The Yoruba Soul Mixes

This is a good starting point if you want to hear US house consciously interfacing with its deep African roots. St Louis, Missouri multi-instrumentalist and producer Osunlade has taken his tracing of rhythm and spirituality back through African-American music to its roots so seriously that he became a priest in the Ifá spiritual tradition of the Yoruba of West Africa. This 2004 collection of him remixing everyone from jazz-funk god Roy Ayers through Malian star Salif Keita and Cape Verde’s Cesar Evoria to modern electronic artists like John Beltran and Spacek is the perfect joining of dots through all his influences. Here you can hear exactly how exacting are his tracing of those spiritual rhythms, but how that is also part and parcel of consistently being deeply, deeply funky.