Duccio is a long time friend of this blog, but don’t get me wrong, we are posting this stuff over absolute quality, not friendship. It’s not that “hey, listen to my man” thing you read everyday on the net.

These mixtapes, “The Unknown Edition” and “Still Unknown” were released for Ecko Clothing (you’ll find many others on their italian site if you wish) and are mostly centered on the eclecticity of Hip Hop from a record collector’s point of view.

The DJ played tunes from his favourite beat makers and blended them with any sort of styles and flavas as long as they sound “right” together. A wide range of music is represented, picked up and thrown in the mix as the recording goes without thinking too much, with the intent to create a musical path based on the DJ’s feeling at that precise moment.

Of course not everything its “mixed” in a strict sense, because by doing so with some tunes you risk to mess up their true nature (and you miss the initial break, which is often the dopest section).

From Dilla to turkish star Selda Bagcan (as sampled in Percee P’s song), from Rock, Psych, Jazz, to Rare stuff. Be prepared to hear crazy beats from Library music and Ethnic grooves from the far corners of the world, from Turkey to Brazil to the Middle East. Feel lost? Don’t be, these mixes are incredibly linear and coherent while they quickly pop secret gems in your face one after another, give them a try.

The Unknown Edition by Ecko Unltd Podcasting

STILL UNKNOWN by Ecko Unltd Podcasting

One of our first successful post was his break beats session. Now, after five years, we want to share with you this other great mix from the one ad the only ”living encyclopedia of beats”. Enjoy!

Almost a month ago I received, from our brother from another mother Rchecka, an email about this gem from 1983: The Big Break Dance Contest Live at the Roxy 1983. This rare footage it’s an historical representation of the early hip hop culture and I am sure you will love to see it. Props to Rchecka for the upload.

By the way, get all his mixes here!

all recent funk and latin funk 45s and some recently reissued classics … funk is alive and well in 2012…

listen and enjoy

Have you been a good boy? Get your present!

To mark the 25th Anniversary of Gilles Peterson broadcasts for the BBC, heres a special present from the Mucho Soul crew! This is the very first show Gilles did for the corporation back in the mid eighties! Recorded on September 2nd 1986 between 10pm and 12 midnight, Mad On Jazz aired weekly on Radio London 94.9 FM every Tuesday. There’s a little bit missing mid way through the show – I must have dozed off! – or popped out and forgot to flip the tape over, but hopefully this won’t spoil your listening enjoyment. It’s a pretty good representation of the sound of early GP and he’s given us the OK to post and share with all our regular podcast listeners. So sit back, listen and raise a glass in celebration of 25 years of the finest Jazz broadcaster ever to hit our airwaves!

Nuff respect to Al & Ket Mucho Soul for this: Gilles Peterson BBC Radio London Sept 2nd 1986

It’s all about playing with music and trying to do something new. Nice one! Check the full video from this performance:

DEVIATION STRING QUARTET: FULL PERFORMANCE from Deviation on Vimeo.

And if you want to pump this stuff in your music player, here’s a download link for the mp3 of this set:

LISTEN! Deviation string quartet 2011 in mp3

The first one is from the guys at NYCT, a killer section of obscure Afro Beat, Latin Funk, Jazz and stuff like that from one of their latest dj sets in a bar in New York City. We weren’t there that night unfortunately, but the magic of the Web gives us a second chance to listen it.

Featuring this crazy Chackachas tune, this mix is a very enjoyable selection of tracks from the roots of black music, dont miss it if you’re into african-centric sounds.

The second mix I suggest you to check out is this very nice and original session from Strong Island’s own Oxygen (AKA Ox the Architect). He got props from Soulman, the king of breaks, so I decided to take a listen, and my curiosity did repay me once again.

A rare groove RnB session filled with solid breaks, some everlasting classics like Tramp or Different Strokes, plus a couple of self-produced hip hop joints because he knows how to spit rhymes as well. A remarkably complete emerging artist and a passionate vinyl collector: let’s support him.

DJ OXYGEN -- PROMO [30-minute funk /soul set] by oxthearchitect

The third mix is the final chapter of our trip into the more recent sounds of black music. Time has come for some serious Golden Age Hip Hop.

