031: Live at Sin-é: Legacy Edition, by Jeff Buckley

Jeff Buckley (USA)
Live at Sin-é: Legacy Edition (2003)
34 tracks, 157 minutes (2CD)
Spotify · iTunes

In the summer of 1993, Jeff Buckley recorded a couple of his sets at one of his usual haunts, the Sin-é coffee house in New York. Four of the best cuts were taken from those sets and assembled into the Live at Sin-é EP later that year, to get the world ready for his debut album Grace that was to be released the year after. The tracks on that EP were beautiful, but we had to wait until 2003 – six years after his untimely death – to hear more of those legendary sets as this ‘Legacy Edition.’ And more there is: there's over two-and-a-half hour’s worth of material in this double album. That’s a lot of listening, and totally worth it.

It’s a very vulnerable position. Just him and an electric guitar, in the corner of what was literally just a small café. The setting lends itself to the music, which goes through a lot of emotions throughout the set, but always retains that same vulnerability. His guitar-work is generally understated but lets through glimpses of brilliance, and his voice is just astonishing. He can blast and bark when necessary, but then he switches it up and becomes soft and delicate. His range is massive, and it’s when he uses his falsetto – soaring but fragile – that the neck-hairs really stand on end.

His studio stuff is great, but this concert shows a bit of a different side. I suppose Jeff Buckley would usually be put into some ‘rock’ box, but he does absolutely all sorts here. He proves himself just as talented as a jazz singer, in blues or folk idioms. Out of the 21 songs on the recording, 15 of them are covers, everything from Led Zeppelin to Édith Piaf. He’s just so wildly versatile. Earlier this month, I referred to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan as ‘simply the greatest singer ever recorded.’ It would seem that Jeff would agree. In one of the many bits of chat recorded between the songs, he remarks “It's Nusrat, and he's my Elvis. That's my guy. I listen to him everyday...I know his nickname as a child” …and then he goes on to cover one of Nusrat’s pieces ‘Yeh Jo Halka Halka Saroor Hai’! In Urdu! Just guitar and voice! It’s frankly absurd and I love it.

There are so many tracks I can mention here: ‘Je N’en Connais Pas La Fin,’ ‘The Way Young Lovers Do,’ a spellbinding version of ‘Strange Fruit,’ the ballsy a cappella opening ‘Be Your Husband,’ and that’s not even mentioning his originals...but I’m supposed to be writing one of these a day, and it would take forever to mention every cool bit on the album. At one point he says to the audience “I’m a ridiculous person...you’re lucky you paid no money to see me” – damn right they’re lucky, but not just because of the free entry.

030: True Democracy, by Steel Pulse

Steel Pulse (United Kingdom)
True Democracy (1982)
14 tracks, 62 minutes (2005 CD reissue)
(This album seems to have disappeared off any streaming or digital download services for some reason, but you can still listen to it on YouTube and buy a well cheap second-hand CD copy on Amazon.)

Honesty time. You’ll find a few video game soundtracks on this blog over the year. This ain’t one of them, but even though Steel Pulse are one of the most exquisite reggae groups ever (certainly to come out of the UK), I first came to them via the PS2 skating game Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, which featured one of the tracks from their album African Holocaust on the soundtrack. I sort of feel ashamed at that, but that’s bullshit – it doesn’t matter how you hear about great music, only that you do. So in the spirit of loving my life, I dedicate today’s post to Tony Hawk and the music supervisor of the game that bears his name, Brandon Young.

Non-musical things first: Steel Pulse is a wicked band name. Don’t get what it’s supposed to mean, but it sounds cool anyway (a quick Google tells me it’s from the name of a racehorse, which is boring. Ignorance is bliss, I guess). The cover is also groovy – and it tells you that you’re gonna hear some truth when you stick the record on.

Obviously, it’s top-notch, musically. Steel Pulse were already notorious by the time True Democracy came out; it’s their fourth album, and their first releases included the legendary Handsworth Revolution. But this is the one for me. The themes are rather serious and political for most of it, but the music is still a fun listen, good for bounce-skanking around a dancefloor. It’s quite bluesy and there’s occasional rocky bits, but in the most part it’s just sublime roots reggae.

The top track is definitely ‘Worth His Weight in Gold (Rally Round),’ an anthem for Garveyism and Black liberation. It’s just a perfect reggae piece, really. Angry and insightful lyrics, a bunch of really catchy hooks, and a groove that feels like it could go on all night. Which is good, because the track comes around twice, at the end of both sides if you’re listening on the LP: the original finishes Side A, and its dub ‘Dub’ Marcus Say’ at the end of Side B. Lovely.

The copy that I have, the remastered CD version from 2005, also contains a handful of extended 12” and dubbed-out versions of album tracks. I’m always up for a dub version of pretty much anything (the heavier the better), and with such a high-quality album of reggae to work off, this additional material slots perfectly in place.

