The Delfonics - 2007 - La La Means I Love You / Sound of Sexy Soul

 

Kent Soul – CDKEND 287  379.91MB FLAC

Eddie Chacon - 2023 - Sundown

 

Stones Throw Records – STH2478  198.36MB FLAC

Before Eddie Chacon’s biography catches up with him, Sundown already feels like a room you have entered at an unusual hour. Electric keyboards glow without becoming bright. Flute, trombone and hand percussion drift through the arrangements without announcing themselves as features. The drums carry the songs forward, but never push them out of their reverie. At the center is Chacon’s voice, thin in places, warm in others, moving between a low conversational murmur and a falsetto that seems to arrive from farther away than the microphone.

Nothing on the record behaves quite as expected. It is soul music, but it does not lean on the familiar signals of revivalist soul. It is carefully arranged, yet the musicians sound as though they are listening for the songs at the same moment we are. There are traces of private-press funk, spiritual jazz, yacht rock, electronic minimalism and late-night Los Angeles studio music, but the album never settles into any one of them.

James TB’s first description of it was wonderfully disorienting: James Ferraro taking mushrooms and attempting a soul-funk version of Steely Dan while playing a house party for Snoop Dogg. That strange combination gets close to the atmosphere. Sundown is sophisticated without sounding slick, relaxed without becoming casual, and psychedelic without covering itself in obvious effects. It feels expensive and homemade at once.

The man singing it has traveled far enough to make those contradictions sound natural.

Eddie Chacon grew up in Hayward and Castro Valley in a second-generation Mexican American family. His parents ran a trucking business based in Oakland, placing his early life firmly inside the industrial and suburban East Bay rather than the imaginary California suggested by record-company photographs. Music arrived through every side of the household.

His mother loved Elvis Presley and Rod Stewart. His father listened to jazz figures such as Johnny Hartman and Dave Brubeck. One of Chacon’s brothers brought home Led Zeppelin, Robin Trower, Pink Floyd and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Another was drawn to Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross singing Billie Holiday material in Lady Sings the Blues.

Chacon himself absorbed James Brown, the Delfonics, Bloodstone, Sly Stone, Tower of Power and Lydia Pense of Cold Blood. He has described his singing voice as a kind of puzzle assembled from those different influences. The croon came from one source, the rasp from another, the falsetto from somewhere else. Sundown makes sense as the work of someone who never learned to regard rock, jazz, funk, pop and soul as separate rooms.

His first band already connected him to a startling piece of Bay Area music history. At around 12 years old, Chacon played in a neighborhood group called Fry By Nite with Mike Bordin and Cliff Burton. Bordin later became a founding member of Faith No More, while Burton became the bassist in Metallica.

Chacon did not follow them into heavy music, but his career would be no less strange.

After playing with the San Francisco band the Toys, he moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s and entered what he later described as his corporate period. He worked as a staff songwriter for CBS Songs and pursued a solo career through Columbia Records. The industry could hear ability in him, but could not seem to decide what kind of artist he was supposed to become.

When that version of his career failed to take hold, Chacon went to Miami and became involved with Luther Campbell’s circle. Working under the name Edward Anthony Lewis, he moved through sessions connected to the Dust Brothers and received an engineering credit on 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty as They Wanna Be.

That detail feels nearly impossible when placed beside Sundown. The singer heard here, surrounded by brushed textures and meditative keyboards, once passed through one of the loudest and most controversial records of the late 1980s. Yet this is part of what makes him so difficult to categorize. Eddie Chacon did not emerge from a single musical tradition. He kept crossing through scenes that were not expected to touch.

His greatest commercial success came after he moved to New York and met Charles Pettigrew. The story has them encountering one another on the C train through a copy of Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man, although Chacon has admitted that neither man could later remember which one of them was carrying it.

Both were songwriters connected to the same Capitol Records executive. They began working together constantly, writing in apartments, taxis and wherever else an idea appeared. As Charles & Eddie, they released “Would I Lie to You?” in 1992.

