Jay Richford Gary Stevan
Feelings (2023 Repress)

↪ SECONDE MAIN ↩Media Condition: Very Good Plus (VG+)Sleeve Condition: Very Good Plus (VG+)The Wheel of Love is an avant-garde/jazz-funk rock album by Hungarian percussionist/composer George Jinda, recorded with French Zeuhl musicians and released in 1975 on Motors.

Kendrick Lamarr has always been one of hip-hop's most thoughtful and thought-provoking MCs, with a passion for utilising beats and backing tracks that often sidestep hackneyed rap tropes and lazy samples. Even so, Mr Morale & The Big Steppers, Lamarr's first solo album for five years, is an arresting listen from start to finish. Impeccably produced, with countless musical twists and turns, spellbinding instrumentation (including jazz pianos, orchestration, intriguing electronics, sparkling synths and punchy rhythms aplenty), it sees Lamarr lyrically signposting his own failings (something not enough rappers of his profile are comfortable doing) within a wider framework of accountability. It's brave but brilliant, with some of the topics covered including his relationship with money, white women and his father, gender and generational trauma. A genuinely landmark album all told.

Reissue of Antonio Adolfo's Viralata LP; An essential album from Brazil's majorly progressive heyday of late seventies jazz-funk !Viralata is a sacred artefact of Brazilian music, which Antonio himself describes as ‘a product of my hybrid musical influences that joins together flavours of marchinhas de carnaval, frevo, toada, classical, baião, mpb and jazz, etc’.The album’s first track ‘Cascavel’ is the emotionally charged, celebratory dance anthem, which became a London jazz-dance classic in the early ‘90s after Far Out label boss Joe Davis discovered a handful of copies in a second hand shop in Sao Paulo and brought them back to London to sell to DJs like Gilles Peterson and Patrick Forge. In recent years the track has been played out by the likes of Floating Points, Mr Scruff and Andrew Ashong, it was also the last song ever to play on the hallowed soundsystem of London’s beloved club Plastic People…