David Axelrod - 1968 To 1970: An Anthology

I wrote about David Axelrod last year, a nifty little piece of writing that I'm pretty happy with. So there's no need to revisit how I got to my fandom; just some words to talk about where it's going.

This is the first anthology Stateside put out, back in 1999. Like its successor, it covers Axelrod's three solo records for Capitol, along with tracks from Lou Rawls and Cannonball Adderly. The difference here are a pair of cuts Axelrod produced for South African singer Letta Mbutu, someone who I'd never heard before and whose music probably bears the least amount of production fingerprint on it. There are also two songs from the Electric Prunes, who once had too much to dream last night, but here contribute from their final record on Reprise, 1968's "Release Of An Oath". It's bonkers how great these cuts are; psychedelic liturgies from Christian and Jewish traditions. It's holy music like Coltrane's finest; imaginative, cutting edge, totally unlike anything else happening at the same time.

What can I say? I like it. It never leaves my phone.

Discogs

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David Axelrod - Anthology II

You start with Terminator X, with a tape you bought in Quebec City in 1992 and hid the entire trip home from your grandparents, and work within a year backwards to "Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel". From there, you jog sideways to Grand Masters Kaz and Theodore on the "Wild Style" soundtrack. You sprint forward to chase everyone on "Masters of the 1s & 2s", and you end up with Coldcut, Invisibl Scratch Piklz, DJ Shadow, which takes you into Solesides/Quannum, Deltron 3030, and the guy whose sound underpins much of it: David Axelrod.

Soul-funk and jazz-funk were, when I was a kid, fucking jokes, the realm of bare-chested hipsters with Fu Manchus and perms, stinking of cologne and dusted with cocaine. But to view both genres through that stereotype is like saying Judaism is all space lasers and blood libels; it just ain't true. They're black as fuk, harder than hell, proto-hip hop that just grooved so hard. And David Axelrod's production fingerprints were all over it. I thought I'd written about him before, but it sure seems not to be the case. In addition to his solo work, most of which has been reissued by Now-Again over the past ten years, he produced so many standout records for Capitol in the 60s and 70s. Lou Rawls, Cannonball and Nat Adderly, Stan Kenton, Willie Tee; these, along with his solo work, make up a body of work that still isn't fully acknowledged by any but the deeper crate diggers.

Alright, I've waxed poetic enough. I like David Axelrod. I like his stuff a lot. It seems like a real miss that so many of his records, even the inconsistent ones, remain out of print. This anthology came out in the UK in 2002, I'm guessing it was to ride off the attention brought by his self-titled record on Mo'Wax that came out the year before. This one has a pair of stone-cold Lou Rawls classics, two from Cannonball Adderly, two from actor David McCallum that are pretty great, and, of course, a bunch of cuts from Axelrod's three Capitol releases. Listen for yourself. I won't fault you for unbuttoning your shirt down to your navel and pouring some brown liquor.

Discogs

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