So I don’t have that much of a clue about funk or jazz, soz kids, you know how the name of this blog is taken from a lovely album by sex magick gender noise terrorist unit Throbbing Gristle and whatnot, which is both jazz, funk and everything else that is or has been deemed to be dirty and unwholesome in the universe, because I don’t know much about these genres but they were supposed to be bad and filthy and dirty weren’t they, but then most people wouldn’t agree that this album is jazz or funk…

So I don’t know much about these genres really, awright, I don’t like this situation, I want to eradicate my ignorance- a big fat bloated fly in the filthy wall of my conscience’s kitchen- but then there’s such small a time, and so many records…so receive apologies for the lack of information or insight about bands and tunes included in this post, most of them have been fetched from mixes, mixtapes or when out and about, listen to that, run to ask someone what the fuck is this, which is the way it works for the eternal immortal win. Because 20JFG doesn’t care about genres or dates, but about good music, and any party you play these tunes at it’s a party we wanna be at.

So let’s get on with it, admonishing our correspondent Lord Nuneaton Savage an actual soul savant who was supposed to hurl some Funkadelic this way aeons ago, I told you you were getting told off Mat!

Sam played Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Theme de Yo Yo at his first legendary 20JFG djing participation with Benedict in the olden days, sending me in a delirious frenzy from which I still haven’t recovered. Since then this larger than life tune has remained in the cryogenic to-do-list, until Shige & Victoria reminded me of the urgency of its posting by playing it at the Extreme Animals gig last week. So what you have is a blaxploitation free jazz crossover monster with bristling horns that stab crush and maul, and a bass lasso which pulls your body across downtown painting the black concrete with blood, for this you say thanks a lot too. Fontella Bass’ hip priestess presence is the proverbial icing in the cake, it’s not that you can dig it, it’s that you should dig it, otherwise you really need to haul your ass away from squareville into some more soulful quarters.

Art Ensemble of Chicago- Theme de Yo Yo

I first listened to the Junkyard Band’s kiddy rap rattle oddyssey ‘the Word’ in Terranova’s DJ kicks, and then sometime after in the Optimo How to Kill the DJ Pt. 2 mix…there’s not that much to say about this tune, you invited it for dinner last night and it ate your daughters and part of your leg with a mastodontic bassline sufficient to make all the dubstep/T&B heads out there sweat gold bricks, after which it made a racket with all the cooking pots & pans and ran crazy into a corner of the streer to do some breakdancing with the rest of its crew like Kangol was still cool or something.

The Junkyard Band- The word

Similarly booty shaking is War Galaxy’, which we discovered via Mike Simonetti & Dan Selzer delicious mix as ‘Crazy Rhythms’, you know how we are always going on about Can being German Funk and so on ad so forth, well, then I guess this is Black Kraut rock, or maybe that was Afrika Bambaataa, the percussive mayhem is but a blueprint for what was to come after, say Liquid Liquid or A Certain Ratio via Banbarra, and all those who ripped them off afterwards, it makes one wish they hadn’t banned smoking in clubs, if only to hide with blue clouds of cancer the pungent smells of a party crowd going totally maracas.

War- Galaxy

And that’s it for today you lovely fools, go to the launch of Cough/Cool tonight at the Pier One Nightspot, Real Gold Crew’s new weekly London club with awesome secret guests and the kind of spirit we respect i.e. evacuate the vacuousness and focus on the music yeh we’ll catch up with you there at the end of the month w00T

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with kraut optimo