The unreleased album by James Brown’s backing band: The Bootsy Collins-led JB’s. This album is the Rosetta Stone of funk’s dominant idioms, yet its existence is barely a rumor. In 1970, James Brown perfectly captured a definitive moment in modern music when he ordered Bootsy Collins into the studio to record the tracks that would be test-pressed on King Records as These Are The JB’s. And if there is any funk ensemble as influential as Brown’s, in the post-“Cold Sweat” musical landscape, it’s the Parliament Funkadelic contingent. Those two streams, as Grammy-winning James Brown historian Alan Leeds details in this album’s liner notes, converged for the first time here. There are only two extant copies of the original King Records test press LP of These Are The JB’s. This, the first commercial issue of this album, was overseen by Now-Again’s Egon alongside Leeds and Universal Music Group’s James Brown expert Harry Weinger. It was mastered specifically for vinyl by Elysian Master’s Dave Cooley from the original two-track stereo master that James Brown and his engineer Ron Lenhoff delivered to production forty-four years ago and is packaged in a thick, tip-on Stoughton jacket. it comes with a 12 page book of liner notes by Leeds and Egon and many unpublished photographs and ephemera.