The Soul Jazz label's long-running curation of New Orleans's funky past has already yielded several premier league collections for hungry musical gumbo fans. The latest catch from the Nola freak scene, tagged Two- Way-Pock-A-Way, Gumbo Ya-Ya & the Mardi Gras Mambo, doesn't disappoint with its swaggering and swinging line of classic cuts.

New Orleans funk owes much to the city's latent and potent culture clashes, as jazz pioneers, Creole players, Mardi Gras Indians and Afrocentric music- makers transported and transmitted their sounds from Congo Square uptown and downtown.

As you can hear on tracks from Lee Dorsey (Little Baby), Betty Harris (What I'd Do Wrong?), Dix- ie Cups (Two-Way-Pock-A-Way) or the mighty Allen Toussaint (We the People), the funk was always at the heart of the action.
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Download: Lee Dorsey Little Baby, Allen Toussaint We the People