Mandoki Soulmates’ “Living in the Gap/Hungarian Pictures” The Band of Bandleaders

Number 1 in Hungary & Germany, Building in North America

"Living in the Gap/Hungarian Pictures” is the 11th album by Mandoki Soulmates. It’s finding and building support in North America, because of the music and unity themes. We’re setting up interviews with Leslie Mandoki, the leader of “the band of bandleaders.” 

The release of “Living in the Gap/Hungarian Pictures” (Cleopatra Records) follows the 2018 USA tour of Mandoki Soulmates, including a performance at New York City’s The Beacon Theater. Just passing 350,000 streams of the album, and reaching over 1.3 million people on Facebook.

Mandoki Soulmates is currently planning to tour the USA and Germany late 2021. In the meantime, Leslie’s finding ways to thank and support, “all the frontline workers, doctors, nurses, grocery clerks, supermarket workers--all the people, who kept the world turning and took care of our daily needs and our lives…”

The album “Living in the Gap/Hungarian Pictures” features a Who’s Who of Classic Rock: Ian Anderson, Jack Bruce, David Clayton-Thomas, Bobby Kimball, Tony Carey, Simon Phillips, Chris Thompson, Al DiMeola, Mike Stern, Randy & Ada Brecker, saxophonist Bill Evans, Supertramp´s John Helliwell and Jesse Siebenberg, bassists: Steve Bailey and Richard Bona, former Snarky Puppy keyboardist Cory Henry, and the Cutting Crew’s Nick Van Eede.

Leslie teamed up with his Soulmates Ian Anderson, John Helliwell, Bobby Kimball, Al DiMeola to record the song “WeSayThankYou,” donating all royalties to US charity organizations (The United Nations Foundation’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund in support of the WHO (World Health Organization) and The Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City).

The album topped the Amazon Classic Rock Charts in Germany end of 2019, and is growing throughout the world including “Eccelente supergruppo” writes StoneMusic.it. Mandoki Soulmates is finding support on prog, classic rock, singer-songwriter and fusion playlists, especially with the songs: “The Torch,” “Living in the Gap,” “Wake Up,” and both “Young Rebels” and “Old Rebels.” Thanks to a great campaign from the Planetary Group, over 70 radio stations in North America, alone, are playing Mandoki Soulmates. This includes medium and high rotation on tastemaker and buzz stations KFAI-Minneapolis/St. Paul, KPSU-Portland, WDCE-Richmond, VA, WICR-Ithaca, New HD Radio w/ Zach Martin, KVCU-Boulder, WRHU-Hempstead. 

WUSB-Stony Brook’s Captain Phil Merkel’s been spinning Mandoki Soulmates all summer, “my biggest takeaway from the entire work is the amount of caring and empathy Leslie has for everyone, especially us here in the USA as we struggle to cope with that monster COVID 19.  I am so glad we have Leslie looking out for us.  Give it a listen, you won't be disappointed.”

Making a Scene writes “Leslie Mandoki is making a scene! The band is pure sophisticated jazz rock, or as Greg Lake (Emerson, Lake, & Palmer) put it, ‘One of the best bands you’ll ever see.’”  The late Mr. Lake, also, dubbed Mandoki Soulmates as “the band of the bandleaders”!

Canada’s LetItRock calls “Living in the Gap/Hungarian Pictures”, “A glorious thing.” Classic rock’s Strutterzine gets the message: “The impact now is so much bigger and the result is a journey which should be heard by as many people as possible…”

Why are so many of us pushing for Mandoki Soulmates to be heard?  Leslie says, “Music is the greatest unifier and nothing is more timely than to raise our voice to unify the world and to build bridges over the gap we are living in, to get out of our news bubbles and echo chambers.”

House of Prog Radio writes, “the coming together of such a diverse cast perfectly expresses the album’s lyrical theme of unity, which couldn’t be a more timely message for today’s world.”

Since escaping from the Iron Curtin in the 1970s, first becoming a refugee in Germany, and then creating a life that included running the largest recording studio in Europe, Leslie’s life has been dedicated to unity, and it shows—in part—because of the pleasant and hard things he went through in order to achieve the Great European Dream. Recently Leslie told Germany’s Tekdeeps.com that “rock and roll means revolution and rebellion for a better world.”

 

  

“We Say Thank You,” by Ian Anderson and Leslie Mandoki, Dedicated to Covid19 Heroes on the Frontline

Ian Anderson and his longtime friend/collaborator Leslie Mandoki have recorded the song “We Say Thank You,” as a dedication to everyone on the frontline, from the doctors to grocery store workers, in the unbelievable Coronavirus battle.  The hashtag to use is “#WeSayThankYou”

Written by the Hungarian-born/German producer/songwriter/bandleader of Soulmates (which has featured Ian through the years), “#WeSayThankYou” was written in the context of Leslie’s own isolation in Germany, where his doctor wife, Eva, is a first contact physician.

Using social distancing as the foundation for their collaboration, Leslie emailed tracks to England for Ian to sing and play flute on between April 7 and 8.  

Ian and Leslie have worked together for over 20 years on various collaborations with his jazz-rock band Soulmates featuring the good and great of classic rock and jazz.  Artists in Soulmates (through the years) have included— David Clayton-Thomas, Bobby Kimball, Tony Carey, Jack Bruce, Chaka Khan, Chris Thompson, Steve Lukather,  Eric Burdon, Nik Kershaw, Greg Lake, Al di Meola, Randy and Michael Brecker, Bill Evans, Mike Stern, Paul Carrack, Peter Frampton, and Jon Lord.

