Yellowjackets
Samurai Samba

2022 Record Store Day edition on Blue vinyl!Azymuth's career-defining LP Light As A Feather returns. Home to their worldwide disco/fusion hit single ‘Jazz Carnival’, the samba-doido staple 'Partido Alto', and the proto-deep house masterpiece ‘Avenida Das Mangueiras’, this album typifies the trio’s tireless innovation in the fields of jazz, funk, samba and cosmic music perhaps more so than any of their other ground-breaking records from its era.Their first release on Milestone Records in 1979, it quickly became one of the best-selling LPs of the year, staying in the UK Top 20 for eight straight weeks with more than half a million copies sold. An incredibly well thought out album both in pace, song selection and musicality, ‘Light As A Feather’ marked a maturing of the band as they began to rightfully utilise the studio as an instrument itself, embracing numerous mixing and recording techniques not yet common for the time as well as pioneering the use of the Big Muff and Dolby System to great effect. The result is an album that endures to this day as a samba/jazz-funk masterpiece.First reissued in 2012, the Far Out edition of this seminal recording was remixed and re-mastered from the original 16-track tapes, which were given to Joe Davis by Azymuth. This latest version is the first ever issue to be complete with a download card that that gives access to previously unreleased tracks, including the incredible full length version of 'Jazz Carnival', as well as remixes from house stalwarts Theo Parrish, Ashley Beedle, and Mark E.

In May 1972, the wave of anger and the thirst for freedom that had swept the world in 1968 arrived in Madagascar. The Malagasy youth took the opportunity to exile in search of a brighter future. Several of them, all jazz musicians and often polyintrumentalists, came to Paris with their afro hair and bellbottoms. Their names were Sylvin Marc, his cousin Ange "Zizi" Japhet, Del Rabenja, Gérard Rakotoarivony and Frank Raholison.By chance, they crossed paths with pianist and bandleader Jef Gilson, who they had already met as kids during a series of concert and workshops in Tananarive four years earlier. Gilson was far from an unknown on the French jazz scene. He had played with Boris Vian and André Hodeir at the end of the forties, he was one of the first French composers to move away from the New-Orleans style to try his hand at bebop, had launched numerous young stars (Ponty, Texier, Portal...), was a polemical critic for Jazz Hot, had opened for Coltrane at Antibes/Juan Les Pins, and was part of the Double Six... But it was tough to make a living playing personal compositions and Jef, who didn’t have enough money to return to the island and continue mining the seam of Malagasy jazz, saw an opportunity to relaunch ‘Malagasy’.He had his recording studio in the Les Halles area, at the Foyer Montorgueil, where he was teaching jazz to a choir. He set to work with the new Malagasy group, working on a repertoire and reviving some of his compositions from the 50s/60s ("Requiem Pour Django", "Dizzy 48", "Anamorphose" here renamed "Salegy Jef" as a nod to an ancestral rhythm reworked in a contemporary style...), and also included more recent tunes ("Newport Bounce" which opens this current album is a reworking of a track called "Interlude", recorded in 69 with the drummer from Miles Davis’ first quintet, Philly Joe Jones). The group Malagasy 73 gigged a lot. One of their concerts was recorded on the 14 March in a club, ‘Le Newport’, in rue Grégoire de Tours, Saint Germain des Prés, not far from the ‘Kiosque d'Orphée’ where Gilson worked at the beginning of the 60s when he brought bebop and avant-garde jazz to the attention of a generation of musicians with his records imported from USA.This meeting between two generations and two cultures created a new mix between jazz, traditional music and electric funk. Jef Gilson had reinvented himself yet again, and it wouldn’t be the last time.

Despite the futurism that the title of the set might imply, the material on this LP is actually some of Sun Ra's earliest, and dates back to the years when the Arkestra was first beginning to make itself heard in Chicago.That doesn't stop the material from being amazing, though, as these prime early tracks really show how strong Ra's vision was, even when it was being applied to material that might look more simple on the surface.