Henry Franklin: The Skipper At Home (remastered, blue with black swirl vinyl) [REAL GONE MUSIC]

Why you'll love it

Remastered and annotated, on blue with black swirl vinyl limited to 500 copies. It is bassist Henry "Skipper" Franklin's second album for the cult Black Jazz label, home to "Soft Spirit," later sampled by A Tribe Called Quest.

This edition

• Remastered, with new annotation
• Blue with black swirl vinyl
• Limited to 500 copies

About the album

Henry "Skipper" Franklin is one of the great journeyman bassists of West Coast jazz. He played with Roy Ayers in high school, toured Europe with Hampton Hawes, recorded with Freddie Hubbard, Archie Shepp and Count Basie, and was on Hugh Masekela's No. 1 hit "Grazing in the Grass." In 1972 he made his debut as a leader, The Skipper, for Black Jazz Records, the small Los Angeles label now treasured for its spiritual, Afrocentric jazz.

The Skipper at Home followed in 1974, and it is a warm, grooving set: "Blue Lights" opens with a deep, rolling bass figure, "What Was" floats, and "Soft Spirit," composed by Sanifu Al Hall Jr., has a hypnotic lilt that A Tribe Called Quest later sampled. Franklin is still playing today, and won an NAACP Image Award in 2023 for his album on Jazz Is Dead. Five hundred copies of this one; the Skipper is home, but probably not for long.

Tracklist

Listen

Out July 3, 2026 on Real Gone Music (cat# LP-RGM-2165C), a reissue of the 1974 Black Jazz Records album.