Numero Group: By The Numbers

Nice piece in Miles Raymer’s Sharp Darts column this weekend on 24-Carat Black:

Composer and arranger Dale Warren moved his visionary soul outfit 24-Carat Black to a few different cities during its life span, and toward the end it called Chicago home—though at that point its lineup was slightly different from the one that had produced the band’s only release, a 1973 concept album called Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth, which flopped in its own time but has since become a favorite of rare-groove freaks and hip-hop producers.

Warren’s pop career had already peaked, though his groundbreaking arrangements for Isaac Hayes’s Hot Buttered Soul were only a couple years behind him, and by the time he took the Chicago incarnation of 24-Carat Black into the studio in late ’74, the group’s label, Stax, was in financial free fall. Warren and his crew tracked an entire album but had only finished a rough mix when Stax folded in ’75. With no more label money coming, the band dissolved. Warren soon abandoned soul for classical music, working as a composer and instrumentalist as well as conducting orchestras in LA and Atlanta.

The reels ended up in the south-side basement of engineer Bruce Thompson, who also played keyboards in 24-Carat Black; the soul archaeologists at the Numero Group turned them up while hunting for a 45 by a band called Chocolate Sunday. Like Numero’s 2008 release of the Brotherman soundtrack, Gone: The Promises of Yesterday is incomplete, though for different reasons: Brotherman was never recorded in its entirety, while Gone suffered from poor storage conditions that degraded the tapes so badly that their magnetized coating flaked off.

Numero could salvage only 6 of the 20 tracks, and even that slice makes it clear that Gone would’ve had considerably more commercial potential than Ghetto. Getting its juice from what the liner notes call “tainted love songs” rather than grim hood sociology, Gone is a much more sensual listen. The baby-making funk of “The Best of Good Love Gone” is anchored by a smoothly popping bass line, elevated by churchy organ and a complex but accessible horn part, and topped by a pleading vocal from Warren’s teenage wife, Princess Hearn. “I’ll Never Let You Go” breaks halfway through for a jazzy ambient interlude that includes a different female singer simulating an orgasm. It’s not just sexy, though—it’s ambitious. The 12-minute-long “I Begin to Weep,” which starts off as sultry soul, ends with a combo of sparse percussion and Robert Dunson’s vocals that could almost pass for avant-garde minimalism.