Mad About

Review: James Gallardo & Sol released their collaborative debut album in 1975 in a burst of bright colour and next-level musicianship. There's a fiery, rockist spirit running through the over driven guitar cartwheeling through "Maranatha", but there's equal space for measured grooves and Gallardo's expressive horn playing. Mellower moments like "Patrice" let in a more soulful side of the project, while "El Que Se Fue" nods to the Latin roots of Sol. Expansive, bold and inventive, this is a treasure for jazz funk heads, marking the first official repress since the first copies slipped out many moons ago.

Review: Since it was first released in the collective's native Brazil in 1978, the self-titled debut album from Guilherme Coutinho E O Groupo Stalo has become a sought-after item amongst collectors of Latin jazz. This reissue - the first of any kind - proves why. Offering a mixture of samba-soaked Latin jazz rhythms, sweet vocals, spacey analogue synthesizer sounds, Azymuth style electric piano motifs, MPB style songwriting and Brazilian jazz-funk stylistic tropes, it's a joyously sunny and quirkily off-kilter affair that impresses from start to finish. Production wise it's a little loose and fuzzy round the edges, but that only adds to the album's obvious allure. Recommended!

Review: Pianist Luis Carlos Vinhas first rose to prominence during the height of Brazil's bossa-nova movement in the early 1960s. By the middle of the decade, he was releasing albums under his own name, and in 1968 delivered what would become his most colourful and exciting set: the effervescent Latin jazz psycehedelia of "O Som Psicodelico de Luiz Carlos Vinhas". As richly detailed and vivid as its accompanying cover art, the set still stands up all these years on - as this essential Mad About Records reissue proves. Backed by a big band, a guitarist with tons of effects pedals and recordings of Amazonian wildlife, the pianist delivered a set of tropical jazz/psychedelic samba fusion that sounds every bit as hallucinatory now as it did way back in 1968. In a word: essential.