Alice Clark: Alice Clark [MAINSTREAM/WEWANTSOUNDS]

Why you'll love it

Wewantsounds remastered this reissue from the original tapes and put it in a gatefold jacket. Clark's voice, Ernie Wilkins' arrangements and a band with Cornell Dupree and Bernard Purdie make it a soul record collectors have chased for decades.

This edition

• Remastered
• Gatefold jacket
• Download card included

About the album

Some singers make dozens of records; Alice Clark made a handful of singles and one album, and the album is a stunner. She grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, cut her first singles in 1968, and in 1972 Bob Shad signed her to Mainstream Records to make an LP with arranger Ernie Wilkins at the Record Plant in New York.

The songs were picked with real care. Jimmy Webb's "I Keep It Hid" opens the record and was also issued as a single, "Looking at Life" comes from Petula Clark and John Bromley, and Bobby Hebb wrote three, including "Hey Girl." "Never Did I Stop Loving You" is a slow, burning beauty, and "Maybe This Time" from Cabaret gets a soulful makeover. Cornell Dupree plays guitar, Paul Griffin keyboards, and Bernard Purdie keeps the groove with that famous shuffle.

By the 1990s the acid jazz crowd in Britain had rediscovered her, and her name started turning up on DJs' want lists. It took about twenty years for the rest of the world to agree with Bob Shad, which in record collecting terms counts as fairly brisk.

Also at Kops: more Alice Clark on vinyl · browse 70s Soul On Up

Tracklist

Listen

On Mainstream / Wewantsounds (cat# MRL 362), a reissue of the 1972 album.