Linda Hill

She kept notebooks. Spiral-bound, lined, 8x10 inches. In her beautiful flowing cursive, Linda Hill documented every rehearsal, every concert, every recording session of the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. The names of three hundred musicians passed through those pages. When she died, the notebooks vanished - a treasure of information, lost. But the music survives. Lullaby For Linda, recorded on April 25, 1980 and released the following year on Nimbus West, is the only album Hill made as a leader. A single document from someone who was, by all accounts, co-leader of the Arkestra alongside Horace Tapscott himself. Mark Weber, photographer and chronicler of the South Central scene, put it plainly: Linda Hill was the PAPA matriarch.

The album opens with "Leland's Song," a vocal duet between Hill and Adele Sebastian that immediately establishes the record's spiritual coordinates. This is devotional music, rooted in gospel but reaching toward something more expansive. Sabir Mateen - here in one of his earliest vinyl appearances - contributes tenor saxophone and clarinet; Roberto Miranda anchors on bass; Everett Brown Jr. holds the drums. The ensemble is smaller than the full Arkestra, more intimate, but no less powerful.

"The Creator's Musician" finds Hill and Sebastian in explicitly sacred territory, dedicating their art to a higher power before launching into the album's most gospel-inflected passages. The title track features Jugegr Juan Grey singing tribute to the matriarch herself - a tender homage wrapped in modal harmonies.

Then there's "Children." Eleven minutes of Hill and Sebastian in conversation - talking about the music scene, about Kwanzaa, about invented gossip - while Virgilio Figueroa's percussion keeps everything grounded. They ululate, they sing, they overdub themselves. It's unlike anything else in the Nimbus catalog: part documentary, part ritual, wholly UNIQUE.