The Whitefield Brothers
In the Raw

THE REVIEW

The Whitefield Brothers are Max and Jan Weissenfeldt, teutonic brothers who are nothing short of nostalgic for the jazz-funk sounds of the early 70s. In the raw: naked, the title suggests. Indeed, naked rolling in the Sahara dust, this instrumental album offers a deep-funk as profound as the landscapes it paints: to call it a fresh album is, however, a necessary oxymoron.

Jazz: there's enough to satisfy.
Funk: there's enough to devour.

A collective of many different instruments chase each other throughout every composition, linking together in grooves that always reach maximum stability; wooden sounds that throb between articulated staccatos create a wild orchestra of carnivorous rhythms.

Ethnic touches that would make Mulatu Astatke happy, stretches of afrobeat that would satisfy Fela Kuti, stubbornness in mid-tempo that would make The Meters pale: in the album, the traits of a very credible 70s sound often reveal themselves to be more follower than master only due to the excellent production. The hypnotic symmetric kraut-funk of Prowlin' highlights the psychedelic aesthetics of this music through its swirling motifs, but at the same time, Yakuba seems to sculpt the mask on the cover among the forests of grooves in the background. Ancestral in somatic traits, tribal in vague mystical allusions, at times it might find intersections with a Bitches Brew: but if it were by Miles, it would be left to marinate for years first.

Bitches marmalade, of course.

The imprint of this music from the past is much more than well-trodden, and since the early 90s, through the Poets of Rhythm and later transferred to the US, the Whitefield brothers have very likely recorded a seminal album of this psychedelic neo-jazz.

By remastering it, Now-Again has produced one of the most interesting offerings of the entire label, second only to the Heliocentrics according to the writer.