The song became an international hit, reaching number one in several countries and helping the duo sell millions of records. Their first album, Duophonic, presented Chacon inside a polished early-1990s soul-pop world, full of major-label precision but informed by deeper musical knowledge than its smooth surfaces initially suggested.

That success did not last. Their second album, Chocolate Milk, appeared in 1995, after which the partnership gradually fell apart. Pettigrew was experiencing severe personal losses, while Chacon has acknowledged that he was still thinking in terms of career momentum and did not fully understand what his partner was enduring.

They eventually resumed speaking and sharing musical ideas. A reunion seemed possible. Then Chacon learned that Pettigrew had died of cancer in 2001 without having told him that he was ill.

The loss changed the meaning of everything they had accomplished together. Chacon later described looking around at the gold records in his home and realizing that the one person who had traveled with him from uncertainty and poverty into international success was no longer there.

He continued writing and producing for other people, but his connection to music began to disappear. During the 2000s, he walked into the home studio that had once been central to his life and felt that nobody was waiting to hear another Eddie Chacon song.

He dismantled the room and placed the equipment in storage.

What he expected to be a temporary pause grew into nearly two decades.

A friend eventually gave him a camera and suggested that he might have an eye for photography. Chacon began a second creative life in fashion photography and art direction, later working as creative director for Autre magazine. This part of his history matters when looking at Sundown. The man on the cover is not a forgotten singer being dressed and positioned by people half his age. Chacon had spent years learning how a face, a garment, a patch of empty space or an awkward posture could carry meaning.

The cover gives him very little room and somehow makes that smallness powerful. His portrait sits inside a wide field of gray. The lettering has the ornate severity of an old religious book. His age is visible, but it is not treated as a problem to solve. The image does not promise youthful energy or nostalgic comfort. It simply asks the viewer to look longer.

Justin Sloane directed the artwork and typography, using his Notre Ami typeface, developed from lettering found on a French book cover from 1929. Jack McKain made the photographs. Jeff Jank did not design this particular release, although the packaging still belongs comfortably inside the visual culture that Jank helped Stones Throw develop over many years.

Chacon’s return to music began through producer and pianist John Carroll Kirby, whose work with artists including Solange and Frank Ocean had already shown his ability to build arrangements that were spacious without becoming empty.

Their first meeting was supposed to be brief. Instead, they drove around Los Angeles in Kirby’s Toyota Camry while Chacon improvised vocal lines. Kirby heard value in the voice as it existed now, not as a damaged remainder of the singer from Charles & Eddie.

Age had softened Chacon’s instrument, but it had also removed the need to impress. His phrasing had become more private. Notes seemed less performed than released.

Their first album together, Pleasure, Joy and Happiness, appeared in 2020. Chacon initially imagined it as a final statement, a dignified way to close the door on the musical life he had abandoned. The record did the opposite. Its minimal grooves, vaporous keyboards and intimate vocals reached listeners who knew nothing about his former fame.

Instead of forcing him to reenact Charles & Eddie, the album introduced a different artist. This Eddie Chacon sang about regret, patience, mental health, tenderness and the need to step away from situations that were slowly destroying you.

Its reception led to Chacon signing with Stones Throw, and Sundown followed in 2023.

At first, the label may appear to be another part of the mystery. Stones Throw is most commonly associated with Madlib, J Dilla, MF DOOM and the densely sampled underground hip-hop that shaped its reputation. Eddie Chacon, approaching 60 and singing delicate soul music over electric piano, might look like a visitor from another catalog.

But Stones Throw has never truly been one kind of label. Peanut Butter Wolf’s taste has moved through hip-hop, private-press funk, outsider pop, electronic music, archival soul, jazz and records that seem to have been discovered in the wrong decade. The connection between these releases is not genre. It is the sense that someone cared enough about a peculiar musical vision to leave it peculiar.

