An early member of the Motown stable, George Kerr was a talented songwriter who produced memorable hits for the Whatnauts, the O’Jays, and the Moments, among others. Here, the New York native pens an unlikely instrumental rock number, comprised of generous slabs of distorted guitar, Iron Butterfly organ, and reckless drumming.

Written by a teenaged Booker T. and the MG’s six years earlier, Count Basie reinterprets this Southern standard with the help of his expansive orchestra. With Basie on the piano, breathy saxophones double the song’s murky bass line for a jazzy take on a blues classic.

Although charting frequently through the early and mid-’60s, this slice of blue-eyed soul would be the Connecticut native’s last sizable hit on U.S. soil. Pitney’s unabashed guitar (and possibly his piano playing and drumming) is complimented with pep-rally trumpets and cascading strings. Pitney passed away in 2006 at the age of 66.

Although famously sampled by J Dilla on the song “Workinonit” from his instrumental masterpiece Donuts, “The Worst Band in the World” was a moderate hit for this experimental group of English rockers back in the early ’70s. The single would later appear on their second album, Sheet Music.

Soulman Marvin Sease died yesterday in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He was sixty-four. Cause of death is still unknown, but the song says it all. Rest in Peace.

Reprinted from Wax Poetics Issue 3, Fall 2002: “Man, patience is a virtue!” Harry Whitaker is reflecting on the long-awaited release of his first album as a leader, recorded when he was thirty-four years old. Now a well-seasoned fifty-nine (“I’m older, not more mature,” he clarifies), he is savoring the fruits of a philosophy that [...]

Graphic designer S. Neil Fujita died from complications of a stroke on October 23. He was eighty-nine. Fujita worked at Columbia Records from 1954 to 1960 (with a break from ’57 to ’58) and designed album covers for Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, Art Blakey, and Miles Davis, among others.

Reggae superstar Gregory Isaacs, who was just featured on the cover of our Reggae Issue, has passed away at his London home after battling lung cancer. “Jamaica was a really nice place to grow up in, not like how some depict it to be,” he told Wax Poetics writer David Ma of his island home. [...]

Exceptionalism, the fourth full release from composer and producer Remy LBO, marks both a summation and transition of artistic objectives. It’s a glassy, funky work of permuting textures, one through which the delicacy of craftsmanship is realized.

DJ Babu, part of the World Famous Beat Junkies and Dilated Peoples, shares his top ten, a list that tells the story of his maturation as a kid in Oxnard to a world-class, international DJ.

As a Wax Poetics online exclusive, guitarist Sérgio Dias discusses fifteen of the albums that contributed heavily to Os Mutantes’ dynamic sound.

The Liberators run through a few records that help pave their band’s way, including the Brooklyn Afrobeat collective Antibalas, Desco’s mysterious Daktaris, and heavy-metal icons Metallica.

He was a young drumer trying to keep up in the serious world of spiritual jazz. Then Norman Connors traded the rigorous life for expensive cars, fashion models, and R&B hits.

A Number of Names, Blake Baxter, Cybotron, Derrick May, Intercity, Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Kreem, Modell 500

You can hear the sonic ripples of Fela Kuti’s legacy anywhere in the world. But to appreciate the explosive power of the man as a musician, a bandleader, and a booming voice for social justice, the tale becomes a Nigerian story, an African story. Rikki Stein was Fela’s manager and close friend, a veteran of [...]

In an age in which robotic vocals have become cliche, the most important thing to know about the talk box is that it’s not a vocoder. That’s not to say the ideas aren’t related. The vocoder models human speech as the combination of a carrier and a formant—the sound of your vocal cords, and the way [...]

World War II may have given us the atom bomb, but it also contributed what Ray Charles would call “an atom bomb on the musical landscape.” Predating synths like the Moog, the Rhodes piano was the great keyboard instrument innovation of the twentieth century. Its history is intertwined with the history of jazz, and while [...]