It can happen anytime, anywhere.

At a Dash In on Parham Road, a former college classmate recognized Carroll Ellis Jr. of Ebony Diamonds and asked, “Didn’t you sing in that group?”

At a music festival outside Nashville, a fan stopped bassist Todd Herrington to describe driving into Richmond from Fredericksburg on a weekly basis to see Modern Groove Syndicate.

And those moments of being remembered and remembering may arise more often thanks to two newly formed, Richmond-based record labels: Coliseum and Ghost Track.

A dispatch from Richmond’s funk heyday

“Carroll and I used to laugh,” says Ray Crawley, who began singing alongside Ellis when the two were students at Virginia State University in the 1970s. The harmony-rich music they made then as the Ebony Diamond — later changed to Ebony Diamonds — just keeps resurfacing. “I would get this phone call, ‘Well, I hear we got to do something again,’” he jokes.

This time the call came from Craig Belcher, the Richmond-based writer and DJ who cemented his label owner status in early November when Coliseum Records dropped a new seven-inch pressing of the Ebony Diamonds song, “I’m So Lucky.” “I’m a music fan,” Belcher says, “and when I hear music that hasn’t gotten a chance, that deserves to be heard, I’m realizing I’m in a position and situation to do that.” (Disclosure: Belcher also contributes to Style Weekly.)

Belcher’s resume also includes artists and repertoire (A&R) work with Super Disco Edits, the United Kingdom label behind the 2014 first pressing of “I’m So Lucky.” Recorded in 1975 at Alpha Audio in Richmond, the song sat for decades until the band had it digitized and uploaded to Facebook, where it caught the attention of Super Disco Edits founder Russell Paine. Now it’s coming home to Richmond, which Ray Crawley calls “way overdue.”

The song is more than just a sunny declaration, it’s a snapshot of the moment in Richmond’s musical history that shaped it — a time when the homegrown funk scene bustled, and when, according to Ray Crawley, “it was all about uplifting music.”

He calls 1970s Richmond “its own little Motown,” pointing to contemporaries like the Whole Darn Family and Standing Room Only, the latter being the go-to musicians of “I’m So Lucky” producer Bernard Smith, who took Ebony Diamonds under his wing. The group performed three-and four-hour engagements in private clubs singing Marvin Gaye, Delfonics and Temptations covers, and they braved high-pressure Virginia State University talent shows. Their harmonies were tight — just like the competition. “You didn’t even think about trying to make it nationally,” Crawley explains. The mindset, as he remembers it: “Let’s see if we can get a spot right here.”

Ghost Track’s inaugural reissue

Thirty years later, Modern Groove Syndicate was working toward notoriety of its own, in Richmond and elsewhere. Todd Herrington remembers lots of writing sessions and many hours in a white tour van with a collection of musicians he describes as “hungry.” “That band represents a way to approach a life in music,” he says, “accepting anything and everything, and rolling with whatever is dealt to you.”

Openness served the band well musically. During the 2000s, Modern Groove Syndicate released a trio of adventurous albums that treated funk as a gravitational center while sending songs on ranging orbits shaped by proficient jazz chops, winning them a 2005 Independent Music Award for best jazz song in connection with their second album, “Vessel.” But just before the release party for its follow-up, 2007’s “Ms. Popular,” keyboardist Daniel Clarke was pulled away from the Syndicate’s orbit, having been called to accompany Grammy-winning artist k.d. lang.

Modern Groove Syndicate still won a 2007 Theresa Pollak Award for Excellence in the Arts, but the promotional push for “Ms. Popular” lost momentum. “That incarnation and that record cycle never really happened for this album,” Herrington says.

That is, until now. Enter Brian Gearing, founder of Ghost Track Records. He’s a vinyl enthusiast who, after getting the hang of selling titles from his own collection on Discogs, turned his focus toward ones he couldn’t get his hands on. He says the idea for the label arose from “having some favorite records that either didn’t exist on vinyl or were produced in such small quantities that if you want it, you’re going to have to pay out the nose for it.” Gearing received a now-or-never jolt from the COVID-19 pandemic, and planning for Ghost Track’s inaugural reissue began in earnest in early 2023.