Chacon belongs there because Sundown has the aura of an obscure record without the dishonesty of manufactured obscurity. It sounds like something a collector might pull from an unmarked box and spend years trying to understand, yet its strangeness comes directly from the lives of the people making it.

Kirby does not surround Chacon with generic vintage soul arrangements. He builds a softer and less stable environment. Rhodes piano, synthesizers, flute, alto saxophone, trombone, drums and hand percussion appear in small gestures. The instruments rarely crowd one another. They enter, leave traces, and recede.

No bass player is credited, which helps explain the unusual way the low end behaves. Much of the foundation appears to come from Kirby’s keyboards and synthesizers. The music has weight, but not the fixed muscular push of a conventional funk rhythm section. It seems to float just above the floor.

The first part of the album was written during a two-week stay in Ibiza in 2021. A listener who admired Chacon’s return to music offered him and Kirby the use of a family villa called Can Rudayla, located on a hillside above the beach at Siesta.

The house itself became part of the writing process. Sound traveled through its concrete floors and plaster walls. Kirby could begin playing in one room while Chacon listened from another, entering only when a vocal idea appeared. They assembled a temporary studio in a bedroom and rented what was reportedly the only Fender Rhodes available on the island from a local rave crew.

Each day they listened to Pharoah Sanders’s “Greeting to Saud.” They were not attempting to recreate the recording. What they took from it was a way of thinking about simplicity, repetition and spiritual intensity. Music did not need to become complicated in order to become deep.

That approach remains throughout Sundown. Several songs circle around short lyrical phrases that might look almost too simple on paper. Chacon repeats them until tone and hesitation begin to reveal what the words themselves cannot.

He does not sing like a young person presenting a newly discovered truth. He sounds like someone returning to a thought he has carried for years, unsure whether it has saved him, wounded him or merely stayed.

The studio photographs on the rear artwork reveal how the album’s second half was brought into focus. The sessions were completed at 64 Sound in Highland Park, Los Angeles, a studio originally built in the 1970s and later restored around vintage equipment, microphones and instruments.

The photographs are arranged like a contact sheet from a private documentary. Most are black and white. One rectangle contains a sunset, glowing amid images of musicians, microphones, percussion, keyboards, studio racks and people listening to playback.

The photographs show that Sundown was not made by placing an older singer over finished electronic tracks. Chacon is surrounded by a compact ensemble working in the same physical space.

John Carroll Kirby plays keyboards and produces. Logan Hone contributes flute and alto saxophone. Elizabeth Lea plays trombone. William Logan handles drums, while David Leach adds percussion. Pierre de Reeder recorded the Los Angeles sessions, and Tony Buchen mixed the album.

Their presence explains much of the record’s texture. Hone’s flute and saxophone do not behave like jazz solo instruments demanding center stage. They move through the songs as color and breath. Lea’s trombone offers warmth without turning the arrangements into traditional horn charts. Leach’s percussion adds a gentle, rolling motion beneath the drums.

The music can suggest Brazil, spiritual jazz, quiet storm, private funk and Balearic pop, sometimes within the same track, but it never becomes a display of references. The musicians are not showing us their record collections. They are using those histories to construct an atmosphere in which Chacon can speak softly without disappearing.

His voice is allowed to remain imperfect. The falsetto frays. Certain notes narrow or drift. His lower register occasionally sounds close to ordinary speech. These qualities would once have been corrected, enlarged or hidden by a major-label production. Here they become the emotional center.

There is no attempt to make Eddie Chacon sound young.

The album instead asks what becomes possible when a singer no longer has to pretend that time has not passed.

Mortality rests beneath the beauty. Sundown is dedicated to Chacon’s mother, whose death following Alzheimer’s disease he described as the most brutal experience of his life. Charles Pettigrew was gone. Friends, collaborators and earlier versions of Chacon himself had disappeared. He had already lived through the ending of his musical career once and then discovered that an ending could be mistaken.

The title Sundown therefore carries more than one meaning. It is the closing of a day, the approach of darkness, and the particular beauty that appears only when the light is already leaving.

