[Today: My Uncle Henry passes along an afro funk classic...]
There are certain benefits to being a certified music geek. Foremost among these is that when friends & family are discarding their record collections, they generally think of you. This is never a bad thing, and sometimes it’s a GREAT thing. Case in point: my Uncle Henry decided to give me his vinyl a few years back. Little did I know at the time that this literally entailed thousands (!) of records that spanned every genre imaginable. These have been coming to me several produce boxes at a time over the last few years. My uncle knows music, and I’m uber-lucky he decided to keep his albums in the family.
When my mom and step-dad paid the P and I a visit a few weeks back, they brought us a few more boxes of Henry’s “produce”. Honestly, for me, getting free records (especially Henry’s) is as close as I can get in my heart to how I felt on Christmas day as a kid. The unbridled joy of knowing something good – and deliciously unexpected – is waiting, well, that’s how I feel when I start flipping through these boxes. There’s the usual smorgasbord of 70′s Funk, 60′s garage bands, free jazz, calypso, Grateful Dead (Rhythm Devils’ Apocalypse Now Sessions anyone?), Blues, freaky soundtracks – as well as an unusually deep selection of Olivia Newton John albums that Henry vehemently disavowed any knowledge of through a series of carefully worded Post-It notes (yeah right!).
Midway through the second box, I stumble on two Osibisa albums. Their self-titled debut (which has equally head-friendly artwork), and this one, which I’ve played about 23 times in the last two weeks. It might be good. It might be great. More than likely it’s somewhere in between. But for me this will always be the album that conjures fist-pumping memories of my own personal Christmas 2007.
[The P tells me that Osibisa means "criss-cross rhythm that explodes with happiness" - her Ghanaian classes are paying obvious dividends...]
Tags: Heads, Olivia Newton John, Osibisa, Uncle Henry
3 August 2007 at 4:02 pm |
[...] dk presents… It’s all about the music « Buried Treasure: Heads [...]
5 November 2007 at 9:49 am |
[...] & Afrika 70 * Zombie – Yet another in a long line of outstanding records that have come to me by way of my Uncle Henry. This afro-funk burner features two album-side length songs, and is the perfect record to drop the [...]
21 November 2007 at 8:57 pm |
[...] My Uncle Henry – He’s passed along nearly 2000 primo albums over the last couple of years. Huge props for [...]
17 February 2008 at 8:32 pm |
[...] display of Afrobeat prowess, but this one is memorable because it was my first chance to take my Uncle Henry to The Fillmore. He lived in SF during the late 60’s and early 70’s and visited all of [...]
18 March 2008 at 9:10 am |
[...] Your Own Adventure I stumbled across this record in our stacks the other day (yet another Uncle Henry special) and decided that rather than trying to find out the history of this group, it would be infiinitely [...]
5 November 2009 at 5:08 am |
Fortunately for me, Osibisa’s full aural onslaught ensued when I was merely 15 years of age in the form of Heads… a second intro to African pop-jazz in the wake of Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa. At that age, I had to (needed to) hear EVERYTHING from Miles to King Crimson, Marley to Chopin with some Om Kalthoum on da side. But Heads kept me listening, for the most part, due to its obvious big-fun, rhythmic recipe. Thank you one and all!
PS Your Uncle Henry certainly knows the meaning of the term heirloom!