A track about an African king recorded in the back of a car wash commands $1,600.

At the makeshift Man-Ray Studios in Akron, Ohio, where barrels of soap

were rolled away to make room for recording, guitarist Wilbur Niles and

his then-girlfriend — keyboardist Machelle McNeal — recorded “Ja Ja.” It

was titled after King Jaja of Opobo in Nigeria, who lived during the

19th century, rising from slavery to become a wildly successful broker

of palm oil.

Niles learned about Jaja as an undergrad majoring in history; humid and

dreamy, it would lead off the pair’s first and only album together,

1979’s rawly-produced Thrust. It begins with an elliptical little

electric-piano hook by McNeal, an accomplished musician without much

jazz experience, accompanied by wind sounds. The effect is of sparkles

of sunlight through an otherwise dense sheet of fog.

Thrust exists in that blurry, liminal space between jazz, funk, soul,

and R&B; ‘70s-era CTI comes to mind, but the unpolished vibe sloughs

off that comparison, too. Even when “Summer Fun” goes for a

four-on-the-floor feeling, the mid-fidelity production renders it

diaphanous. The more strident “Punk Funk” is a nod to Devo, whose road

crew ran Man-Ray. (“They’re punk; I’m the funk!” Niles explained with a

laugh, on the Sounds Visual Radio podcast.)

You’ll swear you’ve heard Thrust sampled somewhere in the hip-hop

sphere; pull up “Ja Ja” on YouTube, and you’ll see a comment to that

end: “Pete Rock sent me here.” (Google comes up short on that one, but

WhoSampled cites the following track, “Summer Fun,” as appearing in

Canadian house/electronica producer Daphni’s “Hey Drum” and British

techno/house DJ and producer Trus’me’s “At the Disco.”