya (Serengeti Beat) (Whitefield Bros.)
06. Yakuba (Whitefield Bros.)
07. Witch-Jam (Whitefield Bros./Roth/Sahm)
08. Weiya (Whitefield Bros.)
09. Thunderbird (Roth/Lehman)
10. Rampage (Whitefield Bros.)
11. The Bastard (Whitefield Bros.)
12. Chokin’ (Whitefield Bros./Roth/Sahm)

NA5039 CD and 2LP 2009

Produced by Whitefield Brothers
Recorded by Gabe Roth at Desco Studio
Additional Recording by Philip Lehman at Soul Fire Studio
Mixed by Whitefield Brothers and Philip Lehman at Soul Fire
Executive Producer Philip Lehman & Whitefield Bros
Mastered by Kelly Hibbert for Sumosound, Los Angeles, CA
Art direction by Matthew Boyd for Way Shape Form, Toronto, ONT.
Produced for Reissue by Egon

Muggy Whitefield – Drums, Percussion
Bosco Mann – Bass
Till Sahm – Organ, Synthesizer
Neal Sugarman – Saxophone, Flute
Leon Michels – Saxophone, Flute
Martin Perna – Saxophone, Bass Clarinet
Jordan McLean – Trumpet
Mike Leonhart – Trumpet
Mike Wagner – Trombone
Boogaloo Velez – Conga, Percussion
Jeff Silverman – Vocals
Jay Whitefield – Guitar

When Poets of Rhythm founding members Jan and Max Whitefield traveled from their native Munich to New York to record their eponymous debut album, Sharon Jones was a name only known to the cult that bought her first, rare 45s, The Dap Kings didn’t exist and The El Michels Affair were teenagers gigging as the Mighty Imperials. Rough, raw, real funk music was decidedly out of vogue. Though the Poets had dutifully dozens of 45s and a few key LPs of their modern take on the funk sound over a decade, their recordings remained for a chosen few. Back then, “African influenced funk” meant “sounds like Fela.” The first American “real funk” label, Desco, had disappeared; Desco’s owner Phillipe Lehman searched for a new approach.

Thus, the idea that Jan and Max presented to him – to record an album chock full of funk music influenced by the African diaspora, an album as indebted to the Meters as to Mr. Kuti and his Africa 70, an album as psychedelic as those Ghanaian and Nigerian masterpieces by unknown psych-funk heroes such as Blo, Edazawa and the Psychedelic Aliens – sat perfectly with him. Desco co-founder Gabriel Roth (later the co-founder of Daptone Records and leader of The Dap Kings) brought his bass. Leon Michels, as in El Michels himself, wrote horn arrangements and played sax and flute. So did Daptone co-founder Neal Sugarman. Jan and Max’s compositions came to life and the record was mixed, mastered, packaged, and quickly released. A 7″ and a 10″ followed, with exclusive tracks not released on In The Raw.

And that was, basically, it. Soul Fire, the label that released In The Raw in 2001, sold a small number of vinyl LPs, and as many CDs as they could self-distribute. And the CD quickly went out of print. Soul-Fire soon folded. The Whitefield Brothers debut album, regarded as a masterpiece by those lucky enough to have heard it, languished as a “collectible” – eBay fodder for the cognoscenti.

The Whitefield Brothers are almost done with their long awaited follow up album to In The Raw. Now-Again Records has worked closely with Jan and Max to assemble a reissue of their first, crucial piece of the funk spectrum. This is wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve, hypnotic, defiantly psychedelic funk music that is as modern as it is grounded in the great musical traditions from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Every time I’m in New York, I follow largely the same routine. Cab from JFK to the loft in Bushwick, wash the sheets (Stones Throw’s East Coast headquarters isn’t an Ian Schraeger type joint, but it works), make my way to Taralucci E Vino for an espresso, check out the East Village Record stores and then call Edan. Why Edan? Well, I’ve been trying to convince him to do an album with me for a very long while and, even though that looks to be a long way off (though still a distinct possibility), he and I often share good conversations about music, life, “the business,” and food.

He’s been telling me that a day trip to Di Fara’ss Pizza was in order, but, in New York, without a car, Grimaldi’s is just so much easier. But, two weeks ago, on a short layover in the City on my way back to LA from Portugal, the timing worked out. I met Edan and Lif on the Q Train (quite surreal that we happened to be on the same train at the same time), and, Scrabble Board in hand, we made our way to Di Fara’s for the inevitable hour long wait for one of its legendary pies.

The end result? An hour into our Scrabble game (and an hour and a half after placing our order), the proprietor’s daughter politely informed us that our pie never hit the oven. “I called out that we had no wild onions,” she said. Uh.. ok. A half hour later, Lif is so clearly ahead in the game that Edan and I can’t possibly catch up, we’ve discussed the collapse of the rather limited music industry that we knew (and how exciting that was for optimists like ourselves), we’ve mapped out the song that the duo promise for the second Whitefield Brothers album, talked more about that album-to-be, and are so damn hungry that anything would taste like manna from heaven.

But the pie is a masterpiece. And, watching the slow, steady approach that the maestro takes with each pie, I think that there is an analogy between Di Fara’s Pizza and Now-Again. Somewhere.