Dinner Music #191: The weekly lineup

Dinner Music is a labor of love. If you’ve discovered new music that you love through the project, consider becoming a paid subscriber to continue supporting it, plus you’ll get access to past playlists and subscriber-only playlists and posts.

This week we’re listening to reissues from this year and last year. These are albums that might’ve only pressed 100 copies on their original run or are beloved records that folks never stopped listening to. The reissues come from all over the world and are all kinds of genres. We’ve got a lot of jazz, funk, psychedelic rock, acid folk, electronic, new wave, and more. It was incredibly difficult to choose only five albums, so I’ve listed a few more you can check out on your own. Each song on the playlist was included in a reissue this year as well. There are a lot of labels doing this work now—sourcing rare records, working with the artists or their families to bring the work back, occasionally remastering, then all the work it takes to re-press and re-release the album. Habibi Funk is a big one which re-releases records from Arab countries, but a few other labels, including the ones listed below, are Mr. Bongo, Soundway, Numero, Dust-to-Digital, Blue Note, Analog Africa, ORG music, Now-Again, and so many more. Each label could have an DM edition of their own. The Smithsonian also has their Folkways project, which reissues a lot of American folk music (they release new music, too). On why reissue labels do what they do, Hilary Staff, a former member of Light in the Attic and now a music supervision and self-described “audio paleontologist,” said in DJ Mag:

“The music is like dinosaur bones…You dust off the bones, and you put them in a museum. That’s what reissue labels do, they help to put these wonders of the world on display.”

That article also goes into the complexity that goes into reissuing. If you’re interested in the inner workings, and what can and does go wrong, read it!

We begin with Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat by Charanjit Singh, a multi-instrumentalist and composer who spent much of his career as a Bollywood session musician. The record blends the ancient Indian tradition of ragas (“a melodic framework, similar to a scale, from which musicians can improvise or compose”) with electronic dance beats made with then-state-of-the-art Roland synthesizers and drum machines, like the Jupiter-8 synth, the TR-808 and TB-303. This is an album way ahead of its time, which “which uncannily anticipated the sound of Chicago acid house by five years.”1 We move into Lucky 7 from Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound, one of the best-selling salsa records of all time, which was reissued to mark its 50th anniversary. Soulful, groovy, and dancefloor-ready, Lucky 7 is a good listen from top-to-bottom, one that will lift you from your chair no matter where you are, physically or mentally. We change vibe entirely with Gathering Of Promises from Bubble Puppy, a debut record from a late-60s Texas psych rock band. Of course I had to include this, as a Texan and an Austinite, where this style of music is still very much alive. In grad school, I even wrote a paper on the punk scene in the 70s, of which Bubble Puppy was a precursor:

Austin was the mecca, with many people journeying into the city for their regeneration from small-town kid to punk rock change-maker. It represented a frontier of sorts, something new and unknown, but also an opportunity for reinvention and community.

This record in particular was called one of the “most electrifying albums ever to emerge from the Lone Star State’s psychedelic frontier.” Next, we have the long-lost record Nishigaito Kenchiku from Jugatsu No Ame, a psych folk record recorded by high school friends Minoru Sasaki and Masanori Nishigaito who spent their days rehearsing in a decrepit abandoned hospital. They self-released the album and only pressed 100 copies. On the reissue, the audio was restored and remastered, so the new press sounds excellent, but still with the DIY fuzz and crackle. We end with African Skies by Kelan Phil Cohran & Legacy, a cosmic, searching album that was originally recorded in the early 90s for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Kelan Phil Cohran was best known for playing trumpet Sun Ra Arkestra in Chicago from 1959 to 1961 and African Skies is one of his few releases outside of his work with Sun Ra. On the record,

“the instrumentation is entirely unique, with two double basses, two harps and a world of percussion laying the foundation for melodic explorations of cornet, voice and the Frankiphone – Cohran’s hand-built, ethereal-sounding electrified Kalimba.”2

It’s a searching and highly transcendental album.

Enjoy.

Question: Any other reissues you’ve listened to lately? Or any albums you love that you wished would be reissued?