Tom Moulton / Various

It would be difficult to imagine the face of dance music today if Tom Moulton hadn’t come along. In the early ’70s, Moulton was the one of the first people to conceive of highlighting and extending the rhythmic qualities of a popular dance song. He created the first remix, at the time only available on the restrictive seven-inch format. Then, through a quirk of music history — one night he and his engineer ran out of seven-inch blanks, and so had to use a 12-inch record instead — Moulton accidentally invented the twelve-inch extended mix and revolutionised the dance floor. For much of the ’70s and the first half of the ’80s, a "Tom Moulton mix” was a revered stamp of approval on a record. Now, Soul Jazz has collected 16 of Moulton’s best remixes over two discs, in an effort to restore his reputation. The tracks here range from the 1973 epic 11-minute remix of Edie Kendrick’s "Keep On Truckin” to the Lover’s 1982 hit "Lip Service.” In between, Moulton’s mixes of BT Express, Patti Jo, Camouflage, Grace Jones and Isaac Hayes join together to paint a picture of a decade where the possibilities of dance music were still wide open.