Lost my groove there for a second, with the start of the semester, but getting back into, with this post and the one tomorrow, where I dust off “The Melting Pot Radio Hour,” to spend a little more time with vinyl I dug up in the previous year. While I didn’t buy that many 45s, the same could not be said of LPs. 2020 was on par with more recent years (though not quite as much as my all-time year of record therapy in 2015), even though I only made it to three stores all year long, and most of my buying was in spurts & batches. I’m not sure if there were any themes in what I picked up, though I feel like I focused on getting more than a few records I’d wanted to get for a long time, as well as a number of things that I hadn’t heard at all until someone put it on my radar, and then I immediately had to have it. As ever, I’m always amazed by how many records are out there still to be discovered. After a little over 25 years as a collector/DJ, the record game continues to surprise me, which gives me hope that there’ll never be a day in the future where I won’t want to share the sounds I discover. For now, here are the top 5 LPs I tracked down in 2020.

Vincent Gemignani – Ophis Le Serpentaire

This one came my way along with a small grip of records from a dealer in France. I hadn’t heard anything from Gemignani prior to checking this album out, but hearing just a few seconds of the vibe was all I needed. There’s apparently another version of this LP with suitably groovy cover art, but I’m more than happy to have this one in my collection, and you’ll definitely hear more from it in a later post.

Dom Salvador – Tio Macro

This one has been on my want list for at least five years, when I first heard a tune from it from one of Joel of Tropicalia In Furs Ebay sales. As a big fan of Brazilian music, there’s little doubt why I’ve been fiending for it once you hear “Tio Macro,” with it’s heavy drums and slinky piano and subtle psychedelic tones. And then…and then, everything drops out in the final moments and you have nothing but clean, booming drums. The whole album is a real treat, and it’s always nice when you’ve long wanted an album that it turns out to be so much more than just the one track that hooked you to begin with. Easily one of my favorite Brazilian jazz/samba/funk albums ever.

Flow – Here We Are Again

I’ve already written a good bit about this album. Highlighting it here reminds me that I need to track down those other vocal non-jazz albums on CTI. Hard to fathom that any of them could be as good as this folk/psych/jazz/country marvel.

Steve Kuhn – Meaning Of Love

Even though there was only one proper Rappcats pop-up in 2020, Egon still had a sizeable influence on my tastes. The thing that I appreciate about collectors and DJs like Egon is that they rarely hold back when there are albums that they truly love and that they want people to hear. There were multiple posts about this album, which is a real contender for a “Don’t Judge A Record By It’s Cover” award, and hearing just a snippet of it, along with Egon’s effusive praise, was enough to get me to track one down. “Meaning Of Love” is my favorite track on the album and though it’s new to my ears, it’s clear it’s gonna be a long time favorite, as are many of the other songs on this wonderfully eclectic album.

David Astri – Safe And Sound

There were a lot of very rare records, definitely more expensive records, that I picked up last year, but nothing gave me as much pleasure as this solitary album from David Astri. So much of that is connected to “Safe And Sound,” which about as close to perfect as an early 1980s song can be. Finally sorted out that the lovely vocalist on the tune was Karen Goldberg, who recorded an album of her own, with Astri in tow, from around the same time, but nothing on there compares to the magic they achieved on “Safe And Sound.” Without a doubt, there wasn’t a song I listened to on repeat as much as this one during the wild year that was 2020, which cements it’s place at the top of this list.

2020 was an interesting year on many fronts. In comparison to recent years, I didn’t buy a bunch of 45s, in fact, in total I only got 13 over the course of the year. A big part of that is of course pandemic related, since a major source of my 45 digs over the last several summers would be from hauls at the Rappcats pop-ups, especially the annual one hosted by DJ Shadow. But though the pile of 45s was meager, the ones that I did pick up were a mighty bunch. And so, here are the top 5 45s I “dug” up in 2020!

