There’s a bone-chilling vernacular that bleeds from every darkly poetic, silkily sewn corner across the timeless discourse of funk, hip-hop, and soul. You know it when you hear it even if it can’t be defined in straightforward terms. It’s simply there. It is simply is, it simply was, and it simply always will be echoing of human emotion, projecting of something deep within our hearts and, for lack of a better word, our soul. Organic instrumentation led with sultry basslines, playful guitar riffs, and percussive patterns that dictate the beat of a listener’s heart, coinciding and colliding with the registers of deeply gifted poets and vocalists to draw into focus something reminiscent of our own internal monologuing thoughts, and external observations on the state of it all. It’s music that requires a lot of its artistry: one hell of a voice, an animated persona through which to express a waterfall of unpredictable poetry and social discourse, an understanding that music still has so much room to expand, maneuver, and ultimately surprise. It’s pure, still simultaneously purely experimental, usually born from places that could never feel pure, but instead feel, period. It is a soundscape that is perhaps also always best when served up a little vintage.

 

BLK VINTAGE emerges from the mire of a modern soulscape and funkdom that is still very much alive, still very much new, and is yet eternally tethered to its foundational past. It comes from BLK ODYSSY, who has as his birth name and his newly minted moniker, been a fervent figure of self-reinvention – or further self-realization – for years. Sam Houston – born in New Jersey the son of Parliament roadie where youthful interactions with George Clinton were by no stretch uncommon. Now BLK ODYYSY – based in Austin where his live jams fueled by myriad stylistic exploration between local spots and the local stage at ACL, alike, have kept him a well-kept gem since 2019 – has seemingly moved and evolved as a man and as an artist through music. He eventually found himself here, where BLK VINTAGE speaks his truths by telling the stories – literal and musical – through a larger community. A larger community, after all, helped deliver this debut years in the making.

 

“I wanted to have a room full of people who are all better musicians than me, and who can all bring ideas to this project. All in all, there are probably upwards of 50 people on the record. You need a community of people to put together a project like this, and it brought the songs to a new level," he recalled to The Austin Chronicle en route to the late Summer release of BLK VINTAGE – an album strewn with flutes and trumpets and saxophones and keys and drums and an endless spiral of layered vocals, prose, and poeticism.

 

Beyond that wide-ranging circle, in the larger community that birthed the album, from which he sourced its rich texture and continues its expansive tradition, is one that’s strife is detailed at some of its deepest through BLK VINTAGE’s closing hymn, Drinking Good. Ghostly samples echo overtop sirens and a subtle intro on the keys before giving way to the silky vibrations of BLK ODYSSY pleading into a bottle, “My mother thinks I’m sick, She smells that liquor on my breath, Liquor on my breath. They killed my brother, shit. I saw those bloodstains on his chest, Bloodstains on his chest.” It’s a track of brutal reminiscence and reconciliation with memories that guided a transformation in his own creative path by way of his personal one. But, it’s one, too, that stamps the album with the mark of its maker. Personal and communal, Drinking Good necessarily details hardship and tragedy to necessarily speak on he and a larger community’s pain and perseverance. After all, this is soul music, and soul music is Black.

 

But so is funk and so is hip-hop, and BLK VINTAGE is a celebration of the Black sound as BLK ODYSSY knows it. Even in its moments of heartbreak and poignancy, there is an addicting rejoice in the jazz-oriented explosions of keystrokes, brass, and hymn. At its more elative moments – see Funkentology, Nineteen Eighty, and Hang Low – there is an air of SiR meets D’Angelo, To Pimp A Butterfly Era Kendrick submerged in the 1930’s Harlem mood that BLK ODYSSY tried to curate during his recording sessions. It’s all there. It’s that wide-ranging, and worthy of its lofty comparisons. And yet, it’s brought together under the banner and within the spectrum of something entirely new, minted from so many golden places and faces in music’s always evolving lineage. All three are difficult-to-define stretches and contractions of funk, soul, and hip-hop in fluid flux across the spectrum of BLK ODYSSY’s vibrant range.

 

It’s a range that pushes its boundaries furthest on the multi-part composition that is Big Bad Wolf/Sober, where a hard-hitting beat and a flex of BLK ODYSSY’s fully furnished skillset as a rapper with a particular strength of pen falls into a B-Side blurred into a more downtempo bit of production and tumbling of spoken word.

 

“Sometimes I wonder why we sit under the thunder,
Unconsciously knowing that we’ll never find another, lover.
You see her intentions were one dimensional,
But type of love I felt you know that shit was unpreventable so we-

Found ourselves in a separate dimension.
Socialized to hate but we never learned our lesson.
I wrote this verse while Astral projecting had me on the astral plane”