Limelight
(All the above from my collection)
Here's a very interesting label. Limelight starts out as Mercury records' Jazz subsidiary with fairly straight releases by Oscar Peterson, Art Blakey, Charles Mingus and Gerry Mulligan. The only hint of what was to come seems to be in their championing of Roland Kirk with records like "Rip, Rig and Panic" (named after a Bristolian Post-Punk outfit, teehee) and "I talk with the spirits". A slight digression: I don't know about you but I've always thought Roland Kirk's stuff is over-rated. In the past I've had "The Inflated Tear" and "The Case of The 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color" and despite alluringly psychedelic cover art, they're disappointingly conventional jazz. What is good is "Root Strata"; a disc I first heard in some "soixante-huit"-er's apartment in Paris.
I suspect towards the tail-end of the sixties Jazz sales started tanking and the label was speedily re-tooled as a catch-all "underground" operation. However, its ambitiousness is startling. Firstly they re-release the cream of French Concrete music, all Pierre Henry's major works as well as electronic works by Kagel, Xenakis, Ferrari, Maderna and Berio and complied the excellent survey of Norwegian electronic music "Response". They sopped up some of the most adventurous Electric Jazz (Melvin Jackson's delicious "Funky Skull"), put out home-grown US Electronic Music by (the obligatory) Beaver and Krause and the witchy Ruth White and were a home to rainbow-array of one-off discs by the likes of Spleen "The Sound Of Feeling" (a Folktronic twin to Buffy St Marie's "Illuminations"), the legendary Fifty Foot Hose's "Cauldron" (unquestionably the square-root of US Post-Rock as it manifested in Tortoise, Ui and Pan Am), and The Mecki Mark Men's eponymous LP. It would be quite unimaginable for a record label today with Avant-Garde inclinations to cover such a massive territory. Especially, I'm afraid to say, an American label.
As if to top it all they even carried titles such as these Indian and Iranian records. The first two I have held in my hands in record shops but not bought. I suspect that they're merely okey-doke tokenly-licensed material but, hell, the ambition is there. I suppose three letters make sense of the whole project. L, S and D.
