Various: Blaxploitation, Volume 3 - Soul, Jazz & Funk from the Inner City

If you were feeling cynical, you might say the Blaxploitation series were a bit of a Tarantino-inspired cash-in, and it's true that this volume has two songs in common with the Jackie Brown soundtrack (a much-played cassette of which got pulped along with the car after our 2006 accident). But you'd have to be in a curmudgeonly mood to deny the pure pleasure of track after track of what now seem like canonical recordings. Who defines the canon? I know it's a function of the collective unconscious. But does it always take a mouthy white bloke to crystallise it, give it voice, and make ignorant people like me pay attention?

Anyway, this compilation barely puts a foot wrong in nearly two and a half hours. If Volume 3 is this good, and has so many classics on it, how good must the first two instalments be? Just about all the songs come from that same pool as I mentioned in connection with Joe Henderson, though this is more the street side of the coin than the mystic spiritual side. A few of the tracks do go on a bit, but that's part of their period charm — a kind of musical denial of the '70s oil crisis.

MusicBrainz entry for disc 1, disc 2 Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Listen to disc 1 in full at Last.fm, disc 2