The mighty Soul Jazz have just gone and re-issued Count Ossie’s seminal 1975 collection Tales Of Mozambique.

Count Ossie set up a famous Rasta encampment on the east side of Kingston, it was there many of the island’s musicians learned about a fervent spiritual movement and came in contact with outsider drumming traditions that wholly redefined the island’s musical heritage.

David Katz writes about the birth of reggae and had this to say:

“By 1948, Kingston’s leading jazz musicians were already playing late at night with the drummers at the Salt Lane yard. Ossie also attracted likeminded outcasts from the Rockfort and Wareika communities of eastern Kingston, who saw him practicing on the edge of the local sewerage gully. In 1951, after Hurricane Charlie destroyed the Salt Lane camp, Ossie moved to Adastra Road in the heart of Rockfort, and the “groundations” he held in the surrounding Wareika Hills (in which drumming, chanting, and spiritual reasoning took place), rapidly became a focal point for the Rastafari movement, resulting in dramatic changes to Jamaica’s music scene.”

Tales Of Mozambique is a wide ranging record, taking in traditional African drumming, bursts of free jazz and choral religious outpourings.

What’s our favorites? Has to be the straight up horn work outs on the wicked Sam’s Intro that open the record, followed by the trance inducing purring of Wicked Babylon.

That really got stuck in our head.

Grab it before it’s gone. It was costing a bomb on Discogs before the reissue.