Now for that phrase ” ” You know what this samples right?”* or rather, in this case, you know what samples this.
Positively Black: Ebony Princess. http://www.discogs.com/Positively-Black-Positively-Black/release/343429 from their 1989 s/t album.

A small piece of overlooked Hip-hop mastery, and one of my favourites from that golden year. It’s such a slamming piece of vinyl but yet seldom does one come across anyone who knows it. In a way It brought me directly to this particular Bill Withers album so I owe it a great debt regardless, and that’s even before commending it, and recommending it for it’s pedigree.
Ebony Princess’ mood and tone used to hypnotise me and the innovative use of the guitar sample had me pulling my hair out trying to get a handle on where it may of come from. The haunting use of the vocal in the Positively Black tune was a coup in those days. Imagine, and I know you know, the feeing and rush I experienced when playing my latest Bill withers find and this tune just comes on. Bliss and perfection and a puzzle piece found, all at once. The best thing about this was that it enhanced the original and the Positively Black tune simultaneously, when so many uncovered samples sometimes leave you wanting more, this was just a perfect symbiosis. I highly recommend the Positively Black album, for reference purposes I have found it for you here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?jwjlzkzynkj
The breadth and use of the samples is fantastic and sometimes stunning and you’ll be recognising a lot of them such as the BT Express House is Smoking and Kool and the Gang Open Sesame. Well known by most but used so inovatively for the time it still sounds fresh (and mean). A year before LL Cool J ripped it up with the Sly Stone sample on his come back track Mama Said knock you out, and to my ears a direct influenece on Cool J’s wall of sound sampling on that track. A more direct and in your face sound, and influence in a way, than even Public Enemy’s layered barrage. Smokey’s Quiet Storm is another sublime piece of sampling used on a cut celebrating the groups DJ.
You may know this album by now, but I hope also that I may have introduced you to something new.

The Jose Feliciano album you mention is one of his brilliant funky outings you should cross off that list as soon as you can too. We used to play out a track called I’m Leaving in our sets in the 90′s here in the UK, the album has a few funky cuts on it including the title track and features a nice slinky version of Lee Dorsey’s Yes We Can Can. It has a great Die-cut sleeve too.
Listen here:
http://open.spotify.com/album/5a1y5joWuKfOpDv0Pdz8B2

Anyway, congratulations again, and keep on digging and keep the vinyl alive.

Dom.

*Jackie Sommer: Dec 17th, 2009. Billy Cobham Crosswind post.

i don’t know that you will return to see this comment but if so, please email me by using the “contacts” page – i would be happy to record the entire +’Justments album for you and mail it to you on CD.

I was given this information through a favorite uncle of mine. A psychiatric head case if ever there was one, but he was the kindest, funniest, animated of human beings
one could ever be blessed to know.

With the very first song on the album, YOU, it brought me to an understanding of the world of adults around me, who didn’t necessarilly quite have it all together.

There was drug use, adultery, and whole host of other things that were raised in Bill’s messages, like black flags, urging, warning me of some of the pitfalls and snares of life.

I enjoyed that album emensely and have searched for a copy, high and low. Hoping that the record companies and executives might see the sense in having it re-released on CD so that an entire generation of young ones could witness for themselves, the greatness of much of the music that came out of the 70′s.

I loved that album that my uncle introduced me to. The song YOU came to be his national anthem. Identifying the snares and pitfalls of drug addiction and the oftentime superficiality of psychiatrist and modern medicine. It came to mean even more to me as life would show me face to face, just how fragile and difficult it can be.

In the Autumn of 77, my favorite
uncle for the last time effectively succeeded in ending his own life. A life filled with the pains of no longer being able to be employed, a string of destructive relationships, as well as the seperation and divorce of his wife and the dismantling of the family with his children.

I was so devestated at the time, that at the age of 18, within the spanse of 30 days after his death, I would thereafter suffer my first nervous breakdown and would never be the same again.