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.”