Continuing a tradition that began with Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song and culminated with Shaft and Superfly, Brotherman was a blaxploitation film set to hit screens in 1975. Prior to the script’s completion, the producers commissioned an original soundtrack to be performed by The Final Solution, a fledgling vocal group from Chicago’s west side previously known as the Kaldirons. But it went down predictable: the plug got pulled and the movie was cancelled before even one foot of film made the can. Dragged around for 30 years by songwriter, guitarist, and arranger Carl Wolfolk, the tapes of his life’s work have finally been mixed and his soundtrack album finally completed, augmented only to include two fully orchestrated instrumentals intended for the film. The Final Solution’s richly complex harmonies weave in and around Wolfolk’s Sebastopol-style guitar sketches, leaving the listener to imagine what might have been.
