today's chillout music (299)

abdul rahim ibrahim / al rahman! cry of the floridian tropic son

The 'Lost' album from cult pianist Doug Carn of Black Jazz fame. Mystic soul-jazz songs with disco twists under the common influences of Earth Wind & Fire and John Coltrane. Doug Carn is the most famous artist of Black Jazz records, the cult record label of the 70s. He recorded four albums for Black Jazz which are considered by many jazz lovers as 70s soul jazz classics. In the mid seventies, Doug Carn left the Black Jazz label, got divorced and converted to Islam. He changed his name to Abdul Rahim Ibrahim, and cut this nice record of spacey soul tracks, most of which feature vocals by Doug and the Jean Carn-esque Kweili. At its best, the set has a nice spiritual groove with spacey keyboards, and a vocal approach that sounds a bit like Jon Lucien or Roy Ayers.Tracks include the spiritual jazz classics Al Rahman, a fifteen minute prayer. As the original liner notes said: Part of the purpose of this album is to show the members of the funk-pop-rock and Jazz-Afro-Cuban-Latin and the Traditional-Blues-Gospel oriented subcultures in western societies that the Arabic language and Islamic Din are not necessarily alien to them. And more specifically, to show that the syllablistic expression of the be-bop language and the evolved musical ideas of the great innovators John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner are equally Arabic in nature, as Jazz itself is a word of Arabic Origin.