So with such a prolific and wide-reaching output, what’s next for Strut? “To look beyond the dance and funkier stuff and look at historically important music that seems to be missed out on,” Scott replies. “I would really like to work with a lot more new acts, but they have to sit really well on the label,” says Scott. They’ve also released studio LPs by musicians who have featured on their compilations-artists like Pat Thomas and Ebo Taylor-and signed new artists, like Canada’s Souljazz Orchestra and Leeds jazz outfit Nubiyan Twist. For its second chapter, the label has mined the archives of artists like Sun Ra, worked with post-punk experts JD Twitch and Trevor Jackson, and gone deeper into music from lesser-known corners of Africa, including the brilliant forthcoming compilation Alefa Madagascar. It was precisely because they put so much effort into high-quality presentations (spending £12k on the luminous ink for one compilation, for example) that Scott had to close the label in 2003 luckily, it was relaunched through the !K7 label group in 2008.
“I love what those labels are doing now, and I think they are at the top of the game,” says Scott.
#THE SOULJAZZ ORCHESTRA NEGUS NEGAST WHOSAMPLED ARCHIVE#
Presented in heavyweight packaging with archival photographs, flyers, and memorabilia, Strut became the benchmark for subsequent archive labels-from Soundway to Analog Africa. “When you are documenting a scene or a moment in time in music, it’s very important to have that context,” says Scott. With the help of other serious collectors and archivists (covering areas as diverse as Mauritius and Réunion Island) Strut built a reputation for painstakingly researched compilations, with extensive liner notes telling the stories of the characters behind the music. “We both thought, ‘What the hell is going on? ‘Why isn’t this stuff better known?’” “When I met Duncan in the late ‘90s, he was way ahead of the game in collecting that funkier fusion sound coming out of Africa,” says Scott. “But I did think most of their releases were always very ‘polished.’ I wanted to do the funkier and grittier ‘70s music that DJs would play.”Īn integral part of Strut’s work in Africa is the record collector Duncan Brooker. “Labels like Sterns, Mango, and Triple Earth did amazing things for raising the profile of African music,” says Scott. Releases in those early years included high-water marks like Larry Levan Live At The Paradise Garage, Club Africa, and Nigeria 70.
Scott, who had previously worked at Harmless Recordings, founded Strut in 1999. But true to their original mission, you can dance to all of it. They’ve covered everything from mutant dance music ( Disco Not Disco) to South African Mbaqanga ( Next Stop Soweto), making it one of the most diverse reissue labels around. Over the course of their two-decade existence, they’ve unearthed “lost” or little known recordings by everyone from Tony Allen and Mulatu Astatke to Larry Levan and Walter Gibbons. The label, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, eventually found a throughline. “But that could mean anything from disco, soul, funk, and African music to post-punk and industrial.” “When we started out we always wanted to relate our releases to dance music in some way,” says Quinton Scott from the London headquarters of his label Strut.
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