Tracklisting 1. Dorando - Didn’t I 2. Moses Dillard - Tribute To Wes 3. Marva Josie - He Does It Better 4. Lonnie Hewlett And The Little Sisters & Co. - Ya Ya Cha Cha 5. Jon Lucien - Search For The Inner Self 6. Bobby Cole - A Perfect Day 7. Baaska & Scavelli - Get Off The Ground 8. Ellen McIlwaine - Higher Ground 9. Caroline Peyton - Just As We 10. Bob Cunningham - Lover’s Theme 11. Ira Sullivan - The Kingdom Within You 12. JR Bailey - Just Me’N'You 13. The World Experience Orchestra - The Prayer 14. Harold McKinney - Ode To Africa 15. 47 x It’s Own Weight - March of the Goober Woobers 16. The Ensemble Al Salaam - Circles This is the first in a series of “Digs” compilations raiding the record racks of some of the most outrageous music collections. Over the years Gilles Peterson has delighted dance floors and listeners to his radio show by joining the dots between musical styles and eras. His record collection is so serious he keeps it in a separate house known as Brownswood. Regular listeners to Peterson’s radio show (Worldwide airs on BBC Radio 1 weekly in the UK and is syndicated around the world) are occasionally treated to a Brownswood Basement selection where all the records are oldies, all on vinyl, and none have been re-issued. By popular demand this compilation features some of the Brownswood Basement rarities from the USA. Peterson is a DJ’s DJ known for selecting and blending together choice tracks from around the world whether they were previously obscure or well known. He also is the listener’s listener filtering and seeking-out music that might otherwise have remained unheard. And despite his preference for quality over rarity Peterson is also the collector’s collector, able to pull out an eye-brow raising record amidst the company of any vinyl connoisseur we know of. “I just love the sharing of music thing and have always had that collector’s gene from my marble days!” jokes Peterson. A typical Brownswood Basement mix effortlessly ebbs and flows between moods and grooves. Opening with a string laden low-rider-style soul cut from Dorando the tempo may be low but the quality level and rarity factors are immediately set to high. The identity of Dorando (real name Darondo, but a spelling mistake on this 45 switched the “o” with the “a") was a long time mystery. In the early 1970s three 45s were released on San Francisco Bay Area labels but little else was known about the man until local musicologist Justin Torres recently tracked him down (watch out for a full Darondo album release on Luv N’Haight). Despite Darondos underground status this soulful tearjerker would not sound out of place next to peers like Al Green or Shuggie Otis. “Tribute to Wes” is a lean piano, bass, guitar and beat-driven nugget from Moses Dillard, a regular guitar session man on the Muscle Shoals scene. Before the age of 20 he had formed the Dynamic Showmen and then teamed-up with James Moore in a duo called Moses & Joshua, recording hits like “My Elusive Dreams", “Get Out of My Heart", and “Soul Symphony” in the late 1960s. Dillard’s career took-off with his own group called the Tex-Town Display. “Tribute to Wes” is from their independently released first album “Now,” a certified holy-grail rarity that dropped prior to the bands subsequent success. Signing to Curtom in 1970 with a line-up that included future soul star Peabo Bryson the bands first single on the label sold over 250, 000. In later outings Dillard appears as part of the Lovejoy Orchestra, Dillard & Johnson, the Constellation Orchestra, and Dillard & Boyce. One of the most seductive sounding insults ever recorded is “He Does It Better Than You Do", a twisted torch track from the Thimble Records release “This Is Marva Josie". “Most people would ask, who is that song for?” says singer Josie. Horn player and producer Fred Miller wrote the song, and as far as Josie knows it wasn’t intended for anyone in particular. “It’s a good song for any women to tell a man who thinks he’s found someone else,” says Josie. “You could even write it down and it would work as a good letter,” she adds about the song which has a dose of “Fever” in it. The album featured her late husband Earl “Fatha” Hinds and Weldon Irvine and included a wide variety of tunes that Josie thought might open up new doors for her career. Peterson’s selection returns geographically to the Bay Area with a 7" rarity on the Wee label, and once again to a release with a spelling mistake which no doubt has confused collectors over the years. The 7" is labeled Lonnie Hewlett when the correct spelling is actually Hewitt. Piano player and band leader Lonnie Hewitt wrote, played, recorded, and occasionally released his own music in a quest to be musically self-sufficient. He also wrote music for an award winning off-Broadway play called Dunbar with his friend Paul Smith (himself a Bay Area funkster who wrote tunes for the likes of Cold Blood, Norman Connors and Pharoah Sanders.) Hewitt’s biggest hit was the soul classic “Send My Baby Back” which he wrote for Freddie Hughes and the Wand label. He was also known as the piano player in Cal Traders band and was a member of the mysterious Bay Area funk group P-I-R Squared. His own album Keepin’ it Together was released just after he died in 1979. Peterson confessed that his 7″ copy of “Ya Ya Cha Cha” has a small chunk broken out of the intro. Did he pick this track to simply fill a hole (literally) in the Brownswood collection? More likely the piano-driven dance floor friendly Latin soul perfectly bridges the sultry Marva Josie and the lively Jon Lucien. Lucien is possibly the most recognizable artist on the compilation but “Search for the Inner Self” is so rare that not even our esteemed compiler has a copy. He remembered Brit-pop king Paul Weller playing it to him almost 15 years ago so we called Lucien and fortunately he remembered the track, too. Producer Beau Ray Fleming (of Zulema, Mandrill, and GQ fame) says he was going for a “Majestic soul” sound and brought in Bernard Purdie to power the song along. The strings, percussion and big-production give the track a dramatic Charles Stepney-like vibe on this first Lucien 7″ release which originally came out before he recorded any of his legendary RCA albums. “A Perfect Day” was originally released on the Concentric label outing “A Point of View.” Sounding fresh and vital as ever it is actually the oldest track on the compilation having been recorded in 1964. “My Italian friend/dealer (Paulo Scotti) sent me a copy off a vocal mix tape he did for me,” remembers Peterson. “When you’ve been collecting for so long it’s a real joy when you hear a track of that quality for the first time,” he adds. Musical director for Judy Garland and house band for Frank Sinatra’s legendary Watering Hole, Cole died a tragic early death falling and cracking his head on the curb outside a New York club. Peterson insisted we pick up this “wondrous piece of vocal jazz” as a last minute addition. That Baaska and Scavelli is a jazz-dance classic is down to an almost unbelievable chain of events. The original version of “Get Off The Ground” was recorded in Los Angeles around 1976. Using direct to disc technology M&K Sound wanted to use the track to demonstrate their state of the art sound recording equipment. “We jammed for 8 minutes to get familiar with the changes and then Valli sang the melody. “That’s a take” yelled the engineer to our amazement,” recalls Baaska. Somehow a test pressing of the recording found its way to London, where it was purchased in a second hand store for 10 pence. Marked only as “"The Bottom End” a product of M and K Sound” Peterson ended up with that copy (after it passed through the hands of London DJs Chris Bangs and Paul Murphy) and it became the mysterious anthem of the old school jazz scene at the famous Electric Ballroom Jazz Room in Camden Town.