Purchase Links:  AMAZON || HMV || PLAY

To celebrate, they’re playing a one off gig at London’s Borderline on January 12th (where advance copies of this stellar album will be available). Support comes from the brilliant The Broken Vinyl Club (recently seen supporting The Stereophonics) + TBC and tickets are only £5.00. TICKETS!

(To be in with a chance of winning one of 5 pairs of tickets. Click here.)

Fresh from their storming set at Trans Musicales (which you can see here). Janice Graham Band have been have been announced to play the HMV Next Big Thing 2012 in Manchester, details and tickets are here.

The album “It’s Not Me” will be out in Feb 2012.

21-year-old Jasmine Kara’s ability to bare her soul is quite extraordinary in one so young.  Yet when you take into account the youthful, traumatic love affair that left her at her lowest ebb and her subsequent escape to New York, you start to understand how she can relate to these songs.

Her time in NYC was seminal.  On arrival in the city Jasmine gravitated towards its music scene, the jazz, blues and R’n’B clubs having a particular resonance for her.  These songs touched her and struck a chord with her own life struggles.

It wasn’t long before Jasmine was brought to the attention of Tri-Sound Records and one of its co-founders became her mentor. Legendary records man Marshall Chess of Chess Records took on executive producer role for this debut album – ‘Blues Ain’t Nothing But A Good Woman Gone Bad’.

It was Chicago’s Chess Records, who took the music of black America from its Muddy Waters led electric birth, through to the heights of soul music and beyond. Jasmine’s album is a tribute to the songs – the great songs – that the label originated.

Marshall Chess says – ”I’ve been around the blues and singers who are in touch with their soul my whole life.  Jasmine Kara is the real deal.  The blues, like a taste of freedom, has truly transformed this young singer.  Her Iranian roots, her Swedish upbringing and her recent meeting with – and interpretation of – the American blues is an amazing testament to what a universal language music is.  And, to how different expressions of a longing for freedom always have had an underlying, common denominator”.

On ‘Blues Ain’t Nothing But A Good Woman Gone Bad’ Jasmine takes a unique journey through the less obvious parts of the label’s history avoiding direct comparison with the originals through distinctive flourishes added to her own versions.

This album is very of the moment, but steeped in the past.  Jasmine Kara is a product of the modern world – but embraces the sentiments of these classic songs.  For Kara this is a start of an undoubtedly wonderful music journey.

Jasmine’s remarkable back-story is further explored in her autobiography published in her native Sweden to much acclaim and now due for publication in the UK.

Hanging out with NYC’s low life and battling to find herself gigs in the city’s jazz and blues clubs, this journey takes her across the US and home again where she finally secures the record contract she’d worked so hard to achieve.

The Broken Vinyl Club have brought back not only The Beatles’ harmonies, The Stones’ swagger, The Pretty Things’ attitude and The Monkees’ personality, but they have even had time to raid a couple of Carnaby Street clothes shops and nick Keith Moon’s drum kit on the way!

TBVC are four young lads from Cardiff and The Valleys, Scott Howells (vocals and guitar), Justin Beynon (guitar), Jamie Taylor (Bass) and Merion Townsend (drums), who have been together since 2009.

To many, ‘Bangsy’ was one of the most radical and exciting DJs that the UK has ever produced, one of the first to radically mix sounds, styles and genres. From mambo and bossa through to funk, soul, boogie, two-step or hard-core jazz and early electronic bleeps; the man was a pioneer. His mid 80s gigs at the Special Branch or the Bournemouth weekender or with Gilles Peterson at the seminal Cock Happy or Mambo Madness nights were the stuff of legend. Chris hung up his headphones on New Year’s Eve 1989 to concentrate on his prolific studio output under various monikers – Bangs A Bongo, Grass Snakes, Lay-Zee Muthas and the Quiet Boys to name a few.

