VA - What It Is! Funky Soul and Rare Grooves 1967-1977 (2006)

Subtitled Funky Soul & Rare Grooves From the Vaults of Atlantic, Atco & Warner Brothers, 1967-1977, this 4xCD set is another outstanding soul/r&b collection from Rhino, and it features contributions from the Meters, Curtis Mayfield, Wilson Pickett, Allen Toussaint, and Sly Stone, among many others.

Consolidation in the music industry has created problems that have manifested themselves both in business and art, but one of the positive side effects of it is on display on What It Is!, the latest in Rhino's campaign to collate the sidelines of music history with four-disc boxed sets. The subtitle of the box notes that all of the (mostly) obscure funk and soul sides in the tracklist comes from the vaults of just three labels: Atlantic, Atco, and Warner Brothers. Reading the exhaustive track notes, however, reveals a huge list of original issuing labels, including Keymen, Josie, Reprise, Cotillion, Alston, and Kwanza, all of which were either scooped up in acquisitions or distributed by the three title labels, which of course are all owned by the same company today.

It's rather nice to have one, well-documented place to go for such a huge range of funk and soul tracks, and Rhino has taken advantage of it, consolidating things even further to compile what amounts to, as Oliver Wang says in his lead-in essay, a "shadow history of funk." These aren't the songs that blew up the charts, though you may have heard a few of them-- Curtis Mayfield's "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below We're All Gonna Go" or Wilson Pickett's "Engine Number 9", for instance.

Though the title puts the range of years at 1967-1977, the vast majority of the songs gathered here came out in the first five years of that span. They're arranged chronologically, and you don't get to 1973 until the sixth track of Disc 4. This is entirely appropriate, because the real window of dirty, nasty funk-- before it gave way to disco and other, smoother cousins-- was a relatively short one. Several of the later tracks don't quite fit the spirit of what precedes them, and there's a lot of distance between the simple bounce of organ epiphany on the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band's "Spreadin' Honey", released in 1967, and the cosmic, synth-heavy stomp of "Riding High", recorded in 1977 by the Ohio Players under the name Faze-O.