Did you get one yet !!!!!. El' Willie & Mr Wonderful Band

[Dave Thorley]

Did you get one yet !!!!!

Got 10 copies of each to go now !!!! £20 each +P&P

— CBLL018 Release Alert —

Here we go with the second one on the day. Another musician, another great voice who wants his music to be listened and danced to overseas. And here we gotta thank Yann Vatiste big time for the great help in making this possible. Songwriter, Arranger, Producer, Sax & Keyboard Player, Singer William Travis aka "El Willie" began his professional career in the early 70's, when he joined The Original Drifters as a sax player. After playing with the Original Drifters for about 4 years, Karl Knighton, Larrice Byrd , Stan Travis, and El Willie decided to get off of the road for a while. Since most of the band members desired to keep the band together they gave themselves the name “Nobody' s Children”. They recorded the first version of “Shardarp” for Chet Davenport’s label Toeholt in 1976. El’ Willie resung it for us a couple of months ago, 42 years later at 68 years old, to get it Cannonballized and exported around the world. We arranged this version with a beautiful hot summer in mind, with the late hours at the party in mind, with the beach and the cocktails in mind and we are very proud of this work for a couple of main reasons: it ain’t been easy to get to it and our family keeps on enlarging with artists and collaborations, for the great happiness of authors, mates, our musicians, the production team, the djs and the dancers. It’s a sense of inclusion, and that’s what it's all about

 

--- CBLL017 Release Alert ----

After the deep funk, the raw funk, the street funk, the modern funk, the jazz funk and the prison funk, here we go with the first example of dollar funk ha ha ha. Jokes aside, some of you may recall a little post I did a couple of weeks ago about old school american soul artists who are still doing their music. So, this one is the first of our 2 todays releases. The first version was recorded last year at a studio in Louisville (Kentucky) by a band that gathered together again after several years and privately released it on a 45 which has been brought to me by my pal Dave. When I called Ron Lewis to give him my congratulations for the great music, it came out they will be doing more stuff and trying to round up other old school Louisville musicians in the attempt to revive the soul and funk sounds in the area. I told him we are at their service if they wanted to export their sounds overseas, and that bit of conversation went more or less like this:

 

Ron: “Yeah man, we gonna doing this stuff more and more”

Alberto: “Let’s get it on Cannonball wax and make it listened around the world”

Ron: “Yeah man let’s do it, that’s my stuff man”

Alberto: “...But Ron, you know we are a club label and we do music specifically for dancefloors so we might need to make some changes to the song...”

Ron: “Yeah man do it, we are dance people!”

 

Their original track was over 5 minutes long and, as those of you into vinyl pressing stuff might probably know, on a 45 the longer the track the poorer the sound fired out of the grooves. That means that if we wanted to pull out good sounding stuff to be pumped off nowadays sound systems we had to do some work on it. So, after some laughs and a few more “Yeah man” Ronal gave us the go to Cannonballize a little their original cut, basically Rhodes, drums, guitars and congas plus a little remodeling of the vocal layout, and here it is the result. Get a copy, play it out loud, and see the ceiling start cracking right after a few bars to eventually tumble down on your head.

Hear Both ............

https://youtu.be/Y3oHoB3aNvk

https://youtu.be/sUPRkk3-_e4