Eight albums that made acid jazz

The name started as a joke. Acid house was on every British sleeve by the end of the eighties, and calling something else acid jazz was a way of taking the mickey out of the lot of it, which is not usually how a genre acquires a name that sticks for a decade.

The joke lasted six years and ended up opening a vault.

Eight records follow, from 1987 to 1993. They aren’t in date order. They’re grouped by label, and read that way they say something the titles won’t: in 1987 this scene fits inside one small independent, and by 1993 it is inside EMI and Sony.

Listen while you read

Before there was a label

The James Taylor Quartet, Mission Impossible (Re-elect The President, REAGAN 2, 4 May 1987). Seven pieces on a mini album cut at 45 rpm.

The label was called Re-elect The President. It numbered its releases with the word REAGAN. This is number two.

Two on Acid Jazz

The Brand New Heavies, The Brand New Heavies (JAZID CD23, 16 April 1990). Nine pieces, on a label Eddie Piller had set up in 1987 with Gilles Peterson and named, as its own page still admits, as a tongue-in-cheek response to the acid house explosion going on around it.

Corduroy, Dad Man Cat (JAZID CD 60, 1992). Twelve pieces. Thirty-seven catalogue numbers on from the Heavies.

Three on Talkin’ Loud

Galliano, In Pursuit of the 13th Note (848 493-1, March 1991). Thirteen pieces. Peterson had walked out of Acid Jazz in 1989 and had Talkin’ Loud running by 1990.

Young Disciples, Road to Freedom (510 097-1, 1991). Nine pieces, out in the same year as the Galliano, on a label with one year of life behind it.

Incognito, Tribes, Vibes and Scribes (512363-2, 1992). Eleven pieces.

One on Blue Note

Us3, Hand on the Torch (0777 7 80883 2 5, 1993). Thirteen pieces, built out of records owned by the company that was putting the album out.

Geoff Wilkinson got called in to meet the label after one of his tracks was played on Kiss FM, and went into that room expecting to be sued. He came out with an album deal and, in his words, “carte blanche to sample from the label’s 40-plus-year-old back catalogue”.

The record, he tells MusicRadar, “went on to sell over 2.5 million worldwide”. A Grammy nomination followed. So did Blue Note’s first platinum plaque.

One on Sony

Jamiroquai, Emergency on Planet Earth (Sony Soho Square, 474069 1, 14 June 1993). Ten pieces, the same year as the Us3, and another multinational’s imprint printed on the label.

What the catalogue numbers say

Six years separate REAGAN 2 from that Blue Note number, and in between sit two labels that came out of the same person and then split, Piller’s Acid Jazz and Peterson’s Talkin’ Loud.

The running order of this page is that journey. A label named after an American election joke. An independent. Its offshoot inside a major. EMI’s historic catalogue. Sony.

Not one of those steps took longer than three years.

Why the name never fitted

Acid jazz was always an awkward thing to call it, and not only because it began as a dig at a rival scene. The label’s own page gives the game away, describing the records it was putting out as ones that often held very little jazz in them and even less acid.

What they held was simpler than the name. Bands playing live the music the DJs were putting on in the same rooms.