Richard “Groove” Holmes - The Best of the Pacific Years
I can’t imagine there’s much range between the “left” and “right” of the soul jazz market, but surely Holmes was about as “right” as it was possible to get, especially when you consider this collection of recordings covers almost the entire decade of the 60s and doesn’t vary a whole lot in sound. Where a lot of organists were moving to choppier and cleaner sounds, Holmes’ organ dates right back to the original Jimmy Smith recordings, with huge, almost campy sounding Hammond swells, all of it feeling like revival songs from a church. Most of the jammier material tends to be up front as well, which means one’s left with an even more conservative impression after the collection’s final shorter tracks. I found it all OK, if a bit on the cheesy side, certainly work from Lonnie Smith, John Patton, Jimmy McGriff and others were a bit more exciting than this. On the other hand, it’s always possible this collection was tilted to a more populist angle.
The Matadors s/t
Apparently the original psych group of Modry Efekt’s brilliant guitar player Radim Hladik, The Matadors were an early Czechoslovakian group who released one album and several singles in the late 60s all of which move all over the psychedelic genre from the poppy to the experimental and jammy. The reissue, filled to the brim, more or less compiles all of this material and for the most part it’s an album of a few jumps as the variety of styles the band flirted with are navigated. Some of it, naturally, is a bit corny and dated, but as the band grows with the times so does the music. Definitely one for collectors and in many ways I find it anagous to Bambi Fossati’s original band Gleemen where you can find the roots of the tree that would unfold with later band incarnations.