Imani - Out of the Blue (1983)

Presenting...

IMANI! The incredible San Francisco area Jazz Funk Blues Spiritual miasma that is the IMANI - Out of the Blue LP (ep?). This is mega sought after and friggin bad ass. About all I know is that it's from 1983, and it's one of the few great private 'jazz' records that is still almost unknown. I really can't say enough good things about this, how the bay area has so many fantastic private jazz-funk LPs from 1970-1985 that are so fucking good is beyond me. This is easily one of the rarest, and one of the better musically too, though I'd give the edge to Aposento Alto and John Heartsman, but people are well aware of those two behemoths while this guy has never been reissued or available anywhere before and has a value that usually approaches $1000. It's in the same realm as my very first post, which spread like wildfire amongst the bigger blogs out there and soon all traces of its origins from here were erased. I'm talking about Minority Band - Journey to the Shore, which has since been reissued in 2 different formats and is very well known. I also featured another single from that awesome label (TSR) but no one seemed to think much of it I guess, though it was quickly hijacked and placed on the french boogie blogs, which I'm cool with. And also I want to remind you of a single which I resurfaced to the blog/ebay world called The Mint, which has Skywalking and 'the Mint' on it, I originally posted it without much attention, then sold it on Ebay for a meager 189.00 but a month ago the German boogie king of Ebay found a copy of his own and auctioned it for a whopping $400, I couldnt believe it. So grab that download if you havent already, it's a classic. But anyway this Imani record is friggin awesome and I'm thrilled their work can finally be heard again, hopefully they are too.


Imani - Out of the Blue EP (1983) Full EP at 224 kbps.

Sabu - Aurora Borealis LP 1971 (Co-Op Records)

Amazingly I couldn't find any blogs that have a rip of this LP out there so seeing as how I just found a copy in fantastic condition, I figured I would rip it and share the wealth. Some of the tracks are pretty straight forward big band jazz but there are still quite a few classic latin jazz/funk tracks with great composition. It's a European jazz classic so I'm glad to make it available again. Also, I was kinda lazy and did not rip it into individual tracks, instead I have the entire A side as an mp3 and the B side as an mp3, zipped in a .rar, but many of the songs flow into the next by design so its still good listening straight through, or you can cut it up yourselves using something like Audacity, a free editing program that I often use.

Sabu - Aurora Borealis LP

Pendulum - Skull Fuck ( skullfuck EP ) 1989

This is new ground for me. Metal! Not just any metal though, first time ever available San Antonio proto-Black Metal Thrash metal that is quite raw and quite good, EXCEPT the vocalist, wow is he bad. This would be worth a lot more if the vocalist sounded either more death metal esque or black metal esque, instead he just sucks. But it has nice atmospheric elements and tremelo riffage, so it's way ahead of what most San Antonio metal bands were doing at the time. AND they took their ep cover pic in a graveyard! hardcore!

PENDULUM - SKULLFUCK EP (Euthanasia Records 0013) 1989 San Antonio, TX.

The Ebony Singers - In The Ebony Spirit LP

Very nice Spiritual Gospel Jazz track by The Ebony Singers called Ebony Suite. It closes out the A side. I only included this track because the rest of the album is quite traditional, and though its decent I didn't feel like spending all that time to upload 'decent', instead here is the one track that is fantastic. Slow build with fender rhodes keys twinkling and a small choir doing spiritual singing then the bass kicks in and a nice jazz funk theme begins and rides out the gospel jazz funk flavor to the end. Enjoy.

Ebony Singers - Ebony Suite:

Mike Baumann - Get a Grip LP (1981)

Utterly unknown folk-jazz-prog pop stuff with a nice spiritual jazz touch on some tracks and weird bluesy quirkiness on others. Definitely not solid the whole way through but there are some gems on here. It's about a hundred dollar record and thats mainly do to the fact that there arent more solid tracks, like the potential was very high on this one and instead of really going for it they had fun and got goofy when the going got tough. But I really do enjoy it and like I said there are some really great forward thinking jazz tracks on here so don't be dissuaded by my harping on its not being as good as it should be crap. There was ZERO info out on this LP, but the interesting this is this guy, Mike Baumann, is I believe the original member of Grayps, a local 60s psych outfit, here's what I said in my Ebay auction for this record:

"Scarce Private press LP with Mike Baumann and Steve Huntington playing most of the instruments and writing most all the songs. This LP is unfindable in all the research I have done, however I do think that this is the Mike Baumann from the Ohio 60s teen garage band The Grayps, and I think he was in a band in the Ohio area in the 70's called Gandalf. If I am mistaken and that is another Mike Baumann musician from Ohio (which I doubt...) I apologize, but I'm almost certain it is the one and the same. That Mike Baumann played drums for Grayps I think. Anyway, the album is really solid and has a diverse sound that a lot of late 70s early 80s private press records have. Some tracks are cool jazzy blue-eyed soul with great lyrics and spiritual jazz sounding chorus parts, other tracks are straight ahead early 80s folky softrock, like Toto or something. Others are instrumental jazz ensemble with prog elements. But my favorite 3 tracks are all in the soundclip above, and combine the best elements of all these genre descriptions into cohesive songs that you rarely encounter on something this obscure.."

LISTEN AND ENJOY!! - Full .rar