Gearing’s relationship with Modern Groove Syndicate turned 20 this year. In 2003, he returned from Peace Corps service in Cameroon having resolved to begin writing about music, and he was one of the first to interview Modern Groove Syndicate while the group was on the road. “It was nice to come full-circle with Brian,” Herrington says. “He is attached to the history of the band, in a way — more so now, obviously.”

“I called Todd,” Gearing says, “and he was like, ‘This is great, because we were actually thinking about doing this ourselves anyway.’ So I basically kept them from having to pour their own money into it.”

One step that had already been taken by Modern Groove Syndicate, whose lineup for “Ms. Popular” also included saxophonist JC Kuhl and drummer Joel DeNunzio, was commissioning a new mix. “It was the early-aughts technology,” Herrington says, “and a very digital-sounding record… We tried to warm it up and bring it up to date but not lose, necessarily, the time capsule element of it.”

The rush of rediscovery

We’re in a golden era of mining the past for capsules of sound to accompany the present. The Numero Group, Light in the Attic and several other labels are thriving by dusting off discs that didn’t initially get a fair shake. Larger imprints have followed suit with archival deep-dives like Blue Note’s “Tone Poet” series and the “Verve by Request” series. Yet for artists making new music and striving to make a living doing so, this rush of rediscovery pushes against the limits of space and time: space in record store bins and the time crunch created by simultaneously looking backward and forward.

“There are a lot of projects that I’m excited about for the following year,” Todd Herrington says. He’s been home-recording new material of his own and planning for another album cycle alongside Americana artist Cris Jacobs. “Working on them and at the same time doing this — it’s surreal.

Ray Crawley had hoped to attend Coliseum’s “I’m So Lucky” launch, which took place at the early November Crates record fair in Richmond, but a gig got in the way. “Music stops music,” he quips.

These limitations play out daily at vinyl pressing plants. Capacity lags behind demand, as Craig Belcher found while trying to get “I’m So Lucky” pressed. “It took us over six months,” he reports. “It would keep getting pushed back a week or two weeks. It makes it really hard to plan any kind of marketing or promotion.”

Even when production proceeds on schedule, as was the case with the planned Black Friday rerelease of “Ms. Popular,” there’s cause for anxiety. “It’s been stressful,” Brian Gearing says. “There’s always the possibility that something could happen to delay it.”

But logistics don’t eliminate the allure of having a second chance to make a first impression. Just as reissues offer artists an opportunity to set the record straight — literally and figuratively — they provide an onramp for new listeners. Carroll Ellis has seen it play out online in recent years, for both Ebony Diamonds and Infinity, the name the group adopted upon moving toward a more full-band sound. “In lot of cases, they’re hearing it for the first time,” he says.

“People that you’ve never met in another country like your music enough to upload it to YouTube,” he says. “Once you get on the web like that, you have pseudo immortality there.”

Brian Gearing regularly experiences this as a listener.

“A lot of my favorite music I’ve come into in retrospect,” he says. Those who missed seeing Modern Groove Syndicate’s initial run are in luck; their revisitation of “Ms. Popular” includes a limited number of live performances, including a reissue release event that took place on Saturday, Nov. 25 at the Camel. For Todd Herrington, that show seemed even more momentous than the group’s 2010 reunion, given the passage of time, members’ individual travels — Herrington, Clarke and Kuhl are some of Richmond’s most sought-after instrumentalists — and the trials of the pandemic. Looking ahead to rehearsals, Herrington was eager to reclaim some of the closeness the band found. “I just can’t wait to hang out with those guys again,” he says.

The last show featuring the Ebony Diamonds trio was in 2009, owing in part to the health of original member Rodney Dorsey. But the group had a renaissance in the 1990s, and Ellis and Crawley have done plenty of performing since. Ellis has shared stages in various bands and settings with his brother and son; Crawley has kept up his chops with Beatles and Earth, Wind & Fire tribute bands. There’s even unreleased material recorded by a reconstituted Ebony Diamonds featuring Crawley, Ellis and one of their friends.

But there’s something unique about those phone calls — the ones that pop up out of nowhere, when the opportunity arises to turn songs recorded years ago into objects that spin up a cloud of memories.

“Nothing really dies, I don’t think,” Todd Herrington notes, “unless you want it to, or you let it.”

To hear and purchase Ebony Diamonds’ “I’m So Lucky,” visit ebonydiamond.bandcamp.com. To purchase Modern Groove Syndicate’s “Ms. Popular,” visit ghosttrackrecords.com.