From the Corner to the Block - Galactic ft. Juvenile and The Soul Rebels Brass Band

New Orleans jazz/rock/funk (or, as I am now officially calling it, jonk) fusion meets hip-hop meets brass band. It will blow your mind while blowing it's horns.

From the Corner to the Block is the title track from New Orleans based fusion group Galalctic's (originally named Galactic Prophylactic) fifth album. The track features fellow New Orleans natives Juvenile and The Soul Rebels Brass Band- though it's the latter presence that really elevates it to such heights. It's a funked up car crash of time lines, genres, and a sousaphone.

More of this please.

Shooting Breaks - Garage A Trois

Shooting Breaks by Garage A Trois

Garage A Trois are an instrumental band featuring saxophone, vibraphone, synth organs and heavy, heavy drums. That sentence alone should immediately tell you how awesome they are, but if you need further convincing here's 'Shooting Breaks,' a track from their fourth studio album Always Be Happy, But Stay Evil released earlier this year- and today's Best Song Ever.

'Shooting Breaks' is the sound of an endlessly surreal panic attack. Great tongues of synth and organ curl down at you from the sky. Drums burst through the ground in the shape of hearts caught in voodoo cardiac arrest. Vibraphones (already the total melding of paranoia and joy into one sound) clink and crack through the roar in a constant game of aural peekaboo.

It's wild as hell, and just when you think you're getting to grips with it you reach the 2:20 mark and things get funky and terrifying in equal measure, like fifty foot elephants doing a can-can across your brain.

Tipitina - Professor Longhair

If you recently discovered Tipitina off of Hugh Laurie's album, allow me to throw a little grit, sweat and soul in your eyes with the original. We're going to dirty things up to wash away Mr. Laurie's take on the inimitable Professor Longhair:

Professor Longhair – Tipitina

Professor Longhair is one of the fathers of blues piano, introducing a funk and swing to the music via the rhumba rhythms of his native Louisiana that would come to be defined as the New Orleans Piano sound. He spent the early part of his life hustling on the street till he turned to the piano in earnest in the late 1940s and early 50s. Recordings from this period were collected on the 1972 album New Orleans Piano, and it's on this record where we can find not just one but two versions of Tipitina.

The Professor has a marvelous way of making music with intensely infectious energy that manages to sound completely laid back, as if he sat down to jam one day and just happened to play a masterpiece. It's the feeling of your shirt sticking to your back from hours of dancing without you having to move a muscle. It's the melody of laughing with friends even if your friends are a world away. It's the sound of a world buzzing and humming while you catch a nap.