I discovered them while digging around for new/old music from New Orleans and they popped up because of the name, Lafayette being a city in Louisiana.

 

In fact they’re from Long Island, New York, where they formed in 1970, initially under the name of the Bobby Boyd Congress, but relocated to Paris in search of fresh funk frontiers.

 

When Boyd went back to America they changed their name, first to Soul Congress and then to Ice, before bass player Lafayette Hudson stepped into the fray to lend his name to the band, and they added sax player Leroy Gomez to the mix.

 

Although they toiled in obscurity at the time, their audience made up mostly of African immigrants in Paris, their innovative use of breakbeats led to their rediscovery when hip hop came along.

 

This track, the standout from their 1973 debut album Soul Makossa (named after the Manu Dibango hit), has been sampled widely (Janet Jackson, LL Cool J, De La Soul, Wu-Tang Clan).

 

Gomez’s desolate sax intro to another track, Darkest Light, was also notably used by Public Enemy (Show ‘Em Whatcha Got), Jay-Z and even Britney Spears.

 

There’s a couple of great compilations released in recent times, which sits happily alongside the likes of Osibisa, Mandrill and War. The band broke up in 1978 after reverting to their old name Ice for a final pair of albums – and another, confusingly, as Crispy & Co.

 

They signed off under yet another name, Captain Dax, with a novelty hit single in Japan called Dr Beezar, Soul Frankenstein.