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A landmark anthology originally released in 2001 documents how James “Plunky Nkabinde” Branch and his groups connected jazz, R&B, and funk through Afrocentric rhythms and spirituality.

African Rhythms 1970-82 wonderfully sums the sound James Branch and his colleagues plugged into in the late ’60s, which harkens to the one that poet/critic LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) predicted as “Unity Music” in his 1966 essay “The Changing Same”: a “Black Music which is religious and secular.” Jones foresaw …“a social spiritualism” that would resolve all the “artificial oppositions” in Black music, and include “all the rhythms, all the yells and cries, all that information about the world, the Black ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, opening and entering.” Plunky’s still playing it on his Richmond front porch. Go check him out. – Pitchfork