VERY RARE JAZZ FUNK/Harold McKinney orig. Tribe ‘74

$

161

Artist: HAROLD McKINNEY
Album: VOICES AND RHYTHM OF THE CREATIVE PROFILE
Label: TRIBE
Catalogue # : PRSD-2233
Vinyl/Cover: STRONG VG/VG++

This is an original autographed 1974 pressing.

The tunes are: “Ode to Africa”, “Heavenese”, “Out of the Blues (Into The Black)”, “In the Moog”, “Corner Stone”, “Freedom Jazz Dance”, and “Dolphin Dance”.

The personnel is: Harold McKinney – piano & vocals; Gwen McKinney – vocals; Wendell Harrison – reeds; Marcus Belgrave – trumpet; Carryl Dybka – moog; Ed Pickens – bass; Ron Jackson – drums; Billy Turner – percussion; Charles Miles – conga; Carol Taylor – vocals & flute; Jenine Jones – vocals; Faye Blakely – vocals; Eileen Cohill – vocals; Sylvia Turner – vocals; Ed Gooch– vocals; Clarence McKinney – vocals.

The vinyl is in nice condition; no significant marks. It plays well, granted, with some noticeable hiss during the soft passages. The very cool cover is near perfect with only a few light traces of ring/rubwear (no seam splits, tears, stickers, bent corners, or writing…except for the autographed)..

Autographed “To My Friend Stan! Harold McKinney”.

FYI, a little info on the Tribe label:

Phil Ranelin (trombone) and Wendell Harrison (saxes) formed Tribe under the banner of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic movement, one of whose tenets was the promotion of avant-garde jazz as the soundtrack to black militancy. Tribe was, in essence, the Detroit variant of AACM in Chicago, BAG in St. Louis UGMAA in Los Angeles and CBA in New York. The organisation was distinctive in that it was a record label as well as a group of musicians. It also functioned as a co-operative in a wider community sense, producing a magazine and being involved with various self-help projects. There were differences stylistically too. The Motor City revolutionaries mixed up their free jazz experiments with funk, soul and African rhythms. This produced a less ascetic body of work than some of their counterparts -- still too far out for that moment but one that has found favour with a section of the post "rare groove" audience. The time may never have been less "Now" for the politics that underpins these projects but it might just be so for its hybrid musical offspring.

In terms of jazz history the early seventies tends to be represented as the fag-end of an increasingly abstract freeform style. Either that or it is the narrative of Miles Davis' jazz-rock adventures followed by a snobbishly despised descent into commercial jazz-funk. These discs disrupt that view. Tribe, along with labels like Black Jazz and Strata East, can be read as one more missing link in African-American musical history. -- Maurice Bottomley (PopMatters.com)

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Like UGMAA in Los Angeles, the AACM in Chicago, BAG in St. Louis, and several other Afrocentric music and arts collectives founded in the early 1970s, Tribe attracted forward-thinking musicians who were interested in artistic self-determination. Other Tribe artists included reedman Wendell Harrison, pianists Harold McKinney and Kenny Cox (who led two sessions for Blue Note in the late 1960s), drummer Doug Hammond, and trumpeters Marcus Belgrave and Charles Moore. Though Tribe was defunct by the early 1980s, the organization nurtured a jazz scene that eventually produced world-class jazz artists such as Steve Coleman, Geri Allen, James Carter, Craig Taborn, Regina Carter, Tani Tabbal and Jaribu Shahid. Tribe documented their explorations via a quarterly arts magazine, and an in-house record company. Produced in micro amounts for the local population, the original recordings are incredibly hard to come by these days. Record collector types pay several hundred dollars for original Tribe pressings without batting an eyelash. -- Jazzweekly.com

Please e-mail (xwel@aol.com) with any questions.