Back in the 90′s we listened everything because everything was dope in Hip Hop. Everything except Heavy D. Or at least thats what we thought. Heavy D was commercial, we were down with ruffneck stuff. But re-listening Heavy D now, I changed my opinion. He was a great artist and this Marley Marl tribute is awesome. Marl takes us back to the sound of those fantastic radio shows he used to host, playing his music the way it was supposed to be played. Sometimes you wonder how many different records is he spinnin at the same time? Magic.

MARLEY MARL HEAVY DEE TRIBUTE MIX FOR WBLS by DJ Marley Marl

And now ladies and gents, I know you want to load your ipod with these goodies, so here’s the download link

LISTEN the Marley Marl mix + the DJ Oxygen mix

LISTEN the NYCT Ritmo Melao mix

That’s all folks. Listen these mixes and check this post back again as we will provide our download links for these joints very soon. Have fun!

Nice review from All About Jazz

Lined and ravaged as it is, the face is ageless: as sunken as a dead man’s, as softly bewildered as a child’s. Chet Baker’s face, and the extraordinary ways in which Bruce Weber has photographed it, encapsulate the story of Baker’s life in a succession of ghostly, indelible images that are at once hauntingly beautiful and desperately sad.

Applied to a different subject, Mr. Weber’s methods might seem disturbingly superficial, but they suit this portrait perfectly. The man, his music and the times in which he flourished are best served by a cinematic style that remains determinedly skin-deep.

Surfaces are everything in ”Let’s Get Lost,” but they are gorgeously stylish surfaces, redolent of both contemporary notions of glamour and of the late-1950′s jazz mystique of which Baker was a part. Mr. Weber, well known as a fashion photographer and as the director of one previous documentary (”Broken Noses,” in 1987), displays an unerring eye for the strikingly evocative image, using black-and-white cinematography to produce as varied a palette as other directors might achieve in color.

The result is a tremendously visceral composite representing the different stages of Baker’s troubled life. It includes early glimpses of him as an uncommonly handsome young jazz trumpeter in the mid-50′s, a celebrated dreamboat whose movie-star looks suggested James Dean; footage of a still-handsome Baker in the mid-60′s, when his drug habit had fully taken hold and his career was beginning to decline; and terribly painful scenes shot in 1987, when Baker had grown so dissipated that old friends barely recognized him. A year later, he died after falling out of a hotel window in Amsterdam.

Interwoven with these glimpses, of course, there is music: Baker’s languid voice is heard offering smoky, sinuous renditions of the romantic ballads that he favored. Mr. Weber, who adroitly mixes the sound of Baker’s music with visual imagery, is most successful in conjuring a purely sensual impression of Baker’s style, and of the mordant joie de vivre that colored even his deepest state of decline. Recurring shots show Baker in the back of a convertible at night, cruising in California flanked by pretty young women, the wind blowing through his hair. Only in the bright, incongruously childish eyes buried in the folds of that weathered face is there any trace of confusion and pain.

A number of Baker’s friends and relatives are interviewed in ”Let’s Get Lost,” most of them speaking of the man’s irresistible charm, some also describing his incorrigible ways. ”He was bad, he was trouble and he was beautiful,” says one of the many women who loved him, providing the best epitaph this film has to offer. Some of Baker’s children appear in the film, making it clear that their father was never a family man; various wives and girlfriends add to the general impression of irresponsiblity. Baker’s own account of how he lost his teeth -- supposedly after a beating involving a drug connection -- is branded a self-serving lie by one of the women who knew him best.

The interview footage in ”Let’s Get Lost” is less effective than some of the purely impressionistic passages, partly because Mr. Weber’s questioning can be more histrionic than helpful. Interviewing Vera Baker, Chet’s mother, the film maker asks whether Chet was a disappointment as a son (she says yes). At the end of the film, he asks Baker himself whether he will ”look back on this film in years to come and think of it as good times?” ”How the hell else could I see it, Bruce?” drawls the subject, with the bluntness that is one of his more appealing qualities.

Even when Mr. Weber gets a rise out of the singer Ruth Young, one of Baker’s longtime girlfriends, by letting her say she controls the rights to the Baker story and then announcing that he too has been given the same rights, the director seems an unnecessary presence in his own film. He is most effective in letting the look, the sound and the tragic mystique of his subject speak elegantly and hauntingly for themselves.