Professor Eddy

A tribute to one of the most gifted, visionary, and enduring talents ever launched into orbit by the Motown hit machine: “ Marvin Gaye blazed the trail for the continued evolution of popular black music. ” (Jason Ankeny) Enjoy! Tracklist: The Durutti Column – The Truth (2010) The Impressions – Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) (1971) Quincy Jones & His Orchestra – Ain't That Peculiar (1965) Ike & Tina Turner – I Heard It Trough The Grapevine (1969) Mongo Santamaria – Too Busy Thinking About My Baby (1969) The Funk Brothers – Ain't No Mountain High Enough (1960s) Gato Barbieri – Latin Reaction (1977) Fred Wesley & The JB's – You Sure Love To Ball (1974) Leon Ware – I Wanna Be Where You Are (1976) Grover Washington, Jr. – Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) (1972) The Three Degrees – Distant Lover (1975) Stanley Turrentine – I Want You (1976) Dianne Reeves – I Want You (2013) David Fathead Newman – Distant Lover (1978) Quincy Jones –

Picture by Rémy Mako Enjoy this 33rd part of ‘ Groovy, sexy & soulful ’! One of the tracks is the sublime ‘Night people’ ('Yeah, baby, yeah') from The Leaders. Songwriter Carl D'Errico remembers: “Ted Cooper, Carl Spencer, Eddie Rabbitt and I wrote a song called "Night People" where the demo turned into the master. The four of us were hanging out at the office and decided to write a song together. Carl Spencer sang the male vocal and I'm not sure who did the female vocal. That's Eddie and me struggling in the background with our falsettos to sound like a female backup group. Teddy got a deal with the Fontana label for the demo and came up with the brilliant name for the group, the Leaders. There was another cover of the song by a group called Harry Deal and the Galaxies - I'm not sure if that's a step up or down from the Leaders. I don't know where Ted's career went after I left Shapiro-Bernstein, but I heard later that unfortu

Picture: Roller Boogie Paying tribute to the last year of disco, before the ‘disco sucks’ movement took over by burning disco records in public. In 1979 I was too young to go to a discotheque, but I imagine the music there would have sounded something like this, including the bad mixing... ;-) The track from Moonshoes is actually brand new, but it has the 1979 feel. The accompanying video contains footage of Skatetown USA (picture below), a movie (starring Patrick Swayze) that came out in 1979. By the way, the father of one of the Daft Punk guys wrote Ottawan’s ‘D.I.S.C.O.’ ‘Love to love you Donna’ is the new Donna Summer remix album that is out on Verve now. DJ's and artists like Chromeo, Hot Chip and Holy Ghost! have teamed up to remix the late singer’s classic hits. It includes reworked versions of ‘Hot stuff’,‘I feel love’, ‘MacArthur Park’,'On the radio' and more. The biggest surprise is an unreleased track called ‘La dolce vita’, a collaboration between the Que

My inspiration came after seeing the movie ‘ Blood ties ’ and hearing ‘ There goes my love again ’ from White Lies. I love those dramatic songs. The more dramatic, the better! I like the drum rolls, twanging guitars and big orchestra sounds, like the famous ‘wall of sound’ from Phil Spector. I hope you will enjoy these dramatic ballads too! One of the tracks is from The Dells. On the 29th of May this year singer Marvin Junior of the Dells died. ‘Iron Throat’ is what David Ruffin, the former lead singer of the Temptations, once called Marvin Junior. ‘Two tons of fun’ is what he called himself. He grew up hoping to be the next Ray Charles and eventually inspired other singers, including Teddy Pendergrass. In the 1970s Gamble and Huff wanted the Dells to join the Philadelphia International label, but when they failed, they contracted Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes with singer Teddy Pendergrass. They thought his voice sounded almost similar to the one of Mavin Junior. The voice o

Three Degrees: Rolling Stone journalist Vince Aletti first spoke of ‘disco’ in 1973. So we are celebrating 40 years of disco this year! This mix is a selection of the early years. The tracks I chose made the (disco) ball rolling. In 1973, for instance, 'Girl, you need a change of mind' was one of the first songs with a (disco) break and 'The love I lost' was probably the first song that had an uptempo disco beat, because of the hi-hat pattern played by drummer Earl Young (Source: A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul ). One year later, 'Rock the boat' (that started to use the off-beat tom tom ) and 'Rock your baby' were the first disco hits that reached the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100: “Considered by some to be the first disco hit, the Hues Corporation's funky 1974 hit "Rock the Boat" is certainly a key track in the style's development. Certainly the song's hypnotic structure -- aside from two br