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.

Embraced in the early 90s by Britain’s rare groove scene and later sampled by Digable Planets and Jay-Z, Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth has since been known as 24-Carat Black’s first and final chapter, barely a footnote in the well documented history of Stax. Producer and songwriter Dale Warren’s dark urban concept album, released in the fall of 1973, challenged even its target audience to embrace it. A downer message to the emerging black middle class and too heady for a populace basking in the afterglow of the Wattstax festival held a year prior, the record didn’t approach radio’s pop standards and wasn’t near white enough for the mainstream press. Warren’s brainchild band simply pushed past their concept’s conclusion, piling up dozens of reels for an intimate follow-up album that no one in the world wanted to hear. Yet. With their ambitious debut LP downgraded to cutout status when Stax finally shuttered in 1975, 24-Carat Black found themselves watching their moment recede in the rearview.

For 35 years, the sketches for 24-Carat Black’s sophomore release hibernated in keyboardist and session engineer Bruce Thompson’s basement below the south side of Chicago. Abandoned by Warren when the studio bill darkened his mailbox, the tapes, over decades, had fallen into soggy disrepair, useless save for the six tracks featured on our release.  Because Gone: The Promises Of Yesterday is by no means a sequel to Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth. Missing are the poignant and bleak sermons on the pain of inner-city existence, replaced by dusky, sensuous re-workings of tainted love songs Warren had written as far back as 1965 during his time as a songwriter at Shrine and Motown. Still, his unfinished self-reinvention, even heard through the prism of these skeletal remnants, delivers on a remarkable purity of vision: one man’s corner of black culture, 24 carats pure and mishandled perhaps until now, finally a bit less misunderstood.

The CD is housed in a embossed slipcase and can be purchased here on our website.  LP’s should be in stock sometime in late July for all you vinyl collectors.

The worst part of unearthing old music is digging up something in a far-too-advanced state of decay. This was the most disappointing moment from the 24-Carat Black excavation. An uptempo cut with all the right moves, this untitled jam would’ve certainly made our tracklist, if not set the bar for the material we found. Unfortunately, far too much is missing. Note the drop-outs, distortion, and overall crustiness. This is Dale Warren at his most fiery. The driving drums and echo-laden congas give a raw urgency not always present on either set of 24-Carat recordings. There was no working with this material, however, and the best efforts of experienced professionals to restore even small parts of it were for naught. Enjoy it here, as much as it is possible… it won’t likely be presented anywhere else.

We’re trying to get creative with the only known photo of 24 Carat Black but, we’re obviously having lackluster results.

Our final result feels like a John Lennon sketch.