First Ever CD Issue For This RecordingFrom James Brown’s Backing Band:The Bootsy Collins-lead JB’s.

This album is the Rosetta Stone of funk’s dominant idioms, yet its existence has barely been a rumor. In 1970 JamesBrown perfectly captured a definitive moment in modern music when he ordered Bootsy Collins into the studio torecord the tracks that would be test pressed on King Records as These Are The J.B.’s. This album is the epitome offunk music, Brown’s innovation that influenced everything that came after it, from Afro-beat to disco to hip-hop. Andif there is any funk ensemble as influential as Brown’s, in the post-“Cold Sweat” musical landscape, it’s theParliament/Funkadelic contingent. Those two streams, as Grammy Winning James Brown historian Alan Leedsdetails in this album’s liner notes, converged for the first time here.This link between Brown’s funk and all that followed features Bootsy and his young band running throughtwelve-minute instrumental take of Marva Whitney’s “It’s My Thing,” replete with blues chord changes, alongsideinterpretations of the Meters, Kool and the Gang and none other than Jimi Hendrix. This is a young band’s JamesBrown-turned-on-his-head style of funk that they nail in a one-minute vamp that pre-dates their obscure butimportant work as the Houseguests ensemble and embodies the essence of the psychedelic-flavored music thatwould propel them into the orbit of George Clinton and his mothership, where they poked cosmic holes in funk’spolyrhythmic ozone layer in the mid-1970s.There are only two extant copies of the original King Records test press LP of These Are The J.B.’s. The firstcommercial issue of this album, was overseen by Now-Again’s Egon alongside Leeds and Universal Music Group’sJames Brown expert Harry Weinger. It was mastered specifically for vinyl by Elysian Master’s Dave Cooley from theoriginal two-track stereo master that James Brown and his engineer Ron Lenhoff delivered to productionforty-four years ago.

• 1. These Are the Jbs (Part 1 & 2)
• 2. I'll Ze
• 3. The Grunt (Part 1 & 2)
• 4. When You Feel It, Grunt If You Can