The songs do not treat this awareness with panic. “Holy Hell” turns perspective into a daily practice. “Haunted Memories” and “Same Old Song” allow unease to seep into the calm. “The Morning Sun” closes the album by placing another beginning after the apparent ending.

This is where Sundown fits into Eddie Chacon’s career. Pleasure, Joy and Happiness was the improbable return. Sundown is the record that proves the return was not an accident.

Charles & Eddie had once operated inside the speed and pressure of international pop music. On Sundown, Chacon works at the pace of breath, memory and musicians listening across a room. His voice has less force than it did in 1992, but force is no longer the point. The years have become part of its sound.

There is also a smaller route running beneath this record, one that belongs specifically to the copy shown here.

In the 1990s, James TB lived in the Wow Cool loft inside the Comic Relief warehouse in North Oakland. About a mile away, near 55th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, a small group of punk artists lived in and operated M&A Laundry.

Among them was Jeff Jank, a witty artist and zine-maker who had grown up with Chris Manak, later known as Peanut Butter Wolf. Jank eventually moved to Los Angeles and became the art director whose lettering, drawings and peculiar visual instincts helped define Stones Throw Records.

James left the Bay Area in January 1999. Decades later, he borrowed this Oakland Public Library copy of Sundown and found Jank’s old world reappearing unexpectedly through a new Eddie Chacon record.

That history does not explain the album, but it adds another quiet circuit to it.

Chacon grew up in the East Bay, crossed through punk, pop, Miami bass, international fame, grief, silence and photography, then returned with a record released by a label whose identity had been partly shaped by an artist from an Oakland laundromat. The CD eventually traveled north into the Oakland library system, where stickers and barcodes were placed over the carefully designed artwork before it reached James’s hands.

He supplied that memory and the first astonished response to the music. The research and writing here were assembled by ChatGPT from the record, its packaging, Chacon’s history and the connections James heard inside it.

The distinction remains visible, but the two perspectives meet around the same object.

Sundown is a record about that kind of meeting. Youth and age, synthetic sound and human touch, East Bay memory and Los Angeles reinvention, the end of a career and the beginning hidden inside it. Nothing is forced to become identical. The parts remain separate enough to create harmony.

Solomon Burke - 1993 - Let Your Love Flow

Shanachie – 9202  305.62MB FLAC

The Oakland Public Library stickers almost turn Solomon Burke into a classified substance: MAIN, CD, RB, BURKE. One label partially covers the title, the disc has its circulation number written directly across it, and Shanachie somehow manages to spell his first name “Soloman” on the artwork. None of this diminishes the man staring from the cover. Burke looks less like a singer posing for a photograph than someone waiting for you to finish talking so he can tell you what is actually going on.

Solomon Burke came out of West Philadelphia and the church. Raised largely by his grandmother, Eleanor Moore, he was preaching publicly while still a child and became locally known as the Wonder Boy Preacher. This matters because preaching was not merely something Burke did before becoming a singer. It remained the architecture of his singing. He knew how to begin conversationally, hold attention, repeat a phrase until it changed meaning, and then raise the emotional temperature without losing control of the room. Even in secular love songs, he often sounds as though he is addressing one person and an entire congregation at the same time.

Burke repeatedly said that he never really left gospel. It remained the foundation under his rhythm and blues, country songs, romantic pleading and theatrical spoken passages. You can hear that foundation in the authority of his voice, but also in its generosity. His gift was not simply volume or range. It was social intelligence inside the voice. He could command, reassure, seduce, confess and testify within a few lines, shifting the balance according to what the song needed. Where another singer might deliver a lyric, Burke could make it sound like an event happening between himself and the listener.

