The Artistics could match the quality of the Impressions and the Chi-Lites, but not their chart success.
Tag: Brunswick Records
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Pieces of Peace cut most of their brilliant soul-funk for other people’s records
Chicago soul-funk band Pieces of Peace didn’t put out their only album till 35 years after they broke up.
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Summoning the ghosts of Record Row
For two decades, a short stretch of Michigan Avenue hosted a concentration of creative entrepreneurship whose influence on Black popular music is still felt today.
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Johnny Pate is one of the great unsung architects of Chicago soul
This 95-year-old living legend has played jazz, written blaxploitation soundtracks, and arranged for Stan Getz, B.B. King, and most famously Curtis Mayfield—but he’s probably most widely heard via hip-hop samples.
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Barbara Acklin missed soul stardom by a hair
She’s best known for the 1968 hit “Love Makes a Woman,” but she also had a productive songwriting duo with Eugene Record of the Chi-Lites.
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Chicago soul man Marvin Smith hit big with the Artistics, but couldn’t break out on his own
Despite his arresting falsetto on “Time Stopped” (and a cosign from Curtis Mayfield), Marvin Smith’s solo records never did better than his 1966 Artistics single “I’m Gonna Miss You.”
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Crate diggers have caught up with the funky soul of Doug Shorts’s Master Plan Inc.
Decades after his greatest group disbanded, Chicago soul singer Doug Shorts is finally being recognized for his brilliance.
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McLuhan’s oddball prog LP flopped in 1972 but goes for big bucks today
Early-70s prog oddballs McLuhan used lots of visuals onstage and recorded their sole LP with the man who’d later produce Thriller.
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The Jackson Find
This was supposed to be the story of the Jackson Five’s first single, cut in Chicago in 1967. But while he was writing it, Jake Austen picked up a trail leading to a tape nobody knew existed: the earliest known studio recording of Michael Jackson and his brothers.