Melting Pot Music

Profile:
DJ Olski's label specializing in contemporary funkyness, from straight-up instrumental funk to afrobeat, smooth jazz and hip-hop. While located in Germany, Melting Pot Music features artists from around the world, such as The Lefties Soul Connection (Netherlands), Queen Eve & The Kings (Denmark), Massak (France), Soul Village (France), and A-Ko (USA).

Sublabel:
Jazz Makossa

Contact Info:
Geisselstr.29
50823 Köln/Cologne
Germany
olski@olski.net

URLs:
http://www.olski.net/



Discography:
MPM-003 - Lefties Soul Connection: Doin' The Thing / Generator Oil (7")
MPM-005 - Massak: Live! (12")
MPM-006 - Queen Eve And The Kings: All Hail The Queen / Bringin' Home The Bacon (7") ***
MPM-007 - Old New Soul (for Carhartt) ***
MPM-008 - Lefties Soul Connection: Bouncing Ball / Hutspot (7")
MPM-009 - Lefties Soul Connection: Dutch Soul Food (CD)
MPM-010 - Slum Village: Everybody Loves The Sunshine / We Gettin Down (7")
MPM-011 - Lefties Soul Connection: V2 (12")
MPM-014 - Lefties Soul Connection: Peacock Strut / Sling Shot (7")
MPM-017 - Various: Breakbeatraer - Four songs from Soulstrut.com (12")
MPM-018 - DJ Day: Gone Bad (12")
MPM-019 - Lefties Soul Connection: Organ Donor (7")
MPM-020 - Various: This Is Melting Pot Music (LP/CD compilation) ***



*** Features Queen Eve & The Kings
MPM-022 - A-Ko: Chicago (12")

QUEEN EVE & THE KINGS - All Hail The Queen / Bringin' Home The Bacon (7" MPM 006).
Released on 7" 45 RPM vinyl the 12th of January 2004.

Side A
All Hail The Queen (2.09)

Side B
Bringin' Home The Bacon (1.29)

Produced by F. Birket-Smith & A. Vingaard of Rolando Posen



Every record has its story. The one behind this 45 starts three years ago in the city of Copenhagen. Two musicians and funk conisseurs by the names of Frederik Birket-Smith and Andreas "Dreski" Vingaard invite seven fellow musicians (one of them a bass player by the name of Eve) for a session at the now defunct recording studio of Frederik's father. Their mission: lay down the grittiest funk that has ever come out of Copenhagen. On that night three songs are being recorded. Various funk experts visiting the city got the chance to listen to the songs and leave baffled.

I first heard about their existense through a friend from Stockholm. DJ Mad Mats was guesting at my Soul Power party in Cologne when he told me about this hot funk demo from Copenhagen. Mats was about to get his Raw Fusion label started which eventually turned into a underground powerhouse for quality club music made in Skandinavia. After hearing the Lefties 45 on MPM he sent me a CD-R with the words Funk Project (c) 2001 and an e-mail adress on it. When I put it in my player I was shocked so was my friend the mighty Soul Rabbi. But when I tried to get in touch with the guys I found out that the e-mail adress was incomplete and since Mats didn't had any other contacts I had already filed the tracks under "great lost private burned funk cd". Call it karma but a few weeks later Mats met Dreski by chance in the streets of Copenhagen and when I finally reached him he mailed me back "Good to hear from you Olski, we wanted to contact you anyway." What I didn't know was that Dreski is a fellow Soulstrut member who had spotted my occasional self-pluggin in the crate diggin' forum.

So here we are three years later with two songs of this seminal session finally pressed on a little record with a big hole ready to take the world by storm.



Olski von Felbert, November 2003




Feedback
"I wish I would have signed the Danes, sounds f***** awsome! I was djing down in Spain last weekend and when your 7" was played the whole club went mad (like me!)." Mad Mats (Raw Fusion, Stockholm)

"Mad record - hard and fast!"
Daddy Bones (Grand Slam Magazine, Nottingham)

"Excellent! There you go again with all these fucking winners !!!"
Snowboy (Snowboy, Thundersley)

"Big drumbreaks, screaming hammond and some flute as a nice bonus. We need more flute in the funk."
Bart Fader (Coldgrits/Struttin, Amsterdam)

"Killer flute led groove from QUEEN EVE. It's all Hammond, relentless drums and a stomping arrangement, maybe the best MPM track yet?
Pete Isaacs (Jelly Jazz, Plymouth)

"Pretty cool. Played it last saturday and rocked 600 people with it."
Jan Whitefield (Poets of Rhythm, Munich)

"Dope record with regular rotaion at my clubnight"
(Florian Keller, Into Something, Munich)

"Perfect! Sound and composition are very cool"
(Zdenko, The Malcouns, Munich)

