One way glass : dancefloor prog, Brit jazz & funky folk 1968-1975

"The subtitle of the 2017 collection One Way Glass attempts to hip listeners to what they will find on the three discs within. It reads Dancefloor Prog, Brit Jazz & Funky Folk 1968-1975, and if you think some of those styles and descriptors don't quite make sense on first scan, you may not be alone. It may not be immediately clear how songs ... fit together; after a few spins it still might not make sense, but it does sound good. What the compilers of the set are trying to do is rescue some worthwhile, mostly lost, tracks, then recontextualize them in a new way. Bands during that era, even the more serious ones, often had a stray album track or B-side that had a little strut in the beat, a little funk in the horns, or some sultry groove hidden within the jams and progressive meanderings ... It's certainly enough to keep prog, jazz, and folk fans who are looking to expand their horizons locked in ...".

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"Overwhelmingly diffuse - may leave you shattered - The remit is wide, but there is a thread. A line can be drawn from the crate-diggers of early US hip-hop to the sometimes finickity rare groove culture that coalesced around the UK's Acid Jazz scene in the late 80s and early 90s. Across three discs, however, the glass somewhat fogs up: there are grooves aplenty, but it's a scattershot history lesson that, more than anything, attests to how difficult it can be to neatly sum up a scene when so many influences are at play. Though influences can be harnessed to form something new, the array of styles here reflects the fractured postmodernism of the 90s. Firmly in the Acid Jazz camp is Soft Machine's Gesolreut, with its debt to Miles Davis' early fusion period - somewhat smoothed out by Herbie Hancock in the 70s, on its way to Corduroy grooves in the 90s".

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