MFQ – Every Minute Of Every Day

This is actually one that I had bought years earlier only to have it disappear in the mail (or perhaps off my porch after delivery, one never knows these days). For a time I think I held out hope that it was just taking a long long time to get to me, but after a while I think I simply moved on to other wants and desires. But then during the summer with my 45th birthday on the horizon and a plan to do an all 45s mix, this one, something I originally heard on Matthew Africa’s last mix, was one that I definitely wanted in that mix. And so, I rolled the dice again and thankfully this time it arrived safe and sound.

Pure Pleasure – By My Side

I first heard this one late, late into the night at Funky Sole, from Music Man Miles. We’d reached the portion of the night where it was almost closing time, there were only a few handfuls of people still there and we were playing things that we really dug, but were hesitant to drop in a set with a crowded dance floor. Pretty much as soon as the needle dropped and those horns started, I was in love. Historically, it’s pretty rare for me to pick up any funky stuff from the 1980s. It’s not that I don’t dig the sound, it’s just there’s so much more from the 1960s and 1970s that I 100% dig and, for me at least, the quality of funky tunes drops way off in the 1980s. However, “By My Side,” is nothing but quality and is the kind of thing that really gets me rethinking my prejudices as a collector.

Doris & Kelley – You Don’t Have To Worry

I’m not sure where I heard this first…I feel like Oliver Wang of Soul-Sides was involved in one way or another, either from a post, or a share at a Rappcats pop-up, but my memory for this one is a bit hazy on that front, something I’m just gonna chalk up to lingering 2020 mental haze. I picked this up at the same time as the Thom Macke 45 that’s also on this list, though as I mentioned in the original post on that one, this arrived a month before that one was found after being lost. I don’t have much to add from my early post on this sweet, sweet tune, except to say that it’s sweetness never fades with repeated listens, particularly Doris’ phrasing at the close of every line she sings…so sweet and fine.

Donald Jenkins & The Delighters – Music Revolution

While I couldn’t recall where I first heard Doris & Kelley’s “You Don’t Have To Worry,” I know that I first heard this one 100% from Oliver of Soul-Sides, after he’d been hipped to it from another of our Sociology soul brothers, Steve Osuna. As I mentioned in a previous post, it’s one of the tightest, sweetest, most soulful tunes I’ve heard in a mighty long time, a truly dynamite Soul Boulder, and well deserving it’s inclusion of the best 45s I tracked down last year.

Thom Macke – Lonely Weekends

I’ve said a ton of words about this one already. I felt lucky just to have come across it during a bit of digital digging for music last Summer. But then to track it down from a dealer, only to have them say it was lost, and then to have it be found and make it safe and sound into my collection before my 45th, that was for real for real one of my absolute highlights of 2020. From the production, to the performance, to the sentiment in the lyrics, without a doubt this was the best thing I picked up over the past year.

Beast – Inlook
Beast – Communication
Beast – Don’t You Think It’s Time
Beast – Migration

As I’ll detail next week in the New Year when I post my traditional rundowns of records I picked up over the past year, despite not being able to go out for much of 2020, I still did quite a lot of record therapy.  With a year like this one I was especially thankful to be able to be able to close it out with a trip to one of my favorite LA spots, Avalon Vintage.  Today marked only the third time I was actually in a physical record store during this year.  As bonafide record nerd/addict, in usual year there might be some days that I’d go to three stores, let alone weeks or months, so as I said, being able to close out this year actually being able to dig through a collection in person was about as nice a way as 2020 could close out.

And what a person.  Rodney is one of my favorite record people.  His tastes are broad, he tells the most amazing stories connected to his life and music and it’s always a joy to be in his space, newly re-designed a few months ago.

