Featured

Caiphus Semenya, AKA Mr Letta Mbulu, is a South African legend, and Listen To The Wind, his iconic debut album, is simply a superb modern-soul/boogie album. It’s also incredibly rare, especially in good condition, so Be With is delighted to present this reissue.

Listen To The Wind is stylistically diverse but the ingredients are never diluted. There are elements of boogie, soul, funk and jazz, all shot through with pan-African flavour, and moving effortlessly from uptempo floor fillers to more meditative, slower soulful tracks. Produced by Caiphus himself, he makes full use of a stellar line up of session musicians including Nathan East, Michael Stanton, Sonny Burke and Paulinho DaCosta. And of course, there are Letta’s show-stopping vocals. To our ears, Listen To The Wind is just one big party, and lord knows we need that more than ever right now.

All that’s missing is you. – Be With Records

Brazilian Funk Soul Finest Record Collection. A tasty slice of '70s and '80s Brazilian Soul and Funk especially the one from the glorious ’70s. Soul and Funk was taking shape all over the world in the 1970s. Brazilians built on their own phenomenal music, combining it with influences of Funk and Soul music from abroad to create something uniquely Brazilian.

-

The disco-boogie-funk sound produced in Brazil in the late 70s and early 80s has been under the spotlight. Some records have become established classics and bestsellers. Many others have become cult records that have remained largely unknown to the general public, some of these rare records are now collected in the first volume of “Disco é Cultura”. - Bandcamp

“Full of soft big city eroticism, ultra-slick synth lines and real funkateer explosions.”

Nadja wrote all lyrics, vocals and choruses on the album herself, with arrangements coming from Sly & Robbie, Japanese producers and composers Yasuaki Shimizu and Akira Inoue, Japanese musician Hiroaki Goto, and French composer Areski Belkacem. - The Vinyl Factory

Jake Sollo (Born in Nigeria as Nkem Okonkwo) started his career in the 1960s as a member of The Hykkers, a popular band that drew large audiences across the country (even during the turmoil of the Biafra civil war). After The Hykkers disbanded, Jake joined the Aba-based super-group The Funkees…a musical outfit turned into instant superstars due to the State Broadcasting Service’s heavy rotation of their demo tracks. The Funkees became a phenomenon that spread across the country fast (and eventually to England where they were championed by the legendary John Peel). By 1976, due to creative and personal tensions, The Funkees slowly started disintegrating. Jake Sollo was soon offered the golden opportunity to join the ‘crème de la crème’ of Afro-rock groups: Osibisa. Jake’s distinctive rhythm guitar graced their hits, but his tenure with them was short-lived…in 1977, Sollo and two other members left the band because of financial disagreements.

Jake Sollo quickly moved on and did just fine after his experiences with said bands…he got steady work as a session musician and became a hot producer in the London scene. Eventually, that chapter came to a close as well (with budgets and visas to record in the UK becoming increasingly scarce at this point). Jake returned to Nigeria where he started recording and producing albums, during this period he became the MOST in-demand producer in Nigeria. – Light In The Attic

Classic LP!

Marcos Valle is one of the few artists you cannot miss if you have the slightest interest in Brazilian music. Whether your taste is focused on bossa jazz, samba, psych folk or soul, Valle has surely recorded a great album for you. By the late 60s he had already put out enough quality records to secure a place within the top Brazilian songwriters of all time, but his career luckily did not stop there and he continued releasing amazing music over the following decades until this day. He settled in Los Angeles in the mid-70s, tired of living under Brazil’s military dictatorship, and started to collaborate with such talented artists as Leon Ware or Chicago.

This self-titled LP from 1983 is the follow-up to the great “Vontade de rever você” (1981) and his second album after moving back to Brazil. It shows all the music influences received during his US years, especially boogie, soul and funk, featuring stellar collaborators: Lincoln Olivetti & Robson Jorge on keyboards and guitar and Leon Ware on backing vocals.

The opening track, the Brazilian boogie anthem ‘Estrelar’, is Marcos Valle’s biggest hit from the 80s and one of the most celebrated songs in his entire career, making clear that what he accomplished while in LA would now make its way into Brazil. ‘Estrelar’ is devoted to workout exercises under the sun and Valle pictures a beach lifestyle and summertime vibe across the entire album that pretty much describes his surfing days in Southern California. – HHV

Instead of re-releasing the entirety of ‘All Keyed Up’, Time Capsule and curator Pol Valls opted for a cut-down EP. Made up of ‘Eden Celebration’, ‘Melodic Heaven’ and the title track, which is presented in its original form, and as an extended Time Capsule Seaside Mix, it's a remarkable window into the freshness of creativity and vision that helped launch Tankard into a beautiful, lifelong career in music. And yet, as impressive as his story is, from the first listen, it becomes instantly apparent that the rainforest rhythms of ‘Eden Celebration’, the Linn drum jazz-funk of ‘Melodic Heaven’ and the sunset piano boogie of ‘All Keyed Up’ all stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the larger-than-life tales that swirl around Tankard. Wonderful, wonderful stuff. - Test Pressings