Mandoki’s Soulmates toured North America in 2018.

In addition to the brave, hardworking front-line medics and care workers the lyrics reference the police, grocery clerks, supermarket workers too. Ian adds the dark reference to the speculators making a killing from the current crisis.  Ian says,  “They know who they are.”

Read Leslie’s short essay about “Speculators” who are using this crisis for financial gains here:  https://promo.mandoki-soulmates.com/en/

“To all, we say, thank you,” Says Ian Anderson and Leslie Mandoki.

David Clayton-Thomas Sings SOUL BALLADS His Way

LEGENDARY FORMER BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS LEAD SINGER’S LATEST ALBUM INCLUDES DISTINCTIVE RENDITIONS OF CLASSICS BY RAY CHARLES, OTIS REDDING, SAM & DAVE, AND SAM COOKE

The latest album by legendary vocalist David Clayton-Thomas delivers splendidly on its succinct title. Soul Ballads, now

available in the U.S. on Airline Records after its initial release in Canada (where the singer resides), consists of 10 seminal soul ballads, every one of them expertly interpreted by Clayton-Thomas. If you didn’t know better, you might think these timeless anthems were created specifically for David to wrap his warm, expressive pipes around.

“The keyboard player for Blood, Sweat & Tears for many years during the ‘80s was Lou Pomanti. And he’d been bugging me for the longest time to do an album of all those great songs that we used to do together back in the old bar days, when we played five shows a night on what they called the Yonge Street strip here in Toronto,” says David, who was in the midst of completing his autobiography and about to receive his star on Canada’s Walk of Fame when he decided to make this album. “I didn’t have much new original material. But I called Lou up and I said, ‘Lou, I think the time has come. Let’s do it!’”

In addition to playing piano throughout, Pomanti produced the set in Toronto. “We didn’t go looking for obscure songs that nobody had ever done before. We went looking for those great iconic tunes,” Clayton-Thomas continues. “We decided to do them with a full orchestra: 15 strings, eight horns, rhythm, percussion, the whole bit. And of course, utilizing modern recording studios.” 

Assembling the set list was a labor of love. “They’re just basically songs I’ve always wanted to sing,” David says. “A very challenging album too, because if you’re going to go and put vocal performances up against Otis Redding and Sam Cooke and Ray Charles, you’d better be on your game, you know? Pretty tough competition. But we just set out to basically pay tribute to all those artists and those great songs.”

The set opens with David’s distinctive rendition of Gladys Knight & the Pips’ “Midnight Train To Georgia.” We stuck very close to a lot of the arrangements, but I didn’t want to just clone the arrangements and make it like a cover album,” he says. “We wanted to bring our own thing to it. So since I don’t have the Pips, and I’m a huge Gladys Knight fan--I think she’s one of the greatest singers ever--we decided to do the background parts with the horn section instead.” 

Few 1960s soul anthems pack a more powerful punch than Sam Cooke’s hopeful “A Change Is Gonna Come,” its message resonating strongly with David. “I idolize Sam Cooke, and I had sung ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ a thousand times in the old days,” he says. “So it just fell right back into place very, very easily.” Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions’ similarly inspirational “People Get Ready” receives a welcome revival on the set as well.

David underscores his love for Otis Redding by revisiting two of his Stax/Volt classics: the tender “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” (which Otis wrote with Chicago soul great Jerry Butler) and Redding’s contemplative posthumous smash, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay.” “Otis Redding was one of my idols, along with Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland and Ray Charles,” he says. Roly Platt’s harmonica winds plaintively through Clayton-Thomas’ remake of “Dock Of The Bay.” “That’s because I can’t whistle!” David laughs.

 That enduring allegiance to Brother Ray’s catalog is immediately apparent on lavishly arranged treatments of Charles’ versions of “Ruby” and “You Don’t Know Me.” David does a splendid job on Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ lush “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” (the original featured Teddy Pendergrass, another timeless soul voice), and really brings the heat on an intense rendition of Sam & Dave’s uplifting Stax classic “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby,” complete with a punchy horn section. 

Transforming Bobby Hebb’s catchy “Sunny” into an after-hours torch number works like a charm. “The song I’m really intrigued with on the album that I like the most and has been getting the most airplay up here in Canada is ‘Sunny,’” he reports. “And that’s a song we did totally different. We did it as a slow ballad, as opposed to the up-tempo version that I had heard.”

Throughout Soul Ballads, Clayton-Thomas’ longtime love affair with each song shines through bright and bold. “I’m a fan of every single artist on that album,” he says. “That’s why I chose the songs. And those are all artists that basically informed my style when I was growing up. One week I’d sound like Ray Charles, the next week I’d try to sound like Sam Cooke!”

Here Clayton-Thomas sounds like no one but himself—the same mighty vocalist whose unforgettable front work on Blood, Sweat & Tears’ “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” “And When I Die,” and his self-penned “Spinning Wheel” made the expansive group a full-fledged 1969 juggernaut. 

Soul Ballads and David Clayton-Thomas: what a perfect combination!

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www.davidclaytonthomas.com