Day 7: The Isley Brothers/Isley Jasper Isley/Quincy Jones – The Artists Vol IV

This is a 1986 album featuring music by two artists (or groups of artists) that I really enjoyed, mainly in the 1980s. At some point I did have other records by these artists. I’m sure I had the 1981 Quincy Jones album The Dude, for example, but no sign of it now –  I imagine that in one of my must-clear-out-some-vinyl sessions over the year I decided that just keeping this compilation would be a good compromise. Street Sounds, the record label for this one, put out loads of compilations, particularly in the 1980s, concentrating on soul, electro, hip hop, rare groove and so on. You may well have one or two somewhere in your dusty collection. Here is the back cover:

 

The Isley Brothers (on Side 2) are musical phenomenon (6 brothers, all in the band at one point or another, only 2 still alive, 1 died young, very early on in the band’s career). As well as the Isleys there is one brother-in-law, Chris Jasper, a writer, producer and also in various incarnations of the band 1973-87 (and the splinter group that included his name, Isley Jasper Isley 1984-88). The Isley Brothers put out their first single in 1957 and their most recent album in 2022 – quite the streak. I probably first saw their name on the 1979 7” single It’s a Disco Night (Rock Don’t Stop) because that was in in my brother’s huge record collection (mentioned back on Day 5) but I must have heard some of their other tracks before that because there are so many of them. They wrote and recorded Shout (1959, the song later released by Lulu) and they recorded various big hits for Motown in the 1960s (you probably know more than you think, mainly written by Motown writers). An Isley brother wrote a Fight the Power in 1975 and Harvest for the World in 1976. Many of their songs have been covered but one of their biggest hits Summer Breeze (1974) was written by a band I’ve never heard of, despite having heard the song many, many times, Seals and Crofts. The song Caravan of Love (later covered by the Housemartins) was written by Chris Jasper and put out by the Isley Jasper Isley splinter group in 1985. I still have a copy of that on 12" too for some reason.

The Isley Brothers version of Summer Breeze is probably one of the reasons I kept this Street Sounds volume. I loved that song – mainly in the 1980s, a good while after its release – and listened to this album over and over, largely for that song, whilst at uni where soul was required to get through the nonsense. The only song on this I’m not mad about is Between the Sheets. I think generally I’m good with songs just not mentioning sheets at all (that Ed Sheeran ‘bedsheets smell like you’ business – I can live without that too, no place for that in a Zumba class, thank you).

 

To say, they’ve been around so long and put out so much music the Isley Brothers are a family band that I don’t know that much about (when you think how much you know about other family bands). Surely there must be a good documentary about them somewhere (I love a music documentary). All of which leads me back over to Side 1 and Quincy Jones as there is a great 2018 film about him, Quincy, made by his daughter actor Rashida (Ann Perkins*) Jones and Alan Hicks. Now 90 years old, Quincy Jones has had the kind of career you can’t sum up in a paragraph or two so I’d suggest that documentary as a good starting point. All but one of the songs on today’s disc are from his 1981 album The Dude which you don’t hear much these days but was pretty huge in its time. Here’s the title track (a few famous names in the credits for this one – Stevie Wonder on synth and Michael Jackson and Syreeta Wright on backing vocals, James Ingram on lead vocals).

Back tomorrow with something Brazilian.

*Her character in the sitcom Parks and Recreation. Much loved by our daughter (the show and the character).

For the first intro post to this series go here.