Super Breaks, Vol. 3: Essential Funk, Soul & Jazz Samples and Breakbeats

Performers include: Funkadelic, Marvin Gaye, Bar-Kays, Coasters, Sly & The Family Stone, Mad Lads, BT Express, David Porter, Jimmy Ponder, Johnny Jenkins.
The third volume of Super Breaks maintains the high standards set by this series in several ways: the quality of the material, eclecticism of the tracks within a '60s and '70s soul-funk-jazz crossover spectrum, and mixture of obscure songs by stars with obscure tunes by just plain obscure artists. Although cuts by Marvin Gaye, the Coasters, and Sly & the Family Stone are found here, none of them are the ones you're likely to hear on oldies stations, or even noncommercial specialist programs. Gaye's "T Plays It Cool" is wiggly, futuristic instrumental funk from his early-'70s soundtrack to Trouble Man, for instance, while the Coasters' "Soul Pad" is goofy modern soul from 1967 and Sly & the Family Stone's "Trip to Your Heart" is from their relatively unheralded debut Epic album. True, some of this disc is 1970s funk, some from leading lights like Funkadelic and the Bar Kays. Yet there are unpredictable side trips to artists few would dare to include on such thematic comps, like the spacy jazz-funk cut "The Rose" from San Francisco late-'60s psychedelic cult band Fifty Foot Hose, the fusion cover of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" by Jimmy Ponder, mid-'70s fusion from Hampton Hawes, and an excellent 1964 sorrowful girl group-soul ballad by Wendy Rene (selected due to its being sampled by Wu Tang Clan on "Tearz"). If you're looking for more well-known samples here, bits of Johnny Jenkins' "I Walk on Gilded Splinters" were appropriated for both Beck's "Loser" and Oasis' "Go Let It Out." If you're not looking for samples (though the modern records that have sampled these tracks are detailed in the liner notes), it's still a good collection of off the beaten track music, if a little erratic and occasionally mundane. ~ Richie Unterberger