Track-By-Track: O/B #23
This tune is a typical sample-based house track, taking elements of the Gamble & Huff-produced 'I'll Always Love My Mama' by The Intruders (1973) and chopping and splicing them up over a Cajmere-adjacent groove. This was a style that had been established by people like Pal Joey with his prolific Loop D' Loop series and would prove to have enduring appeal throughout the 90s and beyond. It feels like there's a dubious lineage to be drawn from those early NYC proponents through Masters At Work, Armand Van Helden and Thomas Bangalter and on to the rich yet preposterous seam of sample-based UK chart toppers from the mid-00s. Pal Joey as the logical progenitor of Sunset Strippers, anyone?
I digress. 'Mama's Groove' squeezes everything it can out of the initial crescendoing cadences of 'I'll Always Love My Mama', focussing in on those curiously detuned guitar motifs and fanfares until they start sounding far odder than they should. It's a trick that KDJ would pull on his best disco-sampling workouts from around the same time. Interestingly, Lil John Coleman would release a slightly adapted version of this track on his outstanding The Farouche EP in 1996 (see video below), perhaps to take advantage of the disco house buzz of those intervening years.
Final note: the Feel Good EP is also home to an absolute barnstormer of a tune called 'Get N 2 A Groove', one of the most unusual and effective Cajmere-adjacent tracks I own. I'm sure I'll post about that another time.
Lil John Coleman - Mama's Groove (Lazyboy, 1994)
(Discogs)
Note: this is an entry in the Track-By-Track series for my mix for O/B.
Track-By-Track is a series that looks back at records you will have heard in my mixes, one by one in the order they were played. Who made them, and when? How did I come across them? And what do they make me feel?