No song in recent memory has captured me quite the way Sons and Daughters of Lite’s “Let The Sun Shine In” has. You can literally feel the sunlight emerging from the cloud cover as you drive down a remote California highway. And on several occasions I’ve broken it out for just that purpose. There is something simultaneously soothing and transcendent about it, and every time I play it, someone notices and asks, “what is this amazingness we’re listening to?” (or something to that effect).
I stumbled across this record one night at Room 389 on Grand Ave. I was having drinks with a couple good friends, and all of the sudden I became aware of some beautiful soul music wafting down from the speakers arranged along the eves of the bar. By the 3:20 mark, the percussion started turning up, and what had sounded like a sultry California soul record began to turn into a Latin-infused Afro-beat dance record. I was thoroughly enthralled.
The music appreciator in me wanted to go ask the DJ what we were listening to, but the lazy ass and respectful conversationalist in me just broke out my iPhone, hit the Shazam app, and kept talking. As soon as I clicked the app, both my friends exclaimed that they were about to do the exact same thing. Despite the fact that we had been regarding the music only as background noise, something about this record caught all of our attentions mid-conversation. The conversation stopped and we all looked down at my phone.
It turns out it was a record called “Let The Sun Shine In” by an Oakland jazz funk collective formed in the early 1970s called Sons and Daughters of Lite. As an Oakland music connoisseur, I was disappointed that I wasn’t aware of such a great local act, but I was also hella juiced to uncover such a brilliant local act that was collecting dust in the region’s collective consciousness. I lightweight lust for these moments.
“Let The Sun Shine In” received a fair amount of airplay in the UK in recent years thanks to DJ Gilles Peterson, but plenty of OGs right here in the Bay have never heard of them. I know that former band leader Basuki Bala is now with the Afro-Carribean Allstars, but I don’t even know how many musicians were in Sons and Daughters of Lite, how long they lasted, or if they put out any other projects. What I do know is that their entire Let The Sun Shine In LP is hella soulful, funky, jazzy, and definitely worth a listen. Thankfully Ubiquity Records re-released it via their Luv N Haight imprint, which means you can cop it with relative ease online.
Ladies and gentlemen, feast your ears on the amazing funk/jazz/soul fusion that is Oakland’s very own Sons and Daughters of Lite.
