Girl trips

This week, three female harmony-soul records from the early '70s. Their production styles are wildly different, but they’re all suffused with the lightly trippy aesthetic of the era.

1. The Three Degrees, Collage (Roulette)
An enduring Philadelphia female vocal trio, the Three Degrees found national fame in the mid-1970s on Gamble and Huff’s massively influential early disco label, Philadelphia International Records.

Named, I'd guess, for its pastiche of gloomy and strikingly imagistic lyrics, “Collage” was, aesthetically, light years from the Soul Train dance lines and gold lamé. This was 1970, when pulling out all the stops in the studio meant a technicolor cascade of minor-key harmonies, chimes, vibraphone, and wah-wah guitar.

2. Sweet and Innocent, Express Your Love (Active)
”Express Your Love” is sweet, innocent, and - like a love letter sung into a portable tape recorder in a teenager’s bedroom - almost painfully intimate.

Cooing with a charming lack of affectation, Sweet and Innocent strive here to fill those gaping holes in their hearts and it seems that a flood of molasses-like studio echo flowed in to fill those holes. They recorded this sleeper in Memphis in the early 1970s, and, sadly, that’s about all I can report. So no word on which one was “Sweet” and which one was “Innocent.”

3. Patti Drew, Keep On Movin’ (Capitol)
Chicago-based Patti Drew has a voice that's a powerful, wondrous thing, and she really unleashes the full dramatic force of it on “Keep On Movin’.”

Listen to the gravitas with which Ms. Drew intones lyrics like, “But somewhere, somehow / I’m going to keep on trying / until in the end / I finally win.” Today, alas, this kind of grim determination would be unlikely to find its way into a pop song with Top 40 aspirations. But that wasn’t the point in 1970. This was an era generally friendlier to anthems of survival, empowerment, and "personal voyaging," an era when even flutes - an official instrument of bohemian peripateticism - could solo in complete freedom.

** Many, MANY thanks this week to Oliver, who gave Office Naps a sweet shout-out from his mighty Soul Sides site. Oliver's discipline - and his peerless writing and tastes - were a real inspiration to me (and should be for any music blogger). Back when he was reviewing LP's on a monthly basis and posting drool-y album scans, back before "blog" meant anything to you or me, HIS was one of the first homegrown music sites that I regularly checked (and it still is one of the few). Check Soul Sides everyday. **

Sitars!

In that weird gray zone where American popular taste comingled with “ethnic” music, anything - even sitars - could happen. It may have been the Beatles who introduced it to the popular consciousness, but only the American record industry could so effectively turn the sitar into a cliché. The sitar signified India, which, to the teenaged demographic, signified, of course, drugs. But the sitar was a democratic cliché. For a brief year or two, it could be spotted droning away in the background of albums of everyone from Jackie Gleason to Sammy Davis, Jr. Thus assuring their parents that they, too, were still relevant.

1. Beautiful, Walters’ Dream (Cyclops)
Notorious Los Angeles-based producer and impresario Kim Fowley came to London in 1967 and managed to insert himself behind the controls for the first recordings of future jazz-rock eggheads the Soft Machine, then darlings of the nascent London psychedelic music scene. Sneaking the tapes, still piping hot, back to Los Angeles, Fowley released two of these songs under the fabricated name Beautiful on the one-off Cyclops label.

Apparently the consensus was that no matter the duplicity involved - and no matter how rudimentary the playing - the American public was going to get its sitars.

2. The Love Sitars, Paint It Black (Soul Galore)
Straight from the end sequence of The Party to you, this version of “Paint It Black” proved that uniting the two dominant cultural vectors of 60’s Pop America - rock ‘n’ roll and sitars - was no harder than coming up with the right Olde English font for your label.

No conclusive information on the Love Sitars. Their name pretty much tells you everything you need to know, though. This had to have been the work of studio musicians from Los Angeles. No other city in the 60’s was so prepared to knock out a few inauthentic notes with such a guileless lack of embarrassment.

3. The Punjabs, Raga-Riff (Prince)
This scrappy twenty-five watts of sitar power is a personal favorite of this lost sub-sub-subgenre, and the reason my heart races when I see “Sitar with Orchestra - Instr.” printed on a record label.

It’s pretty easy to trace the trajectory of “Raga-Riff." Written and recorded in an afternoon. Casually handed out to some turned-on Los Angeles deejays. Played once. Maybe played once. And - like the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, or fur vests - immediately locked away in storage and forgotten about.

West Coast Latin jazz vibes

Three different Latin jazz combos, heavy on the vibraphones and sprung from the fascinating Latin jazz world of '50s and '60s California, which in this case means the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Diffuse scenes, they drew their devotees from the Mexican-American and African-American communities, from the jazz musicians who’d already themselves established in California (guys like Cal Tjader, Al McKibbon, Clare Fischer, and many others), and from a handful of Cubans and Puerto Ricans. Due in part to its smaller scale, it was the versatile five- or six-piece jazz combos - rather than larger orquestas like New York City's - which reigned on the West Coast. And it was the vibraphone, with its capacity to fill a room with shimmering, exotic sound, which landed itself such a predominant place in some of California's more popular working jazz groups of the era, quintets like Bobby Montez's and Cal Tjader's, and, later, the Harold Johnson Sextet and the Afro Blues Quintet).

