I’ve been trying to take my music collection to an even higher level of organization lately. I’m backing up a lot of my jazz and reggae albums onto yet another hard drive and organizing them chronologically by record label. Today, i’m picking out all of my CTI jazz albums.

I get a feeling that these record covers aren’t as interesting to a lot of you as they are for me. I say that because every time I tweet one of these galleries, I drop 3-4 followers, but if Bad George Benson and Johnny Hammond Smith cause you to stop being interested in what’s going on around here, that’s really ok with me. I know this is the Classic Kicks site and not Nick Santora’s site, but whenever anyone only talks about sneakers, it just seems disingenuous and not very original. Also, I don’t have anything to sell anyone at the moment and there are around 7 websites (that look exactly the same), showing you all that stuff, so my opinion is you don’t need it from me…. I’m just making an archive of cool shit right now.

Anyway……CTI

I’m a big enough fan of funky jazz to have had a radio show at WRIU at 6 am Monday mornings with @thejohnfulton back in the day. Our bread and butter was a lot of the Blue Note Rare Groove albums as well as a lot of these CTI albums pictured below. The CTI stuff almost sounds like the next phase of that Blue Note stuff. Most of these albums are a little more funky, afro-centric, disco, and vocal than their predecessors. If you also look at the lineups of who’s playing on these albums, they are the stacked with the funkiest guys ever to grace this earth: Herbie Hancock, Grover Washington, Johnny Hammond, Bob James, George Benson, Idris, Muhammad, Billy Cobham, etc. etc. etc.

I’m posting these covers because a) the artwork is awesome b) these albums are defining essentials in the history of jazz fusion and funk c) at the very least, you’ll find some classic Hip Hop samples if you dig around a little bit.