HarveyCanal said:batmon said:
So this is a UK perspective thang, right. like Tabira said.
Yes, again they've established a "genre" out of collecting stuff unavailable to them when it originally dropped.
I was about to make a "countdown until Harvey takes one of his standard 'cultural imperialism' shots" post, but we're three pages into this shit now, so of course I'm too late.
I'm not going to teach my granny how to suck eggs as regards the origins of "rare groove" as a
scene - and it was a scene as much as it was a genre, possibly more so - mainly because I was more about hip-hop and early Chicago house when that shit began to pop off in the South of England. But I do know that it drew quite a lot of inspiration from the weekender/jazz-funk scenes of the late 70s in terms of its musical aesthetic. Certainly, tunes like Expansions, Rock Creek Park and Running Away were no more obscurities to UK listeners than they were to folks in the US. Back when I was a teenage punk-rocker spending most of my money on records by the Clash, Buzzcocks, the Ramones and them, I remember buying Running Away on a 45 just because I loved the groove - had no idea who Roy Ayers was at all. Also, someone mentioned You're A Star by Aquarian Dream, which was a huge record back then - big with disco crowds, jazz-funk heads and at places where they played Mecca-flavoured Northern.
Essentially what the rare groove scene did, or so it appeared to this observer-at-a-distance, was to develop an aesthetic through a combination of classic militant funk (JB-related shit, War, Fatback Band), soul-tinged fusion (and vice-versa) of the Roy Ayers/Mizell Bros variety and what later became known as boogie or modern, all focused around a handful of hit-and-run outlaw warehouse parties-cum-soundsystems and club nights. I recall it as being very much a London thing. Many of the records would get played at clubs in the North, but the wholesale embrace of it was shied away from, because blatantly aping what was going on down South...well, we didn't hold with that kind of thing at all. Nuh-uh.
Surprised not to see any of the following posted yet;
And of course this, which was one of those that
everyone jammed.
I can't find a working link to Don Blackman's Holding You, Loving You out here in Deutschland, otherwise I'd post that as well.
To touch on something that me, skel, Junior and Pattrick were talking about in the boozer the other week, those Midnight Music comps and their subsequent knock-offs might be a little outside that precise "90s bootleg" timeframe we were discussing, but they were hugely important in acting as a kind of roadmap for non-scene dudes like me who occasionally DJ'ed, and who actually already had some of these records in my own collection, like Eighties Ladies, Betty Wright, Little Beaver, some other Ayers stuff like Life Is Just A Moment, and a fuck-ton of JB 45s I'd scooped for peanuts when I was about 20.
It ought to go without saying that rare groove both grew out of and fed into a whole grip of sub-scenes both before and after.
id Raer Gruve happen concurrently with Acid Jazz?
