Endangered Music by Endangered Species

“Endangered Species” and “Just A Memory” are a pair of pearls from the compact but lustrous catalogue of V4Visions, a London label operating at the confluence of street soul, house—and on this occasion—jazz.

Endangered Species was the production alias of Chris Forbes, co-founder of V4Visions, and his musical accomplice Kofi Banga. The track draws on the soul-jazz feel of Gene Ammons’s 1970 track “Jungle Strut,” adding thick-textured drums in the Masters At Work style, a Latin-flavored piano vamp that zig-zags across the groove, itchy hand percussion, and a rasping squiggle of a trumpet solo on loan from Japanese jazzman Terusama Hino.

“Endangered Species” appeared on the 1992 EP Endangered Music, alongside two mixes of lead track “Ping Pong” and “Mother of the Future,” a cover of a 1974 piece by Panamanian-American saxophonist Carlos Garnett. The EP’s musicality and sultry yet relaxed swing caught the ear of New York’s Strictly Rhythm, the era’s leading house & garage label and home to iconic producers like DJ Pierre, George Morel, and Louie Vega & Kenny Dope.

Strictly Rhythm licensed the Endangered Music EP and followed it up with Endangered Music Vol. II. Released at the very end of 1992, this wasn’t an EP, though, but—as was the Strictly style much of the time—five different mixes of the same track: “Just A Memory.” Featuring the exquisite retro-jazz vocals of Ellie Lawson and a sample from hard bop pianist Horace Silver, “Just A Memory”—like the earlier, Charleston-flavored “Ping Pong”—recalls the big-band disco associated with August Darnell (Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, Kid Creole and the Coconuts) but adapted for the electronic 1990s. As Chris Forbes crystallizes it, the concept with Endangered Species was “house discipline meets jazz chords.”

Raised in Hatfield, a suburban town 18 miles from London, Forbes’s involvement in music started with deejaying as a teenager at school events. It was during this period, the late b’70s, that he met Kofi Banga, a record fiend with a knack for finding the rarest of rare grooves. They both shared a passion for jazz-funk and Latin fusion. Forbes’s deejaying career took off with shows on London pirate radio stations and gigs at clubs like the Camden Palace. His enthusiasm for hip hop intensified following a 1983 trip to New York, which enabled him to pick up a large number of bootleg compilations of breakbeats. During the late ’80s Forbes had a late-night show on Capital Radio, London’s legal pop station, where he pushed the emerging house sound. Then in 1989 he met Alex Palmer and the two of them decided to start a label: V4Visions.

A label that operated at the confluence of street soul, house, and rave in early-’90s South London.