Chris was behind many of the early Acid Jazz releases and in particular was a regular contributor to the Totally Wired series. The production experienced he gained at the label stood him in good stead to produce the like of Paul Weller and Galliano’s later albums.
The most influential of all the acid jazz creators, in 2010 Bangs returned to DJing, establishing the Soul In One night that mixed the early Acid Jazz feel with a broad soul music policy.

Some eight months later the debut 45, the theme from Blow Up appeared – the reaction was staggering. Initially, Gary Crowley championed the record on BBC Radio London but the real explosion came when John Peel called Piller one day to announce that he was in love with the simplicity and energy of the single – ‘did James have anything else?’ he asked. Piller sent him a tape of the rest of the material recorded in the JTQ’s first studio session and was rewarded a couple of days later when Peel called back and asked if the James Taylor Quartet would care to come into the BBC and record a session for him. This caused a massive problem because there wasn’t really a James Taylor Quartet at the time as James had quit the industry and wasn’t even in the country. Piller knew that a Peel Session was the holy grail for the indie scene so he agreed to a date for the session and then set about convincing Taylor to return from Sweden. Taylor eventually agreed and recruited a band for the session. They included former Prisoner Allan Crockford as well as two members of The Daggermen – Taylor’s younger brother David and (later hugely successful artist and Billy Childish collaborator) Wolf Howard.

With the Peel session under their belt and the radio legend’s constant support and encouragement, the JTQ moved from strength to strength. Blow Up spent several months in the upper echelons of the indie chart, the Mission Impossible album followed and James moved back to the Medway to start his new career. The JTQ recorded two albums for Re-Elect The President before signing to Polydor and releasing the hit single Starsky & Hutch with three full-length albums and then on to Big Life. It was ’93 before Piller brought James Taylor and his (by now) ever expanding Quartet ‘home’ to Acid Jazz and to rekindle their earlier relationship.

Acid Jazz immediately re-released Mission Impossible and The Money Spyder (which had never been available on CD) whilst the JTQ recorded the brilliant In The Hand Of The Inevitable, the band’s career defining Gold album. Several line up changes have followed but it is safe to say that his tightest, genre defining band featured Gary Crocket on bass, David Taylor on guitar and John Wilmott (who also recorded his own, very early album on the label with the Apostles) on sax and flute and vocalist Noel McKoy.

The JTQ continue to be a very popular live draw and have now released over 20 albums on more than ten different labels, but it is the groundbreaking album In The Hand Of The Inevitable that showcased their best work.

Original Heavies members Jan Kincaid, Simon Bartholomew, Andrew Levy, Lascelles Gordon and Jim Wellman were joined by vocalist Jay Ella Ruth (sister of sax genius Steve Williamson) and recorded their Acid Jazz debut in the summer of 1989. Whilst the first Acid Jazz single – the instrumental People Get Ready – disappeared without trace, their second, Dream Come True, caught the attention of cool US hip-hop label Delicious Vinyl, who immediately moved to license the band for the US. A great future beckoned and a debut American tour was scheduled. Disaster struck when Jay Ella refused to visit the States and suddenly quit the band (keeping a regular vocalist was something that dogged the Heavies for the rest of their career) – several gigs were performed as an instrumental funk band (to honour contractual commitments) while they pondered the future. Fate lent a hand when Delicious Vinyl put forward N’Dea Davenport as a possible replacement and so the (blue) Heavies album, released by Acid Jazz as JAZID23 in 1990 and titled simply Brand New Heavies, was re-cut with her vocals for an American release.

The album (and band) proved so popular in the States that it spent over a year in the US R&B charts – a unique achievement for a mixed-race and particularly a British band. The floodgates opened for Acid Jazz in America and before long the success was repeated here in the UK, where the US album was released by AJ through London Records in 1991 – the blue-sleeved album went gold but the revocalled version achieved platinum status.