"Thanks for sending over the record! I played it on the same night and put it in my december chart"
(Oliver Korthals, Mojo Club, Hamburg)

"Massive groove gladiator"
DJ Cem (Beatpackers, Cologne)

Interview with the two producers and founders of Queen Eve & The Kings, from http://84.44.164.196/content/mpm/artists/index.php?focus=queeneve


Queen Eve & the Kings are not your typical funk band. They don't spend their evenings in a sticky rehearshal room to get ready for for a poorly payed gig at the weekend. Queen Eve & the Kings don't have a rehearshal room at all and they have never played in front of more than ten people. Their first and only 45 single so far is the result of one single recording session in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2001.
The musical directors behind the band are the producers and DJs Andreas "Dreskiboogie" Vingaard and Frederik Birket-Smith, who are both involved in variou projects in Copenhagen and abroad.

INTERVIEW
With Andreas "Dreskiboogie" Vingaard and Frederik Birket-Smith:

How did you get in touch ?
We met a long long time ago at a Copenhagen radio station by the name of Radio Jazz where both of us worked.

What's your musical background ?
Andreas took the classic route: After listening to hip hop for many years he got interested in where the samples came from. Since then he has been expanding his musical horisonz on all forms of music including funk, soul, jazz, rock etc. He dj's quite often.
Frederik has played the drums, the piano, the congas, and the vibraphone from an early age and has studied in London, England as an audio engineer and producer. He works at the biggest music recording studio in Copenhagen but also dj's very often however mainly UK Garage, Bashment and Dancehall. He also runs one of the oldest underground club/rave promotion companies in Copenhagen, "Rolando Posen", celebrating 10 years anniversary this year. Currently he concentrates on promoting UK Garage and Bashment music in Copenhagen but also does a lot of remixing and song writing with both Danish, British, and Jamaican artists.

Who is Queen Eve and what make the other members Kings ?
Queen Eve is Denmark's baddest funk and jazz bass player and she is also known as "Eve, the shewolf". As you may understand, she is not to be messed with. Dig the bass lines and rough sound on the new 7" and you will know! However there will be no Queen without a King and in this case, Kings. The Kings are a group of talented musicians who all share our passion for funk.

The 45 was recoreded a while ago, right ?
The tracks were recorded during a loooong jam session in Copenhagen, March 2001. Nothing was written beforehand and we recorded a few takes of each of the grooves from the jam sesion we all liked. We then selected which take was the best and started mixing. The recordings took place at now defunct Moremax Studio, Copenhagen. The studio of Frederik's father actually. It was the very last session at the studio before it closed and moved to new premises. A very nice way to end almost 20 years of recordings at Moremax Studio.

How did you manage to create such a raw and wild sound ?
As this were our first funk recordings we were not yet sure how we wanted the sound to be and more importantly how to produce the sound we would prefer. It was just a trial-and-error session and we learned quite a lot regarding recording rough funk music during the session. The Hammond B3 organ was miked and recorded on seperate tracks, the drums were recorded with just a snare, kick, and a mono overhead microphone on seperate tracks, The bass and the guitar were miked and recorded seperately however, all of the horns shared just one microphone. When they were to play a solo they just moved closer to the microphone and it worked very well. A trick taught to us by Phillip Lehmann actually. All of the instruments were miked with old microphones (valve and non-valve) and recorded on a 16-track 1/2" reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was mixed the same day and we did not use a lot of gear nor effects except for an old spring reverb and a slap delay for the guitar and a spring reverb for the organ and horns.

What do you tell people who think its corny to play a style of music had its heyday 30 years ago ?
This music still has a lot of potential and we haven't been asked that question at all. When we play this kind of music for people the reactions have been quite the same: they love the energy and all the imperferctions of this kind of music. It is okay to hit the wrong note and it does not have to sound "polished" and "clean".
Do you try to add anything new to your funk or is all about recreating the old sound 1:1 ?
Well, a very good question. As we are not that experienced in recording/producing old school funk we have not given it much thought whether or not we want to recreate the sounds of the 60's and 70's to perfection. When we have more production experience in this kind of music we will be able to answer the question properly.
What do you think about the "new funk scene" in general?
There's a lot of nice new stuff coming out. It will be interesting to see how the funk movement is going to progress in the future. Is it going to fuse with modern styles of music such as eg. hip-hop or is it going to evolve into something completely different or just keep sounding as it has since the 1960's?

There is a second funk-realted project you are working on, right ?
Yes, it is called Orgel Kvintetten. In Danish Orgel means organ and Kvintetten means The Quintet. We will have a track featured on an Acid Jazz hammond organ compilation due to be released in early spring 2004 and there are also other projects in the making