Browse by Artist: JAMAL CREATIVE ARTS ENSEMBLE, THE KHAN

Artist:	JAMAL CREATIVE ARTS ENSEMBLE, THE KHAN
Title:	Drum Dance To The Motherland
Label:	EM RECORDS (JAPAN)
Format:	LP
Price:	$20.00
Catalog #:	EM 1082LP

A special treat for the vinyl hounds! The long-awaited first vinyl reissue of The Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble's almost-impossible-to-find, 300 copies only, 1972 Drum Dance To The Motherland. Newly remastered and sounding great, this is a unique, uncategorizable expression of Afrocentric America -- freely-improvised (but not necessarily "free jazz"), pulsing, moving, restless, yet restful. Recorded live in the group's hometown of Philadelphia and originally released on the now-defunct Dogtown Records, the players masterfully combine all the currents of Afro-American music -- jazz, R'n'B, blues, funk and more -- in a manner not imitative of, but somehow informed by, the spiritually Afro-astral work of Sun Ra. Drums, percussion, bass, guitar, clarinets and the balaphon-influenced marimba and vibes of bandleader Khan Jamal are all wondrously-integrated and propelled into other dimensions by the heavy, dub-like use of live echo and reverb by "sixth member" sound engineer Mario Falana (dancer/actress Lola Falana's brother!). Trippy! There is an abundance of fine playing in these grooves: tasty guitar, propulsive bass lines, layers of percussion, wailing clarinets, Jamal's vibes and marimba, all periodically carried farther out on waves of echo, and farther in via cavernous reverb. "Thirty years after its release, the album's tapestry of sound, fearless abstractions, relentless grooves, cool swing, flashes of ecstasy, and pan cultural embrace remain powerful and beyond category. This long overdue reissue rescues from obscurity a really stunning document of musical exploration, a classic session that perhaps now will acquire the status it has always deserved." --From the liner notes by Ed Hazell; Khan Jamal (vibraphone, marimba, clarinet); Alex Ellison (drums, percussion); Dwight James (drums, glockenspiel, clarinet); Billy Mills (Fender bass, double bass); Monnette Sudler (guitar, percussion).

Artist:	JAMAL CREATIVE ARTS ENSEMBLE, THE KHAN
Title:	Drum Dance To The Motherland
Label:	EREMITE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	MTE 050CD

Classic reissue of this 1974 private press album! "There's not another record on the planet that sounds even remotely like vibraphonist Khan Jamal's eccentric, one-of-a-kind masterpiece, Drumdance to the Motherland. In its improbable fusion of free jazz expressionism, Black psychedelia, & full-on dub-like production techniques, Drumdance remains a bracingly powerful outsider statement thirty-four years after it was recorded live at the Catacombs Club in Philadelphia in 1972. Comparisons to Sun Ra, King Tubby, Phil Cohran & BYG/Actuel merely hint at the cosmic otherness conjured by the band & by recording engineer Mario Falana's real-time 'enhancements.' The first edition of three hundred copies, issued by Jamal in 1973 on the local Philadelphia label Dogtown, was barely distributed outside the city's limits. Since then Drumdance has assumed a mythic status among the very few aficionados, eBay mutants, & heads who know of it at all. Hallelujah that it can finally be heard outside their murky inner-sanctums!"

Previous Page Index of Artists Next Page