These Are The Jbs (unreleased Session)

First Ever CD Issue For This Recording

From 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 James

Brown perfectly captured a definitive moment in modern music when he ordered Bootsy Collins into the studio to

record the tracks that would be test pressed on King Records as These Are The J. B.'s. This album is the epitome of

funk music, Brown's innovation that influenced everything that came after it, from Afro-beat to disco to hip-hop. And

if there is any funk ensemble as influential as Brown's, in the post-"Cold Sweat" musical landscape, it's the

Parliament/Funkadelic contingent. Those two streams, as Grammy Winning James Brown historian Alan Leeds

details 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 through

twelve-minute instrumental take of Marva Whitney's "It's My Thing," replete with blues chord changes, alongside

interpretations of the Meters, Kool and the Gang and none other than Jimi Hendrix. This is a young band's James

Brown-turned-on-his-head style of funk that they nail in a one-minute vamp that pre-dates their obscure but

important work as the Houseguests ensemble and embodies the essence of the psychedelic-flavored music that

would propel them into the orbit of George Clinton and his mothership, where they poked cosmic holes in funk's

polyrhythmic 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 first

commercial issue of this album, was overseen by Now-Again's Egon alongside Leeds and Universal Music Group's

James Brown expert Harry Weinger. It was mastered specifically for vinyl by Elysian Master's Dave Cooley from the

original two-track stereo master that James Brown and his engineer Ron Lenhoff delivered to production

forty-four years ago.