Like the winged half-man/half-bull that dominates its outrageous cover, Cleveland Eaton's Half And Half is a mutant bass-heavy monster that absolutely slays. Incredible jazz-funk from 1973, it's been largely overlooked for decades, and unfairly so. This is just sensational music - a crate digger's delight. It's super funky throughout, with lots of layers, jazz breaks for days, dripping with style and gritty class. This is the first reissue of what has been a hard to find record for many years; it's long overdue. Joyous music for mind, soul and body.

Cleveland Eaton was a revered bassist who played an active role in the backing of Count Basie, the Donald Byrd Quintet, The Ramsey Lewis Trio, Terry Callier and Minnie Riperton; amongst many, many others. Half And Half was the first album released under his own name, initially released as a private press record on his - awkwardly named - Cle An Thair Records. It was then picked up by Gamble & Huff for Gamble Records. Varied, string-adorned and with stupid funky grooves, it's just exceptionally good.

Whilst Half And Half is treasured for its famously brilliant interpretations of gold funk-soul standards, Eaton proves an imaginative composer in his own right. Indeed, the album opens with a striking original; the earthy, laconic jazz-guitar-funk fusion of "Keep It Funky". Cleveland and co. do exactly that. Up next is a properly moving cover of Aretha Franklin's eternal "Day Dreaming". The flute and guitar combo truly achieve celestial greatness here. "Here Comes Funky Lou" rides a bassline from the Gods and a driving soul-jazz groove allows the track to go off in all sorts of directions. Serene guitar soul of the breezy variety one moment, crazy hectic violin-driven wig outs the next, courtesy of Ed Green who played with Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane. His blistering two track salvo of Stylistics covers to close out this A-Side of A-Sides will leave your jaw dropped, and they're likely the reason you're here for this. And why not? "Betcha By Golly Wow", which uses a bed of acidy synths and harmonica to create a unique atmosphere, is on some next level business. Melancholic, wistful, beautiful. "People Make the World Go Round" is so good, dripping in wonderful horns and ace percussive breaks, it could even be regarded as the definitive version. Seriously!

Opening Side B, War's gigantic "Slipping Into Darkness" is tightly tailored to Eaton's funky flute fusion arrangement whilst the insistent "Missing You" is a swaggering horn-heavy version of Luther Ingram's track from the Dilla/Ghostface-linked LP, I've Been Here All The Time. The creeping, screeching guitar-drenched original "John's Groove" features more fantastic horn lines and neck-snapping percussion whilst "The Love Gangster", written by Bill Wyman and Stephen Stills for his seminal Manassas LP, contains a heavy break with slick drums high in the mix and fuzzy guitars.

The album closes with two more Eaton originals. Written with Johnny Guitar Watson, "Lie" is one hell of a funky string and guitar-driven gem whilst the wild, celebratory "Ah Movin' On" cleverly quotes "Wade In The Water" (which he'd recorded with Ramsey Lewis in 1966) folding it into his new free-jazz composition. A message to his old boss, perhaps, as a sign-off?

We've worked on this reissue for 3.5 years, spending the whole time making it sound super sharp and looking as perfect as it possibly can. An absolute must-have for fans of soulful jazz-funk, Half And Half was mastered for vinyl by Simon Francis and cut by Pete Norman at Final Tweak. The bizarre artwork, mutant beast and all, was restored at Be With HQ over many painstaking months! Hopefully, this new edition, a real labour of love, should bring Cleveland Eaton into the homes and record boxes of many more people.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Keep It Funky 5:20
A2 Day Dreaming 3:36
A3 Here Comes Funky Lou 4:00
A4 Betcha By Golly Wow 4:15
A5 People Make The World Go Round 5:34
B1 Slipping Into Darkness 7:15
B2 Missing You 3:1
B3 John's Groove 2:55
B4 The Love Gangster 3:20
B5 Lie 2:15 B6 Ah Movin' On 4:00

Second solo album by La Luz singer/guitarist Shana Cleveland.

RIYL: Robert Wyatt, Opal, Nilsson, Kevin Ayers and his Whole Wide World, Norma Tanega, Jessica Pratt, Julie Driscoll, Michael Nesmith, Sibylle Baier.

