Phil Flowers & The United Family Alpha & Omega

Tuff City Records is proud to announce the release of a lost, great psychedelic funk concept album by the enigmatic R&B impresario, Phil Flowers. The release, Phil Flowers and the United Family Band’s Alpha and Omega (DEL LP/CD 0081), is transferred from the original master tapes and is available now as an exact reissue vinyl LP, as well as a CD featuring bonus content.

Before recording this album in 1973, Phil had a long and storied career as a master R&B stylist who, born in North Carolina and raised in Maryland, had been performing for twenty years before he recorded this record. Phil had, by 1973, amassed a family of seven children and a traveling cadre of musicians. Playing in the idyllic Bermuda for months out of the year, Phil, who had various cycles of fervent religiosity which manifest themselves as a fascination in Pyramids or cryptic readings of the Old Testament, conceived of a musical play that took the myths and stories of the bible and applied them to modern day dilemmas. And though the play never materialized, we have existent a stunning musical document. With his years of studio experience, a talented family full of musicians, a room full of wah-wah pedals and echoplexes, a garden of Earthly delights in Bermuda and a group of long-time and forward thinking musicians, Phil assembled an album no one could have ever assembled. Immediate and urgent yet timeless, calling on the genres of funk and soul yet transcending them, Alpha and Omega is an album that is rests comfortably in the cross section between Eugene Macdaniels, Sun Ra, Del Jones and the YaWhoWa 13.

This is a music lovers’ album. It is an album that was made by musicians who each poured his or her own ambitions, individual talents and command of genre. Made for no one but the musicians themselves, it is a pure record full of fire and brimstone, cherubim and ether and a commitment to an artistic vision. Alpha and Omega will be available for retail March 10th, 2009, on LP and March 31st, 2009 on CD. The CD release of Alpha and Omega will include bonus tracks – alternate versions of songs from the Alpha and Omega studio sessions.