Astride the corner of Tenth & Parker in Berkely, San Francisco squats the Fantasy Studios. Inside a grizzled old hepcat sits in the vocal booth, wearing green Wellington boots and munches on a meatball sandwich in between harmonising with his tuning pipe and poring over his indecipherable notebook of lyrics. Behind the desk sit three young men, excited yet slightly apprehensive. The hepcat is legendary jazz vocalist Mark Murphy, and the three young men are Brent Newitt, Kieron James and Dave Wallace.

"We were trying to think of a name for ourselves for a while and we couldn't come up with anything" reminisces Brent. "We took a cab to the Fantasy Studios to record with Mark, Tenth & Parker was the destination, we liked it and it stuck."

The making of Twenty Twelve began three years ago as a side project for Brent, Kieron and Dave, with a burgeoning family of collaborators, all throwing in their twopenneth to create a swirling musical schmorgasboard. "It wasn’t supposed to be a full length album, we had so many ideas we wanted to explore" smiles Dave. "Stylewise the album's all over the place, house, jazz, latin, breakbeat, although hopefully it still sounds like an album from the start to finish - it all fits together."

"We've been influenced by everyone involved with the record" ponders Brent. "Mark Murphy - I'm a massive fan of his, he's incredible, I mean, you add up mine Kieron and Dave's ages and that's his! Snowboy, the legendary percussionist with jazz and latin who's coming from his own area, Sid Gould on horns who's worked with Blur, all the singers, Billie Godfrey from Mr Hermano and Jenny Burrell from vintage Acid Jazzers 'Izit'."

A strong conviction held by Tenth & Parker was to direct the musicians as little as possible "We tried to let people do what they wanted," explains Kieron. "We wrote some of the music and then let them get on with it. I think they liked the fact that we didn't tell them what to do, we let them have their own input and I think you can hear that reflected in the album. A lot of the time that's how things were done 20, 30 years ago a load of session musicians who had never met before, it's a real vibes thing. I buy and collect a lot of library albums" says Brent. "With those albums there'd be a band leader bringing in a load of desparate musicians who were in the country at the time and they'd turn out a detective theme album one day, then an album of classic compilations the next. Each musician brought their own style and you'd end up with a rich diversity of influences, which is what we've tried to do."

The backbone of Twenty Twelve is in the collaborations, one of the key characters is latin/jazz aficionado Snowboy; "I'd been a fan of Snowboy’s for a while, and was really impressed by the passion he had for what he was doing, you can see that he’s got something special," smiles Brent. "We collaborated with him ages ago, so when we called him up and told him about the Tenth & Parker project he was committed to it straight away."

Probably the most important collaborations on the album were with Mark Murphy who introduces the album on the intro and appears on a further three tracks; "I’ve been a fan of Mark’s for a while," smiles Brent. "I managed to get the others into his stuff as well, we knew we wanted to work with him, but didn’t know how to track him down. Giles Peterson gave us some numbers and we ended up sending Mark some instrumentals we put together. He was really into them and faxed us over some lyrics he had written to the music, stuff about Gregorian chants which was a bit mad!"

Kieron picks up the story; "So we flew over to Berkely, San Francisco to record the vocals, not knowing what to expect. We were sat there in the studio waiting for him to arrive and he wandered in wearing those green Wellingtons! He’s a proper Beatnik from the Jack Kerouac era, it’s stayed with him. He’s a real individual in that he won’t conform, he still talks the hipster slang."

It is Murphy’s lyrical contributions which electrify Tenth & Parkers beats with an otherworldly mysticism, none more so than on 'Millennium Riddle Song' where Murphy spins intricate webs of puzzlement, hinting at the dark Mayan prophecy relating to the end of the world on the date 2012.

"He really took our music on board and gave it his own interpretation, each track’s got it’s own story. 'Cool Down' was originally a down tempo groovy track, but Mark ended up taking it and turning it into a ballad, cross between Sade and Barry White."

With attention spans shortening as the years go by, Twenty Twelve is an exception, an album you can put on and leave on all the way through; "It’s got some individuality to it, so hopefully you won’t get bored." says Dave. "It’s not supposed to be a straight four-four album for the club, we’ve been doing that for so many years now, 2012 was an opportunity to do something different."

With Twenty Twelve, Tenth & Parker are trying to show us that in the new millennium, we’ve got a whole bright musical future ahead of us.

SUSHICD29 / LP29