Jay Richford & Gary Stevan - Feelings

9.0 - Italy - 1974

- Masterpiece -

Stellar library album from the seventies reissued by the good folks at Schema in 2016. The credited names are pseudonyms ("Gary Stevan" in particular sounds quite phony), so the actual authorial artist(s) is unclear. Dusty Groove has it as Sandro Brugnolini and Stefano Torossi (presumably respectively); Discogs has it as Puccio Roelens and Giancarlo Gazzani (more likely respectively). The somewhat spotty liner notes to the Schema re-release holds that all four worked on the album, which seems most likely (though just who is who is murky).

Still, no matter who made it, this is a fantastic record, easily one of the greatest library platters ever cut. The music itself consists of ten exquisitely crafted tracks based around the usual jazz-funk rhythm section of drums, electric bass, Rhodes piano, and wah-wah over top of which some terrific easy-listening strings and horns provide an insistent, vamping groove. The occasional fuzz lead pops its head up now and again.

Ostensibly, each track is intended to convey one of the titular "feelings", but the overwhelming aesthetic throughout is sultry glamour (opener "Flying High" in particular doesn't quite match its title). One or two tracks -- "Walking In The Dark", notably -- just sort of stand around looking pretty but doing nothing, but so long as that wah-wah keeps squelching away, I ain't complaining.