We Went to Memphis to Find a Long Lost New Zealand Funk Album From the 70s

Two Kiwis, a couple of Puerto Ricans, a Cuban and an Englishman walk into a Memphis studio, and record a psychedelic funk/soul album.

That could be the opening line in a culturally complex joke that hasn’t aged well. Fortunately, it isn’t.

Instead, it’s the crescendo moment of the New Zealand Trading Company; a long-forgotten six-piece whose only album was produced by a friend of soul legend Isaac Hayes, in 1970.

A group that had its roots in the Maori show-band era in New Zealand, and disappeared almost as soon as they recorded in Memphis 46 years ago.

The sound of the New Zealand Trading Company (NZTC) is almost as hard to pin down as a vinyl copy of their record. Maybe you’d call it psychedelic jazz fusion. Maybe pop soft-funk. Maybe a wannabe late Beatles sound [the album features the strangest cover of “Hey Jude” you’ve ever heard], with a sugary twist of the Fifth Dimension thrown in.

The New Zealand Trading Company
Standing, from left: Jorge Casas, Alberto Carrion, Gonchi Sifre
Sitting, from left: Thomas Kini, Maurice Moore, Kawana Waitere

Natalie Rosenberg, who produced NZTC’s self-titled album in 1970, remembers it being even better than that.

“If you get into a music studio and cut something that is so good, it’s a natural high,” she told NOISEY in Memphis, recently.

“This was a natural high.”

The NZTC’s long, strange road to Memphis started in Gisborne; the birthplace of rhythm guitarist Thomas Kini.

Born in 1944, Kini grew up on New Zealand’s East Cape under the influence of big band jazz. According to New Zealand music blog Audioculture, Kini moved to Wellington in 1960 to join a Maori showband called the Maori Hi-Five.

Later that year, the band changed their name, and some of their line-up, to the Maori Hi-Quins and moved to Australia where they played residencies at hotels in Surfers Paradise and Sydney.

They stayed on the move, and changed composition again, heading to Europe where they toured constantly over the next five years.

Future NZTC member, pianist Kawana Waitere from Putiki, joined the band in England, where they were based. Two Australians – Lynn Alvarez and Neville Turner - also became involved. Sammy Davis Jr saw the band play in London, and, according to Audioculture, encouraged them to move to the United States.

The Hi-Quins’ life on the road continued in the US, playing casinos and hotel residencies from coast to coast for the next four years.

The New Zealand Trading Company was finally born in Chicago in 1969 when the group – whom Kini was the only original member of - changed their name and shape again.

All but Kini and Waitere left, while Maurice Moore, an English pianist, joined, as well as a Latin-American trio; Cuban guitarist Jorge Casas, and drummer Gonchi Sifre and singer Alberto Carrion, both of Puerto Rico. The trio once backed rock legend Janis Joplin when she performed in Puerto Rico.

The band kept rumbling on in the States, scoring residencies at Playboy nightclubs. The group were playing the Playboy club at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin when Memphis businessman Ronnie Hoffman saw them perform.

Hoffman reported back to his friends Seymour and Natalie Rosenberg, who had just started a label – Memphis Records – and opened a studio that was modeled on the design of famed soul label Stax Records.

“After the studio was built, we didn’t have an artist,” Rosenberg says.

“Then Ronnie Hoffman bought us the New Zealand Trading Company.”

Natalie Rosenberg in her Memphis home. Image: Ben Stanley

The Rosenbergs were prominent figures in the Memphis music industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Along with being a top attorney who represented musicians in royalty lawsuits, Seymour also managed blues and country star Charlie Rich.

Natalie, meanwhile, produced much of Rich’s early recordings – while also working at Stax. There she’d met Booker T and the MGs and Hayes, whom she wrote songs, and became good friends, with. Hayes would also babysit her children from time to time.

Talking with NOISEY in the ‘play room’ – where the NZTC once rehearsed - of her house in the Memphis suburb of Germantown, Rosenberg remembers the New Zealand Trading Company as “shy gentleman.”

“They were absolute gentleman,” she says. “They were so nice, and so much fun.

“Everybody was laughing. I think they were in a little bit of awe of the studio. I don’t think they’d been in a studio before. They were a little bit shy, too.”

Rosenberg’s memories of the recording session were limited, beyond a lingering impression of the band’s incredible musical abilities.

“You could hear every instrument,” she says.

“They were such good musicians. I wanted every instrument to come through, along with the singers.”

The band stayed in a downtown hotel while the record was cut over several weeks in the American summer of 1970. After taking press and album photos of the band on barges by the Mississippi River to capture the ‘Trading Company’ essence of the group, Memphis Records officially released the record that September.

Unfortunately, it struggled for radio time from the get-go.

“Disc jockeys would listen to it and say ‘it’s fabulous. It’s a fabulous album, but we don’t know where to put it,” Rosenberg says.

“It’s not rock and roll. It’s not rythmn and blues. It’s not country. It’s not mainstream. We can’t put it on our playlist.

“Then I think Seymour tried to get Leonard Chess, of Chess Records, to take it. He didn’t know what to do with it. That was the problem. We couldn’t make it happen for them.”

Rosenberg says she has retained a sense of discontentment the New Zealand Trading Company’s music never reached the audience that she believes it deserved to.

“We had done it for other people. We had some hits on other artists that had sold well – country, rock n roll.

“That was my biggest disappointment, that there was no demand for that kind of music. It’s a hybrid of country, rock and a little psychedelic. It’s a lot of pieces.

“So they left and I guess they went back to what they were doing, playing gigs and making money that way.”

According to Audioculture, they didn’t. The band split up soon after their time in Memphis, with its members finding new homes in other nightclub residency groups.

Carrion became an acclaimed composer, Casas went on to be Gloria Estefan’s musical director and Moore led various club bands in the UK for the next two decades.

Waitere returned to New Zealand and died in 1997, while Kini moved to Chicago where he became a fixture on the city’s vibrant jazz circuit. He became a bassist, and performed with Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock and George Benson. He died in Chicago in 2004, aged 60.

Ben Stanley is a freelance journalist & @vicesports NZ editor. Follow him @benstanleynz