Sama Sama Records Just Gave a Lost 1980 Manila Jazz Record Its Second Life
A London DJ with Malaysian roots just launched a reissue label built for Asia-Pacific record collectors, and started with a 46-year-old Manila jazz-funk record nobody outside crate-digging circles had heard.
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Boy Katindig recorded After Midnight in Manila in 1980: jazz-fusion built on synths, disco-funk basslines and Brazilian batucada, a cover of Isaac Hayes's Déjà Vu turned into a Filipino instrumental, and a session drummer named Jun Regalado holding it all together. Then it did what most regional pressings from that era did. It went out of print and sat in secondhand crates for 46 years.
In June, it came back on 12-inch vinyl, £24 a copy, care of a DJ who grew up in the UK on her Malaysian grandmother's cooking and now runs a label named after the phrase for "you're welcome" in half of Southeast Asia.
Who's Behind It
Alice Whittington, who DJs and researches records as Norsicaa, spent eight years helping shape Soundway Records before striking out with her own imprint, Sama Sama Records, based in London. She curated Soundway's 2024 compilation Ayo Ke Disco: Boogie, Pop & Funk From the South China Sea (1974-88), which is the kind of project that leaves you with a phone full of unreleased contacts and no label to put them on. Now she has one.
"Sama-sama" is used across Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, a shared root from proto-Malayo-Polynesian that can mean "you're welcome," "together" or "same same" depending on where you're standing. Whittington has said the name is deliberate: "the label is being built for the region and diaspora; the culture belongs to them but everyone is welcome to appreciate it." She's also been clear it isn't a pure crate-digging operation. "I would like to see the label acting as a third space in a metaphorical way, with music as the central connecting piece."
Why Katindig, Why This Record
Boy Katindig wasn't some undiscovered nobody. He came out of a family that basically built Manila's Latin jazz scene: his father Romy Katindig was one of the people who set the template regional big bands still play from. After Midnight leans on Brazilian percussionist Paulinho da Costa's records for its batucada backbone and pulls from Greg Phillinganes, the keyboardist who did sessions for Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, for its harmonic ideas. Bassist Roger Herrera and drummer Jun Regalado round out the core band. None of that reads like a rarity that fell through the cracks by accident. It reads like a record that was simply too regional for anyone outside Manila to notice at the time it mattered.
Mastering and restoration went through Frank Merritt at The Carvery in London, with Javi Bayo handling the artwork restoration, so this isn't a cheap needle-drop reissue. It's a proper remaster, and it shows: pre-orders for the vinyl edition opened a month ahead of the June 12 release date.
What's Next, and Why the Catalog Actually Connects
Sama Sama's second release lands September 11: Coco Okayo, a full album pairing UK alt-soul duo Thandii (Jess Berry and Graham Godfrey, who has Filipino heritage of his own) with Jun Regalado, almost certainly the same Jun Regalado credited on After Midnight, and by any measure the most recorded session drummer in the Philippines: around 400 album credits across a career that's run more than 55 years. The label brokered the pairing itself. That's not a coincidence dressed up as a narrative. It's the actual model: the region's veteran session players getting booked again by the people reissuing their old records. Whittington has also flagged a year-end release of breaks and electro from Malay and Hakka Chinese Malaysian artists, which would push the catalog past reissues entirely.
This matters here because Southeast Asia's reissue economy has been getting genuinely busy this year. Bandung's Munir has spent a decade re-editing Indonesian 70s and 80s disco. Habibi Funk's sister label Audible Beauty dug into Malaysian state radio jazz archives in August. Sama Sama is doing the same excavation from London, but it's the first of these labels actually rehiring the region's original session musicians for new material rather than just clearing the rights to old tape. Whether that becomes a pattern or a one-off is worth watching. September 11 will tell you which.
Cover: official artwork for Boy Katindig's After Midnight, courtesy of Sama Sama Records.
