The Southern University Jazz Ensemble - Goes To Africa With Love

That one of the great Spiritual Jazz albums of the era could be found in duplicate New Orleans thrift store in the 1980s goes a long way in illustrating the lack of acclaim this special and overlooked album maintained, even in a city where the Batiste name is musical royalty. The Southern University albums Alvin Batiste offered the world were novelies, not worthy of serious consideration, a moment captured, but not necessarily worthy of being collected or preserved by anyone not immediately involved in its creation.

That changes now. With the release of the two Southern University albums, Now-Again continues a conversation begun with the late Kashmere Stage Band director Conrad O. Johnson and the issue of his high school students’ music as 'Texas Thunder Soul', and the continued belief that beautiful music created by youth – even under the most adverse circumstances – can always inspire us.

Tracklist:
1. Samba Dee
2. Ah Ja Ge Da Ba
3. Clean Air
4. Music Came
5. Nanigo
6. Holdin' Meetin'

DJ Muggs - Notes & Tones

Following the launch of their Holy Ghost wine and record pairing, DJ Muggs and Egon have teamed up with California’s Broc Cellars and its winemaker Chris Brockway for Notes & Tones: Deep natural wine meets deep jazz and rap samples on vinyl.

Natural wine can be the same, obscure type of thing as a natural hot dog. Natural in what way? As in it, in some way, originally came from nature? In this case, we mean an unadulterated wine made without chemical pesticides or fertilizers used in grape cultivation; a wine made without unnecessary intervention by the vintner without fining and filtering; and with little or no sulfites added to extend the wine’s shelf life.

In this case, this wine is a “living” – sensitive, evolving – thing. If you follow the biodynamic calendar, you might find it tastes different if you drink it on a “root” day or a “fruit” day. And you will probably find that it is not sanitized like the commercially produced, neutered and shelf-stabilized wine that is what 90% of wine consumers tend to drink. In other words, Notes & Tones is probably unlike most wines you have ever had.

This is a good thing. This is purposeful. Chris Brockway of Broc Cellars worked with Muggs and Egon to conceive, ferment, taste, blend and then bottle this homage to the skin-contact wines of yore brought into the modern day – those by the likes of Stanko Radikon in Italy and Xavier Caillard in France.

The only name that fit it was that of the landmark book by the great jazz drummer Art Taylor. Muggs complimented the wine with music that he and Egon sourced and cleared from the landmark catalog of the cosmic jazz musician Sun Ra. A Soul Assassins x Now-Again x Broc Cellars collaboration. 

Tracklist:
1. Notes & Tones Intro
2. What Planet
3. Liquid Diamonds
4. Notes & Tones, Skulls & Bones
5. It’s Spring Again
6. Third Planet
7. Space Is The Place
8. There Are other Worlds
9. Who’s Your God?
10. His Story
11. Quiet Ecstasy
12. Nebula
13. Rocket To Venus
14. Time Is An Illusion