New releases last eight weeks: Funk Soul & Jazz

Review: Reserved for Record Store Day comes this exciting new doublet from brilliant Brazilian jazz-funkers Azymuth, in the form of both an extended mix of their enduring major hit single from 1979, 'Jazz Carnival', and a fresh remix by Yambee, the duo of Ashley Beedle and Yam Who?. The original track was a rare slice of instrumental funk music, dare say instrumental music at all, to climb the UK charts and remain in its upper echelons for a solid twenty weeks. Though its initial popularity was lengthy, it has since then gone underground, becoming a throwback favourite of the likes of Kerri Chandler, Mr. Scruff and Gilles Peterson, to name but a few icons to play it back out over the years.

Review: Opa's Back Home was first reocrded in 1975 but not released until 1996; it was the fourth and final album by the esteemed Uruguayan fusion band, whose preferred admixture was usually some melted pot of funk and samba, making for an impressive heuristic building on their intuitive recalling of their mutual upbringing in South America. Mysteriously (for reasons unknown to the band), Opa's debut was shelved and remained so until the mid-1990s. But the story goes that it was recorded after renowned label producer and owner Larry Rosen heard the band playing in a Brooklyn nightclub; with this in mind, Back Home makes for an ironic title, since the sonic turn expressed by the band is not one of homesickness, but rather that of an immersion in New York's metamorphous music scene ('Brooklynville' has an instant proto-hip-hop vibe, if not for its original urban field recording, then certainly for its bulbous broken funk twang). Now reissued on vinyl and CD via Far Out, you won't want to miss this round trip.

Review: With this CD edition to complement the main LP reissue, we're once again met with the beauteous multi-instrumental talents of Agustin Pereyra Lucena, Argentina's finest. His self-titled debut record from 1970 is quite literally a 'bossa nova' (direct translation, 'novel swelling', 'new upswell'), doing justice to the genre name with a dialectical, pioneering regional take on already-established styles like samba and the aforementioned, informed by his outsider status as an Argentinian looking in on Brazil. Atypical for its time, Agustin's guitar playing never quite settles into any looping riff, instead revelling in free-associative improvs and overdubs of the crispest quality, both low and high in pitch range.