His early records for Apollo led to Atlantic Records, where he became one of the artists who helped define soul music before the term had completely settled into place. His first large Atlantic success, “Just Out of Reach,” came from the country songbook, and that was no accident. Burke’s musical world included gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, pop and country without treating them as separate fenced properties. During the early 1960s he recorded “Cry to Me,” “If You Need Me,” “Got to Get You Off My Mind” and “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” records built around the tension between spiritual urgency and human appetite. The Rolling Stones and other British groups covered him, but Burke’s originals retain something difficult to imitate: the sense that the singer has responsibility for everyone in the room.

By the end of the 1970s, however, popular music had changed around him. Burke had moved through several labels after Atlantic, and the hits had become less frequent. The recordings on this CD first appeared in 1979 as Sidewalks, Fences and Walls on Infinity Records. Let Your Love Flow is therefore not a 1993 recording session, despite the date attached to this Shanachie edition. It is a retitled and resequenced return to a late-1970s album made when Burke was no longer being treated by the record industry as one of its central stars, even though the central instrument, that enormous and unusually flexible voice, was still completely present.

The producer was Jerry Williams Jr., better known as Swamp Dogg, working with Bahamian percussionist King Errisson. Swamp Dogg was an inspired match for Burke because he also distrusted tidy musical borders. His records could contain country writing, deep soul, funk, humor, social criticism and deliberate roughness without ironing them into something respectable. Here the arrangements give Burke room to preach and plead while the rhythm section moves through country-soul, funk and pronounced Afro-Latin accents. The result is polished enough to carry Burke’s voice but not so polished that it seals him behind glass.

“Boo Hoo Hoo (Cra-Cra-Craya)” opens this CD with Swamp Dogg’s slightly crooked humor, while songs such as “Lucky,” “The More” and “Please Come Back Home to Me” place Burke in the confessional territory where he could be especially convincing. He was able to make emotional excess feel reasonable. When he begged, he did not shrink. He enlarged the feeling until surrender seemed like the most dignified option available. The title song and “Sweeter Than Sweetness” draw on the warm, direct language of country-soul, while “Sidewalks, Fences and Walls” gives him a larger social and dramatic frame. Burke could take a simple physical image and treat it as a barrier between people, then sing as though he intended to remove it personally.

The album also includes “Please Don’t You Say Goodbye to Me,” which had given Burke his final appearance on the R&B chart in 1978, and a version of the Isaac Hayes and David Porter composition “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” permanently associated with Sam & Dave. Covering that song places Burke beside another branch of gospel-powered soul. Sam & Dave performed it as a two-man surge; Burke approaches the material with the weight of a single voice accustomed to filling every available role. He can be the caller, the responder, the preacher and the person being saved.

There is a small discographical puzzle hiding in the packaging. The back insert announces two songs “previously excluded from album release,” although the original 1979 Infinity LP appears to have contained all ten selections. The wording most likely refers to the eight-song Charly repackage that circulated under titles including From the Heart and omitted “Please Don’t You Say Goodbye to Me” and “See That Girl.” This Shanachie disc restores those two tracks, changes the running order, gives the collection a new title, and accidentally changes Solomon into “Soloman.” It is less a definitive edition than another room in the strange house this music has occupied.

When this CD appeared in 1993, Burke was active but had not yet received the broad late-career reconsideration that was coming. He released Soul of the Blues that same year, entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001, and won his first Grammy for Don’t Give Up on Me in 2003. That later album introduced him to listeners who had missed the Atlantic singles and the decades of records that followed them. Let Your Love Flow sits before that public return, carrying a neglected late-1970s session into the CD era while the larger culture was still deciding how much of Solomon Burke it had forgotten.

This particular copy eventually entered the Oakland Public Library system, where the labels, handwriting and worn plastic show that it became something people could discover without already knowing what to request. That feels appropriate for a singer whose career never followed a clean museum timeline. This is not the obvious starting point for Solomon Burke, and it is not usually listed as his masterpiece. It may be more revealing for exactly that reason. Away from the famous Atlantic years and the celebrated comeback, Burke still sounds unmistakably like himself: part singer, part preacher, part counselor, making private trouble large enough to become communal music.