Manzanita is the common name for a kind of small evergreen tree endemic to California which has strong medicinal properties. It’s also the name of the brand new full length by visual artist, writer, songwriter, and musician Shana Cleveland. Subtle, powerful, and unafraid. We can’t actually tell you how much we love this record because you’d never believe us, so we’ll just say that it is her strongest and most personal album to date. These songs are as strong as the bricks in the Brill building, and seem destined to be covered by others in years to come. Where her previous record, 2019’s Night of the Worm Moon (Hardly Art) functions as a collection of speculative fictions equally inspired by Afro-futurist pioneers Herman “Sun Ra” Blount and Octavia Butler, Manzanita concerns the love that loves to love. “This is a supernatural love album set in the California wilderness,” Cleveland explains. The combinations of words and song structure are so strong throughout that one hardly notices Cleveland’s nimble fingerpicking on first listen, or how much is packed into the arrangements. The lyrics are satisfyingly direct, with the buoyantly whimsical descriptions typical of the 1960s New York School of poetry. It’s peppered with the kind of unexpected turns that make the words more modern, and in their spookiness they are more West Coast, as in “Mystic Mine,” with its “Mystic Mine Lane, cars rotting away/ I feel so relieved to be/ Back in the country.” So much of the pop music we love is propelled by those first blushes of infatuation and lust, but Manzanita concerns the kind of love that one can only experience with time, work, and devotion. Cleveland says: “The songs were all written while I was pregnant (side A) or shortly after my son's birth in that weird everything-has-quietly-but-monumentally-shifted state (side B),” she says. Moving to the country, starting a family, laughing for real at the same joke the thirteenth time you’ve heard it, surviving heavy shit (this is the first release since Cleveland’s successful treatment for a diagnosis of breast cancer at the start of 2022). This is a love album that’s somehow populated with the insect world, ghosts, and evil spirits. Sonically, Manzanita sits in a meadow similar to her previous solo records, set back and away from the genre-recombinant garage pop of her band La Luz. This is part due to the fact that there’s a different sonic palette in use here. While Cleveland continues to play guitar and vocals; Johnny Goss, who has recorded all of Shana’s solo material and early La Luz recordings, and Abbey Blackwell (Alvvays, La Luz) play the bass; Olie Eshleman is on pedal steel; and Will Sprott plays the keyboards, dulcimer, glockenspiel, and harpsichord—little of which would have been out of place on her previous two solo records—Sprott also adds layers of synthesizer infused with the sounds of the natural world. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Another beautiful folk-leaning record this week from the brilliant Shana Cleveland. The La Luz singer / guitarist brings things down a little for her solo project, still swimming in psychedelic waters but with more of an organic, slow-moving drift. At times, the hefty gothic folk instrumentation overtakes her echoic vocals, but it's never less than perfectly manicured and a great listen throughout.

TRACK LISTING

1. A Ghost
2. Bloom
3. Faces In The Firelight
4. Mystic Mine
5. Light On The Water
6. Quick Winter Sun
7. Bonanza Freeze
8. Gold Tower
9. Babe
10. Ten Hour Drive Through West Coast Disaster
11. Evil Eye
12. Mayonnaise
13. Sheriff Of The Salton Sea
14. Walking Through Morning Dew

Shana Cleveland has been beguiling listeners for years in her role as the superlative frontwoman for elastic surf rockers La Luz. Now Cleveland is evolving her sound on the new solo full-length Night of the Worm Moon, a serene album that flows like a warm current while simultaneously wresting open a portal to another dimension. As much a work of California sci-fi as Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, Night of the Worm Moon incorporates everything from alternate realities to divine celestial bodies. Inspired in part by one of her musical idols, the Afro-futurist visionary Sun Ra (the album’s title is a tip of the hat to his 1970 release Night of the Purple Moon), the record blends pastoral folk with cosmic concerns.

Cleveland dreamt up this premise while living in Los Angeles, a city where--as deftly explored on La Luz’s recent Floating Features--reality and fantasy casually co-exist. Abetting Cleveland during the recording process was a familiar gallery of co-conspirators: multi-instrumentalist Will Sprott of Shannon & the Clams, original La Luz bassist Abbey Blackwell, Goss, pedal steel player Olie Eshelman, and Kristian Garrard, who drummed on Cleveland’s previous solo effort (with then-backing band The Sandcastles), 2011’s Oh Man, Cover the Ground.

But whereas that album was internal and contemplative, Night of the Worm Moon occupies a different, vibrant kind of headspace. UFO sightings, insect carcasses, and twilight dimensions are all grist for Cleveland’s restless creativity, and they and other inspirations collide beautifully on the album’s 10 kaleidoscopic tracks--a spacebound transmission from America’s weirdo frontier.

STAFF COMMENTS

Javi says: ‘Night of the Worm Moon’ is as much an album of acoustic lullabies as it is of shifting ethereal nightmares - and it’s this balance between the beautiful and the unnerving which allows Shana Cleveland’s ruminations on sleep, love, and identity to be so beguiling.
“Don’t Let Me Sleep” pulls us gently into this nocturnal world full of harps, zithers, vibraphones and lutes before second track and album highlight “Face of the Sun” trembles in, lilting between Latin guitar rhythms and wailing slide guitar. There are such nods to spaghetti western soundtracks throughout the album, in both the instrumentation and the slow, trundling tempo of tracks like “Solar Creep” and masterful “Invisible When The Sun Leaves”.
That’s not to say the album is a wholly analogue affair, though - the synth bass and eerie affected whistles of “The Fireball” are just as poignant as the more stripped back moments. At times the bass sounds like it’s going to swallow the song whole, lending a sense of intense anxiety to the proceedings, sucking the listener in.
If La Luz are the sound of bright summer days spent surfing and swimming in the sun, then ‘Night of the Worm Moon’ - the debut solo offering by frontwoman Shana Cleveland - shows us a parallel world that only appears once the sun has set and the stars have taken its place in the sky. From the first tender plucks to the final twilit twinkles, Cleveland has crafted an album as warm as it is melancholy, and as intimate as it is intoxicating.

TRACK LISTING

1. Don’t Let Me Sleep
2. Face Of The Sun
3. In Another Realm
4. Castle Milk
5. Night Of The Worm Moon
6. Invisible When The Sun Leaves
7. The Fireball
8. Solar Creep
9. A New Song
10. I’ll Never Know

Cleveland's latest superstar art-project This Moment In Black History comes out swinging with a six-track blast of frenzied rock'n'roll wailing. Features members of Neon King Kong (GSL records), Bassholes and Chargers Street Gang.