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││││││├┐││ ─────────────────────────────────────── music for body and soul
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└────────┘ 19.04.2007
freshhh!
artist: Shuggie Otis
album: Strawberry Letter 23
label: Luaka Bop
cat: 70876-15303-1-5
year: 2001
genre: Funk
sub-genre: Soul, Breakbeat, Trip-Hop
source: Vinyl
grabber: Eac
encoder: LAME 3.97 V2 --Vbr-New -V 2
quality: VBRkbps / 44,1kHz / Joint-Stereo
size: 25,6 MB
link: http://www.luakabop.com
─┐└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
│tracklist.
no. time track title
A1 07:33 Strawberry Letter 23 (One Rascal Extended Mix)
A2 02:07 Xl-30
B1 03:54 Strawberry Letter 23
B2 04:06 Inspiration Information
total time: 17:40 min
─┐└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
│release notes.
Time was, they reserved the vision thing for the scant few artists
who truly envisioned panoramic music - Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone,
John Coltrane. Today they hand out the "visionary" tags as freely
as they dispense the gold records, like party favors out of a
cardboard box.
Shuggie Otis truly had the vision thing. Compared at the wispy age
of 15 with Hendrix and the great Kings of blues guitar (B.B.,
Albert, Freddie), the young phenom went on to make two expansive,
genre-defying, deeply curious albums, 1971's "Freedom Flight" and
1974's "Inspiration Information." The records, essentially crafted
as a one- man band, floored Sly Stone, gave the Brothers Johnson
their most enduring hit ("Strawberry Letter 23") and predated the
stylistic synthesist Prince by half a decade.
Otis, son of the rhythm and blues bandleader Johnny Otis, was a
guitar prodigy, but he didn't stop there. An exceptional drummer
and vibraphone player, he immersed himself in drum-machine
technology in its earliest incarnation. He played piano and organ,
and he arranged for horns and strings; friends say he was at least
as good a bass player as he was a guitarist.
Johnny Otis says that his son was as natural a musician as they
come. When the senior Otis urged his teenage guitarist to pursue
his interest in film scoring by signing up for composing lessons,
they didn't last long. After a few days, he remembers, the tutor
came to the father and begged off: "He already knows this shit!"
After showcasing with his father's band, Shuggie cut sessions with
Frank Zappa and Al Kooper, then set out on his own. "Freedom
Flight" combined his innate fluency in the blues with a budding
interest in exploratory, style-fusing soundscapes.
Nearly three years in the making, the deeply personal "Inspiration
Information" was the culmination of Shuggie's intense self-imposed
apprenticeship, a genuinely visionary song cycle that featured
primitive but soulful drum-machine meditations ("Aht uh Mi Hed,"
"XL-30"), satiny pop orchestration backing shrewd jazz guitar
("Rainy Day") and suitelike funky dance music that glides from a
roots-reggae backbeat to swirling Love Unlimited-style strings
("Not Available"). Insatiable as it was, the album foretold several
pop music developments to come: soulful auteurism, D.I.Y.-style
recording, organic computer music.
Musicians were his biggest fans. "I've always been in love with his
stuff from "Inspiration Information," says George Johnson of the
Brothers Johnson. "That album was right up there for me with
(Sly's) "There's a Riot Going On."
But the album proved too futuristic, too stubbornly unique for the
rock marketplace of 1974. By the time of its release, Otis had
squandered whatever momentum he had earned as a rising star at the
turn of the decade. The album met with commercial indifference, and
it turned out to be Shuggie's swan song.
Now 48, Otis makes the occasional recording session, the odd live
gig. But health issues have kept him from sustaining his musical
career with any consistency. And he isnÆt exactly eager to talk
about the past. Strangely, no one who was around at the time can
recall just what Shuggie was up to in the studio. Johnny Otis,
credited as the album's executive producer, says he called sessions
for strings and horns at Shuggie's request. That's about all he
remembers.
"I executive produced it," he says, "but he was the creator."
Steven Paley was Shuggie's A&R man at Epic during the "Inspiration"
years. "He was signed to me, but I had very little to do with him,"
says Paley, who was also Sly Stone's A&R man. "I had absolutely
nothing to do with the record other than, "Hi, how are you?"
Perhaps it's no coincidence that a gaping lack of information now
surrounds the record. In the original liner notes to "Inspiration
Information," the writer proclaimed that the former adolescent
guitar prodigy "is a man and an artist now. He is creating in the
seventies, time whose conflicts are being shaped by information -
and the lack of it."
Few may recall how the masterpiece was realized, but they all
remember how boundless Shuggie's potential seemed at the time.
Larry Cohn, producer of the groundbreaking Robert Johnson boxed set
and the man who first signed Otis to Epic Records, equates
Shuggie's unfulfilled talent with Johnson's.
Cohn offers another lofty comparison, this one reflecting Otis'
mastery of so many instruments. The jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke,
dead at 28, was known as Louis Armstrong's match on the cornet, but
he was equally gifted on the piano. "In his [Bix's] piano playing
you can hear Bartok, Debussy," Cohn says. "That's probably the
avenue Shuggie would've traveled, to my mind."
Among the classical composers of the rock ænÆ roll era - the
electronic artists, DJs and post-rock musicians - the ones who have
been turned on to Shuggie agree. "'Inspiration Information' is
almost like a new style of music that could've developed but never
did," marvels Tim Gane of the group Stereolab. "That's the problem.
It never developed past this record."
Around the time of "Inspiration"'s release, the Rolling Stones
offered Mick Taylor's newly vacated guitar spot to Shuggie. When
Billy Preston called with the proposal, Otis politely declined.
"I had my own group, my own label deal," he said years later.
"I just wanted to do what I want to do. I had my own identity."
More than that, he knew where to find the inspiration.
Enjoy!.
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