We Are One
The Hot 8 Brass Band
Rock With the Hot 8 Brass Band, 2007
This song is a cover of a Maze featuring Frankie Beverly song from 1983. It’s an unlikely choice for a brass band but the harmonies sound so lovely with that instrumentation.
This album came out on Louisiana Red Hot Records 6 months before Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (with less appealing cover art). According to a poorly written press release on the Tru Thoughts website (the label that re-released the album), they were “inundated with thousands of enquiries about” the Hot 8’s version of “Sexual Healing.” These two sentence are particularly vexing:
After the hurricane the label never fully recovered and the track was pushed underground until it was brought to the attention of Tru Thoughts A&R Robert Luis when Quantic started dropping it in his DJ sets. People have been swapping CDRs and MP3s to get hold of the track ever since and it has received a remarkable response from DJs such as Gilles Peterson, Rob Da Bank and Coldcut getting in touch with Tru Thoughts eager to get hold of their own copy.
Wait, ever since what? It sounds like they are saying that these go from being underground to mainstream by merely entering the consciousness of Robert Luis. Tru Thoughts released “500 exclusive copies” of the single in October 2007 (although they can’t be that “exclusive” as the album came out two weeks later). I first heard this song in a Daz-I-Kue DJ set at Winter Music Conference in March of 2007 so it seems the swapping was in full effect many months before the Tru Thoughts release. I guess what is more likely is that he was leaking the mp3 to high profile djs but they should just say that.
Anyway, the music is great so who cares about everything else.
>> songs are available for two weeks [15.5 MB]