1. Manny Duran and His Sextet, Johnny Comes Marching Home Mambo (Cavalier)
It’s lovely to hear Duran and company tearing off at full throttle after the mock vocal introduction, and deconstructing a patriotic warhorse like “When Johnny Comes Marching Home" with such wild inventiveness.

Manny Duran was pianist who played in the 1950s Bay Area with other simpatico Latin jazzbos like Cal Tjader and Armando Peraza. He’s heard here along with his brothers Carlos (bass) and Eddie (guitar), percussionist Benny Velarde (see next selection), and Cliff Anderson and Bevan Brahms on vibes and percussion.

This was likely recorded around 1959 or 1960. Cavalier was small California label with a odd discography of '50s and early '60s pop, country and teenaged rock 'n' roll 45s.

2. Cool Benny (Velarde) and His Stone Swingers, Wobble Cha (Virgo)
I can tell you that Benny Velarde was one of the cadre of great West Coast Latin percussionists which included Francisco Aguabella, Moises Oblagacion, Armando Peraza, and, briefly, Mongo Santamaria - a cadre which dominated their Pacific corner of the jazz universe in the '50s and '60s (albeit mostly in a supporting role). I can tell you, too, that the wobble was one of about a billion dance crazes in the early to mid-'60s. The wobble could tenuously claim some Latin forbears, too, with some '60s New York City Latin groups - Joe Cuba's and Joe Quijano's come to mind - performing twist-cum-chas in a style known as “wobble."

No word, however, on whether the wobble actually involved wobbling, and if that's actually Velarde heard offering his encouragement here with exhortations. “You’re looking like a wobble cha champ!”

3. Tony Martinez Quintet, Ican (RCA)
Tony Martinez was a bandleader, vibraphonist and a generally mysterious character whose names pops up occasionally in the context of Los Angeles Latin music.

On this early Latin jazz recording (ca. ‘54), Martinez leads his razor-sharp quintet through a classic Eddie Cano composition, with the great Cano himself handling piano duties. “Ican” is the template for the dark, exotic strain of Latin jazz that found favor in post-War California nightclubs (see also Roscoe Weathers) - both Cano and Martinez whip through their parts with the kind of crazed, infernal energy that must have spooked the bourbon ‘n’ pineapple crew down at PJ’s.

“Ican” was later covered with characteristic elan by conguero Poncho Sanchez (who’s kept the spirit of West Coast Latin jazz alive in recent decades) on his Bien Sabroso album.

The Shingaling

Shingaling: like the term “boogaloo,” it’s two separate (but related) mid-'60s pop phenomena.

There's the “shingaling” synonomous with Latin Soul - jazzed-up guajiras and mambos with an R&B kick, sung in English and Spanish by younger Nuyoricans. Possibly more familiar, though, is the “shingaling,” the peculiar evolution of '60s soul dance music shortly before the polyrhythmic funk of “Cold Sweat”-era James Brown changed everything around. It sustained the tradition of silly lyrics, though it was arguably more sophisticated than the dancefloor styles that preceded it. It had big, jazzy horn riffs, it looked good (it dressed in mod suits), and it had a walloping beat. And, most of all, it was just crazy danceable.

It’s from the latter definition that we present these funky bits of discotheque nougat. (Which, incidentally, are all from the Philadelphia area.)

1. Gene Waiters, Shake and Shingaling (part 1) (Fairmount)
We’ve got all the requisite ingredients: the horns, the titantic drum fill, the lyrics about keeping “it” moving. Spiced with guitar and some fab organ, and finally wrapped together like some stylish stick of dynamite, "Shake and Shingaling" is to me the very essence of shingaling soul. It bobs along with the unbounded confidence that comes from being a member of the new breed, whoever they were.

2. Carl Holmes and the Commanders, Soul Dance No. 3 (Blackjack)
Carl Holmes - guitarist, gifted screamer, and a kind of tightly wound version of Wilson Pickett - here conjures the transcendent 1966 blare of American dancefloor mojo-shake. If stomping were a path to enlightenment, then, like dancefloor Buddhas, I really do believe we’d be radiating kindness toward all beings after only a few rounds with this one.

Carl Holmes led various R&B and soul combos throughout the the 1960s and '70s, and toured the Mid-Atlantic extensively, including my old south-central Pennsylvania stomping groundS. (See the fantastic Funky 16 Corners for more info on Carl Holmes.)

I sure dig that hand-drawn label.

3. Bobby Sax, Sock It (DePlace)
Bobby Sax’s “Sock It” careens forth at a heart-pounding tempo for its 1:55 sprint to the finish line, ain't that a whole lotta whoo, indeed.

This hot potato is full of such poetry - a poetry pretty much unique to the shingaling. Even within the genre, “Sock It” is exceptional, though. It's constructed from monumental slabs of echo, horns, and drums, and, with sound bleeding from every available channel, it manages to distinguish itself as possibly the loudest record on earth.