Perhaps it’s fitting the final record (well, in truth, I bought a bunch of records today), is by a band called Beast, since 2020 was such a beast of a year.  There’s not a whole lot that I know about this group, a seven piece outfit at this time, apparently based originally out of Denver, Colorado.  I have vague memories of seeing this record, somewhere, at some point in the past, and having the cover haunt me until now.  Now that I’ve actually listened to the album, with songs like “Inlook,” “Communication,” “Migration” and “Don’t You Think It’s Time?,” it’s a little hard to believe I haven’t had a copy before.  In terms of their sound, there’s many elements in Beast that I love dearly, there’s a bit of hard psych (“Move Mountain,” which I’m not sharing is maybe the best example of that), with more pastoral sounds, as well as CSNY harmonies, all mixed up with a bit of jazz, and some flightly flute.  After a year of so much uncertainty and (as I’ve written below) so much loss, it was nice to finish the year doing one of the things I’ve done the most in my life…digging for new and old sounds and finding a few gems of records along the way.  So, looking forward to 2021 and can’t wait for my “I Survived 2020” T-shirt to arrive.  Happy New Years folks!

Stanley Cowell – Travelin’ Man
Stanley Cowell – Trying To Find A Way
Stanley Cowell – Lullaby

Roughly a day or two after I’d already recorded and sent of the December “Moods” focused on “Adoration” for those we lost in 2020, we learned of the passing of someone who I likely would have started or closed the show with, Stanley Cowell.  For those of us who are fans of “spiritual jazz,” the label that Cowell co-foudned with Charles Tolliver, Strata East, is perhaps the gold standard.  All of the albums were artist controlled and they are some of the most magnificent music that was produced in the 1970s.  I first learned about Strata East from the 1997 Universal Sound/Soul Jazz collection of music from the label, “Strata 2 East.”  This was around the period of time that I was really getting deeper and deeper into digging for vinyl, and the sounds really hit the sweet spot in terms of the kind of jazz music I was increasingly interested in.  Music that you rarely heard on the radio in those days, growing up in Atlanta with a landscape dominated by WCLK, featuring virtually all-Jazz programming, though tendingh tended towards more of a straight ahead approach.  The only time that WCLK didn’t play Jazz during those days was on Sundays in the afternoon, when they’d play multiple hours of gospel.  WRAS, wisely chose that time to play Don Kennedy’s “Big Band Jump,” and a jazz show that I initially founded with James Diggs, Darryl “G-Wiz” Felker (and named by G-Wiz), “The Blue Note.”  Over time James and Darryl weren’t able to keep up hosting duties and so the show was all mine for the last two years I was at the station, until 1998.  In addition to focusing on jazz funk and dance floor jazz, spiritual jazz was a major component of the show, sounds which again, you so rarely heard anywhere in those largely pre-internet days.  Interestingly enough, after leaving WRAS, a station that had sold off it’s jazz library before I’d ever gotten there, I found myself at WORT in Madison, Wisconsin, with maybe the best jazz record library I’ve ever seen, including at least 30 Strata East original albums.  One that the station didn’t have and one that I searched high and low for many years until I finally got a copy last year around my birthday was this one from Cowell, something I’d long wanted for the version of “Travelin’ Man,” which was featured on the Strata 2 East compilation mentioned above.

Cowell recorded two versions of “Travelin’ Man,” on 1974’s “Musa-Ancestral Streams” and here.  This version (which also features some lovely flute from Jimmy Heath, who passed in January of 2020) isn’t just my favorite of the two, it’s one of my all-time favorite tunes from those Strata East albums.  Part of it is the sound, part of it is the sentiment, sung so lovingly, primarily by Charles Fowlkes Jr.

“I’m a travelin’ man, never stopping, but moving on, moving on…I’m a travelin’ man, trying my best to understand what’s going on, goin’ on…”

As someone who has lived in multiple states and has had 14 different residences in the 25 years since my mother passed, it’s safe to say that the song resonates deeply with me, as do “Trying To Find A Way,” and the album’s closing, “Lullaby.” It’s gorgeous, spiritual, life-affirming music.  Something that could only come from artists fully and completely self-determining their own production and creating exactly what they wanted to create with each other.  My life is made so much brighter by the records that Cowell had a hand in through the creation of Strata East, I’m so thankful to have been in a position for many years to share that music and spread it far and wide.  RIP