Released: September 29
Acid jazz pioneers The Brand New Heavies’ discography is revisited for a career-spanning best-of LP, featuring all of their biggest hits.
Coinciding with the 35th anniversary of their debut single, Got To Give, the group returns to London Records for a double-disc celebration of a catalogue that took the west London band around the world and saw them rise through the ranks as pioneers of the genre in the early 1990s.
Across 21 tracks, the collection highlights their game-changing approach, journeying through chart smashes, internationally acclaimed originals and reinvented cover versions that showcase the group’s knack for taking classic sounds and turning them on their head with modern, future-facing revisions and production.
As superfan Mark Ronson explains in his liner notes for the album: “The Brand New Heavies and their pitch perfect jazz-funk revival were my musical coming out party. They were my introduction to all the incredible music I would spend the next 30 years of my life DJing in clubs as well as triggering my desire to think outside of the basic-ass chords I knew on the guitar and piano.”
Collections such as this often appear sequenced in chronology, but in the case of The Heavies it’s an advantage to view their output outside the realms of time, instead jumping between eras and alternating between an impressive line-up of collaborators – such as N’Dea Davenport, Siedah Garrett and Carleen Anderson – and highlighting the range of their musical references.
From the straight-up acid jazz of their earliest releases like Never Stop and Dream Come True, to the hip-hop influenced ‘Heavy Rhyme Experience, Vol. 1’ number Bonafide Funk (feat. Main Source & Large Professor), funk-heavy Dream On Dreamer and downtempo Sometimes, it’s a showcase of their diverse repertoire that never follows and always dictates its own trends.
Alongside the original recordings, the set is backed with a second disc of remixes from such titans of dance music as Masters At Work, Dimitri From Paris and Roger Sanchez, as well as a percolating new remix of Stay This Way by Bob Sinclar, leaning back into the club origins of their formative years.
In an era of streaming where decades of music are available at the touch of a button, the greatest hits concept is increasingly tricky to get right, but in the instance of The Brand New Heavies ‘Never Stop’ excels not only in fusing together a spectrum of work in one cohesive package, but in showcasing the pioneering role of the often-overlooked acid jazz icons.