The hits came thick and fast; Dream Come True, Stay This Way, Never Stop and at the end of ’91 the band embarked on Heavy Rhyme Experience (with executive production duties in New York from label boss Eddie Piller) – which featured a whole host of American rappers, indeed this became the first ‘live’ hip hop album (shortly followed by LL Cool J) and was released in the UK in ’92.

After the release of their next album, Brother Sister (also through London Records), Acid Jazz took a back seat in the band’s career and allowed London A&R man Pete Tong more of a creative role, perhaps better suited to the bands increasingly ‘pop’ orientated sound. They never lost their funk/soul flavour and are respected as the band that delivered Acid Jazz its first chart hits while breaking the sound worldwide!

It was about then that Eddie Piller decided to track Terry Callier down. It had been label policy to include a healthy percentage of oldies in its roster and with his mod heritage and current iconic status, Callier was considered the perfect choice.

It proved excruciatingly difficult however. From Acid Jazz’s two room office just off the Hackney Road, Piller started off by contacting the US music industry organisations. That drew a blank. No one had an address or a contact and Callier hadn’t been a member of any of them for many years. Next up he contacted Jerry Butler. Butler had written Ordinary Joe for him and had also published some of Callier’s material. If royalties were still being generated, then surely Butler’s people would have his details? Sadly, they hadn’t heard from him either. It transpired that since about 1983, Callier had just dropped off the radar…The helpful secretary at Jerry Butler’s office heard that he might well have moved to LA – this was wrong though and added a further three weeks of following dead end leads to the project.

Piller was not to be put off and eventually resorted to calling American directory enquiries which, in practical terms, meant half an hour each evening calling different US phone companies. At that time, there were no national or even state-wide phone directories. Instead, each separate company had a different listing for individual areas. Not even cities. It was after three weeks worth of calls that he finally got lucky. A Terrence Orlando Callier had been found in a random suburb of Chicago; the address and number were handed over and after a quick nip of scotch, Piller took a deep breath and called the number.

‘Hi, can I speak to Terry please?’ The young girl on the other end of the line went quiet for a couple of seconds before replying ‘Sorry, no one called Terry lives here, I think you must have a wrong number’ ‘I’m actually looking for Terry Callier…’ click – the line went dead. Piller was sure something wasn’t quite right about the call and phoned back. Again, the receiver was immediately put down. This seemed most odd so Piller decided to keep calling over the next couple of weeks. Half a dozen calls later and for some unexplained reason the young girl – by now increasingly irritated – relented and asked Piller to stay on the line. A couple of minutes later a softly spoken man came on the phone and said; ‘This is Terry Callier, my daughter says that if I don’t take your call there is a realistic possibility that you will just keep calling, so yes, this is me and what can I do for you?’

‘Well, it’s like this…’ Eddie explained that he was a massive fan and that Terry had an unexpected underground hit in the UK, would he be interested in coming to London for a gig and for Acid Jazz to release his I Don’t Want To See Myself single? Terry was reluctant. He had turned his back on the music industry back in the early 80s following unexpected family issues, had retrained with computers, established himself at Chicago University and devoted himself to bringing up his daughter. He genuinely wasn’t interested. Period.

After such a long search, Eddie Piller was not to be put off and eventually his persistence paid dividends when Terry agreed to visit London with his daughter and perform a gig at the legendary 100 Club, more as a holiday than anything else; if it went well, he’d think about allowing Acid Jazz to release the legendary ‘lost’ single.

Needless to say, the gig was massively over-subscribed and Terry was treated as a returning hero. He was amazed at the reaction and that the crowd seemed to know of the words to all of his songs. After an extremely emotional night, Callier decided to give the music industry one last try. Soon after Acid Jazz re-released I Don’t Want To See Myself (Without You) which went on to sell 10,000 copies and provided a platform for Terry to record his first album for over ten years. The international success that had eluded him all though the 60s and 70s was finally his by right and Terry Callier became a soul-jazz icon to a completely new generation. A status he still holds today…