On 13 new songs Erik Jekabson’s Breakthrough weaves together amazing arrangements and beautiful compositions all under his mesmerizing trumpet. You would be hard pressed to find better musicianship; many of the players along side Erik are artists themselves or have impressive symphony credentials. All around a wonderful work sure to inspire a Breakthough.

Erik Jekabson is a freelance trumpet player, composer, arranger and educator living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

He has toured with Illinois Jacquet, John Mayer, Galactic, and has performed on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Night with David Letterman. Erik has several solo albums on Wide Hive Records “One Note at a time” (2020) “Erik Jekabson Sextet” (2018) and “Erik Jekabson Quintet” (2016).

Eric is equally busy playing and composing for different bands, leading his own groups, (the Erik Jekabson Sextet, the String-tet and the Electric Squeezebox Orchestra) teaching a wide variety of students and running the Young Musicians Program at the California Jazz Conservatory.

Available January 17, 2025 courtesy of Wide Hive Records.

(Gotta Groove Records offers vinyl record pressing and EcoRecord manufacturing for independent labels, musicians, and artists – this post features one of the many records pressed at Gotta Groove in the past month).

New record pressing — Hammock – From The Void.

“There are four songs we were considering for ‘Love in the Void’ that weren’t fully fleshed out. Listening to them again, we decided they deserved to be brought to life because of how they made us feel. In addition, we decided to create four new pieces inspired by LITV. Adding these pieces and pulling them from the void creates what we think is a bridge between LITV and our next LP, as well as a nice stand-alone document of music.” -Marc Byrd

Available now.

(Gotta Groove Records offers vinyl record pressing and EcoRecord manufacturing for independent labels, musicians, and artists – this post features one of the many records pressed at Gotta Groove in the past month)

New record pressing – Little Freddie King – Things I Used To Do:

The legendary Little Freddie King returns to Newvelle Records with a stripped down – and decidedly different – sound. The blues titan appears here just a few years following his acclaimed release Going Upstairs but now in raw, unadorned form. Paul DeFiglia on upright bass and Bobby Lewis on harp give a little structure for Little Freddie to expound from. Like a private conversation with a legend. A front porch record.

Here, Little Freddie plays classic works, many of which he first learned as an eight-yeard-old on a jury-rigged cigar box guitar in Mississippi. These are the songs he loves – from Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon,and Sister Rosetta Tharpe – and transformed in hands shaped by eight decades of living.

Available courtesy of Newvelle Records.

(Gotta Groove Records offers vinyl record pressing and EcoRecord manufacturing for independent labels, musicians, and artists – this post features one of the many records pressed at Gotta Groove in the past month).

New Record Pressing – Devon Goldberg’s Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, performed by MORRICONE YOUTH, to the 2024 horror film Eight Eyes — the debut feature-length of director Austin Jennings (director/co-writer of Shudder’s “The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs”) which world premiered at the 2023 Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, shot on 16mm and Super 8 on location in Serbia and Macedonia and starring Scream Queen Emily Sweet (V/H/S ‘99). The film is co-produced by Vinegar Syndrome as the Blu-ray reissue label’s first entirely original production and distributed by Shudder in North America and Donau Film in Europe. 11-Track LP (42 minutes) with 21-Track Digital Download Card (56 minutes).

Available October 31, 2024.

(Gotta Groove Records offers vinyl record pressing and EcoRecord manufacturing for independent labels, musicians, and artists – this post features one of the many records pressed at Gotta Groove in the past month).

New record pressing — Eilen Jewell – Butcher Holler, A Tribute To Loretta Lynn.

Butcher Holler is named for the little Kentucky town where Loretta Lynn was raised – On the tribute album of the same name, acclaimed singer-songwriter Eilen Jewell pays homage to Lynn’s humble roots and timeless, hard-hitting writing and performance style – For the first time, Butcher Holler is now available on vinyl, remastered and expanded with three brand new tracks. Jewell writes, “And so, a toast: to the woman with more banned songs than anyone can count; to that voice that reaches the very grain of the theater walls around her; to our national treasure. Gratitude is not enough, so I sing these songs for any who will listen.” The Boston Globe praised, “There’s an irresistible snap to these songs- they’re tight, deliciously twangy and rendered without orchestrated frills… [a] deft tribute.”

Available October 11, 2024 courtesy of Signature Sounds.

New vinyl pressing! Juliana Hatfield – Sings ELO. Available from American Laundromat Records.

“ELO songs were always coming on the radio when I was growing up. They were a reliable source of pleasure and fascination (except for “Fire On High” which scared the heck out of me). With this album of covers I wanted to get my hands deep into some of the massive ‘70’s hits but I am also shining a light on some of the later work (“Ordinary Dream” from 2001’s “Zoom” album, “Secret Messages” and “’From The End Of The World”, both from the ‘80’s).

Thematically, I identify with the loneliness and alienation and the outerspace-iness in the songs I chose. (I have always felt like I am part alien, not fully belonging to or in this Earth world.) Sonically, ELO recordings are like an amusement park packed with fun musical games with layers and layers of varied, meticulous parts for your ears to explore; production curiosities; huge, gorgeous stacks of awe-inspiring vocal harmony puzzles. My task was to try and break all the things down and reconstruct them subtly until they felt like mine.

Overall, I stuck pretty close to the originals’ structures while figuring out new ways to express or reference the unique and beloved ELO string arrangements. An orchestra would have been difficult or impossible for me to manage to record, nor did I think there was any point in trying to copy those parts as they originally were. Why not try to reimagine them within my zone of limitations? In some cases, I transposed string parts onto guitars, or keyboards, and I even sung some of them (as in “Showdown” and “Bluebird Is Dead”).

Recording the album was a kind of complicated and drawn-out process since I was doing all of my tracks at home in my bedroom (drums and bass were done by Chris Anzalone and Ed Valauskas, respectively [in their own recording spaces]), and I kept running into technology problems that would frustrate me and slow me up. But eventually I got it all done. A labor of love.” -Juliana