I’m the first one to admit, keeping this Records at Random thing truly random has not always been easy. My main concern as I’ve picked arm-fulls of wax out of my stacks has been avoiding inclusion of too many obvious breakbeat staples, nightclub standards, Rare Groove essentials or otherwise widely-popular (be it with beat-diggers, DJs, producers or mainstream music listeners) records. I’ve made exceptions of course, mostly for albums that are true personal favorites or that I just plain wanted to listen to that day.
Today’s entry falls into almost all of the above categories. It’s also one of the first records I copped when I actively started beatdigging, something I only murkily delineate from buying used records on the strength. That was way back before I became a dollar-bin whore and didn’t have a problem laying down ten or more dollars for a record if I heard a break or funky groove on it. And Prelude, the 1972 CTI Records release from Deadato, a record I had searched out due to it’s inclusion of a specific break, had plenty of both.
At the time I knew little about Brazilian keyboardist, composer, producer and arranger Eumir Deodato or his legacy as a recording artist and respected behind-the-scenes figure who’d worked with artists as varied as Astrud Gilberto, Wes Montgomery, Kool & The Gang and (nearly concurrently with my purchase of Prelude) Björk. I just knew he had beats and samples and that CTI/Kudu was one of the “go-to” labels for funky Jazz. Despite my moderate ignorance and the costly fee I relinquished for my prize I was comforted by the sight of Ron Carter, Stan Clarke, Billy Cobham, Ray Barretto and Hubert Laws on the list of players inside the LP’s gatefold.
The record inside the sleeve was even more comforting. It starts with Deodato’s biggest hit, his Grammy-winning Funky-Jazz reinterpretation of Richard Strauss‘ “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” Perhaps better known as the theme to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 cinematic masterwork 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Friedrich Nietzsche-inspired “symphonic poem” is one of the most recognizable pieces of Classical music. Deodato bends it to his will like some kind of musical Übermensch, creating something totally of this world — dirty, grimy and funky — out of something that had previously been the provenance of the high-falutin’.
The a-side’s original compositions, a smoothed-out Burt Bacharach-esque (it owes an undeniable debt to “The Look of Love”) slow-jam with a sinuous Ron Carter bassline called “Spirit of Summer,” and the Bossa-influenced “Carly & Carole” are pretty sweet too, if less dramatic than “Zarathustra.” The standout track on the b-side is another original, penned by Deodato in collaboration with drummer Billy Cobham, titled “September 13th.” It’s “September 13th,” with its prominent breakbeat, bubbly electric piano, Funk bass and guitar, and catchy flute and horn parts, that instigated my purchase of the record, and has made it a “dusty” favorite to this very day.
-El Keter
