New Big Cats video / Haze LP

Seems like Twin Cities Funk & Soul Week just won’t die around here. The mayor and the city council made the proclamation to celebrate the release of a collection of rare local jams by Secret Stash Records (see the proclamation here). The week ended with a show featuring artists on the original recordings, including Wanda Davis, the Valdons, and members of the Prophets of Peace and the Band of Thieves. I covered the story for City Pages – you can read the article here, and a review of the show on their music blog, Gimme Noise, here.

Yesterday I opened my mailbox to find a message from Big Cats, the hip hop producer who will be releasing his third album next month, and a link the video for the first single, “One,” just out this week.

We’re excited to host a listening party for the new album, For my Mother, this Saturday after our regular closing time at 7pm. In a way, this record is the opposite of his latest collaboration with the Tribe (Space, hear it here) because it’s an instrumental album free of samples. Well, free of them in a way. Instead of crate digging with the regulars we see here at Hymie’s every day, Big Cats made his newest beats by assembling his own band and recording over 10 hours of soul to sample, including “enough drum beats for a lifetime” performed by Graham O’Brien (whose own work you can see here or with the trio No Bird Sing). For my Mother is, in short, an amazing collaboration of music performance and beat making. You’ll have a chance to hear it and to meet Big Cats and some of the musicians on the album this Saturday night here at the shop.

Also this week, just a little too late for the official Funk & Soul Week, is this awesome local LP which rarely passes through the shop:

You may recall having read about this band in the City Pages a couple years ago (here’s a link to the great article by Emily Kaiser). Since their reunion in 2010, ASI Records has reissued their first album on vinyl, which we have in stock at Hymie’s, and the band has issued CDs of that one as well as their two “un-issued” LPs. I say un-issued because copies of the record above leaked out, presumably through the band’s management, and still surface from time to time.

You can buy albums and CDs direct from the band on their webpage (here). You can also read more about their history, they claim to be the first R&B band from Minnesota to chart a single (#38 on the R&B chart in 1975). Since they seem to keep pretty tight control over their music, I’m only putting up short samples of tracks from the LP in the shop. You’ll have to buy a copy to hear the whole, awesome n’ funky jams.

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(“Let’s Have a Party” / “Music is my Life” / “Let the Disco Funk Your Mind” samples)