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Jazz Articles about Sly and the Family Stone

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Album Review

Sly and the Family Stone: The First Family: Live At Winchester Cathedral 1967

Read "The First Family: Live At Winchester Cathedral 1967" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
August 7, 2025

The glossy silver foil finish inside and outside the covers of The First Family: Live at Winchester Cathedral 1967 to some degree belies the sound quality of the music inside. But the assiduous effort applied to the sonics of the original recordings--by Sly and The Family Stone's first manager Rich Romanello--is right in line with the meticulously annotated contents of the enclosed fifty-two page booklet. With the many period photos as thought-provoking as the carefully annotated prose, the ...

Radio & Podcasts

Sly Stone, Tessa Souter, Cedar Walton

by David Brown
June 26, 2025

This week we remember progressive soul and funk pioneer Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone with two interpretations of his classic tunes: “Family Affair" from Bobby Hutcherson and “If You Want Me to Stay" from David Murray. Songs featuring some wonderful “oohs" and “aahs" in the background will be follow from Nina Simone and Billy Strayhorn. New releases are up next from Tessa Souter, interpreting Eric Satie, Brandee Younger, performing on Alice Coltrane's Harp, and Adam O'Farrill with ...

Book Review

Sly Stone: Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) - A Memoir (Paperback)

by Doug Collette
December 21, 2024

Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir: (paperback) Sly Stone with Ben Greenman 336 Pages ISBN-13: 978-1250872265 Macmillan Publishing/AuwaBooks2024 Reading Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir, it' is hard to know who to compliment most (even if no additional content appears in the softcover edition). Is it Sly Stone for his rapid fire recollection or co-writer Ben Greenman for helping maintain some flow to the prose thereof? ...

Book Review

Sly Stone: Thank You (Falettinme be Mice Elf Agin)

by Richard J Salvucci
January 26, 2024

Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir Sly Stone With Ben Greenman 297 Pages ISBN: 9780374606978 Auwa Books2023 Some readers may remember a time before Sly and the Family Stone. There was music--music you might reasonably call funky. The word “funk" first appeared in the early seventeenth century. Its use in jazz went back to the 1950s, at least. But for a lot of people, there was before Sly and after ...

Extended Analysis

Sly and the Family Stone: Live at The Fillmore East October 4th and 4th 1968

by Doug Collette
August 9, 2015

Sly and The Family Stone's galvanizing appearance at the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair in August of 1969 may well represent the pinnacle of their career, but their rise to this apogee of recognition was the culmination of a long slow climb to fame dating back even further than Sylvester Stewart's, nee Sly, tenure as a disc jockey and record producer during the early to mid-Sixties in San Francisco. Melding r&b, gospel, rock and roll, blues and pop, ...

Extended Analysis

Sly and the Family Stone: Higher

by Carlo Wolff
December 7, 2013

Sylvester Stewart is a maddening guy. Both a cock of the walk and abjectly self-destructive, the man better known as Sly Stone, leader of the Family Stone, psychedelicized funk better, or at least more notoriously, than anyone else as the 1960s collapsed into the 1970s. In albums like Dance to the Music (1968), the 1969 breakout Stand!, the shadowy 1971 masterpiece There's a Riot Goin' On and 1973's disturbingly catchy Fresh, Sly and his musical--including some blood--kin crafted unparalleled, unsurpassed ...