029: Vol. 4: Liwalo Na Liwe, by Jagwa Music

Jagwa Music (Tanzania)
Vol. 4: Liwalo Na Liwe (2000)
6 tracks, 59 minutes
Awesome Tapes From Africa · YouTube

This is my first feature on here of an album sourced from an online blog. This one in particular is from one of the most well-known and best of them, Awesome Tapes From Africa. The guy who runs it, Brian Shimkovitz, is understandably putting much more time and effort into the record label of the same name nowadays, but the website is an amazing repository of music from all over the continent, almost all of it stuff you would never find outside of its home region. (I actually interviewed Brian for an article in Songlines Magazine last year, check it out on my other blog).

Jagwa Music play mchiriku, a style from Dar-es-Salam. It’s a super-fast clash of tinny, overdriven Casio keyboards and traditional drumming. The stylistic origins lie in Zanzibari taarab and Congolese rumba, maybe with hints of funk and reggae, but those are only particularly noticeable now and then – otherwise it is just unrelentingly frenetic, major-keyed, looping madness. Yep, it’s my love of ostinatos again: one tiny phrase on the keyboards repeated over and over and over for ages. Play this late at night, in a sweaty club and you could dance yourself into a purely natural ecstasy with this stuff. In a typical act of injustice, mchiriku is banned in its city of origin…not that it stops it from being popular of course; that sort of stuff never does.

As you would expect from an album sourced from Awesome Tapes from Africa, this is a locally-produced cassette, volume four of over a dozen. It’s not the greatest sound quality – it’s probably a copy of a copy of a copy and so on – so it’s kinda wavy and distorted now and again, but that all works with the DIY aesthetic. ATFA puts it brilliantly: ‘In its own way, this whole tape feels punk to me.’ The group made a worldwide release on Crammed Discs in 2012, Bongo Hotheads, but it just doesn’t have that rawness. The tracks are shorter, there’s less distortion, it’s not quite as fast…it just feels too clean. Better to stick to the tapes. Liwalo Na Liwe is obviously the one I’d recommend, and if you’re hooked, ATFA also has Vol. 5: Tumechoka Hoi to feast your ears on. Enjoy!

028: Un Fuego de Sangre Pura, by Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto

Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto (Colombia)
Un Fuego de Sangre Pura (2006)
14 tracks, 53 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Cumbia is the most recognisable sounds of Colombia and one of the biggest party sounds in world music: catchy horns, ripe for fusions with psychedelia, club and pan-Latin styles, and all of it with that unique shuffling rhythm. But that wasn’t always what cumbia was: those horns and rhythms have their roots in the traditions of the indigenous people of Colombia’s Caribbean coast mixed with those of African slaves.

The original sound of cumbia continues today – and is having somewhat of a resurgence – as a folkloric style, and Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto are one of its leading exponents. The group have been going in some form or another since the 1940s (some say 1930s), and their music captures the original spirit of the cumbia and other related forms. As their name suggests, their sound is based on the gaita wooden flutes, which are played in pairs, one providing the higher-pitched melody, the other giving harmonies and counter-melodies. They are accompanied by sets of traditional drums, shakers and other percussion and usually sung poetry.

With so many interlocking rhythms and melodies, the overall result is quite complex but just as danceable as this style’s modern relatives. Listening to this type of cumbia is important in recognising the indigenous roots of a lot of modern Latin music, and it’s interesting to hear the folk sound that became today’s pop – much like blues is to rock. Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto are the masters of this traditional cumbia and this album, released on the always fantastic Smithsonian Folkways label and a Latin Grammy winner in 2007, is a great place for you to start.

(Side mention: Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto also did a few collabs with dubmaster general Adrian Sherwood, called Dub de Gaita. They’re a fun set of sonic experiments with some groovy, if unexpected outcomes. Available on Bandcamp in Vol. I and Vols. II & III flavours.)

027: Inherent Vice (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), by Jonny Greenwood and Linda Cohen

Jonny Greenwood and Linda Cohen (United Kingdom/USA)
Inherent Vice (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (2014)
17 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Inherent Vice is a really cool film. It’s a darkly humorous detective film set in the hippie’s Los Angeles of 1970. It’s quite like a noir in a way, but this film’s private investigator is well-baked instead of hard-boiled. It’s got a wonderful aesthetic, thanks to director Paul Thomas Anderson and director of photography Robert Elswit: it’s romantic and wistful and bittersweet; the colour is slightly washed-out and the film is grainy; it’s like a pot-hazed memory of twenty-odd years ago.

It also sounds just like it looks – the sign of a great soundtrack. The soundtrack as it exists in album form (we are 365 Good Albums after all) is about half-and-half for original soundtrack composed by Jonny Greenwood (best known as guitarist for Radiohead) and licensed music as selected by music supervisor Linda Cohen.

Greenwood’s compositions for this soundtrack serve mostly to evoke feelings and play with tensions – making you feel a bit nervous or suspicious here, relief or sadness there. It’s mostly performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with Greenwood and others guesting on the less orchestral instruments now and then. You can hear the noir influence in these pieces, I think – quite late-Romantic (in the Western art music sense) with the slightest of influence of jazz, in some cases a big dollop of Philip Glass, and hints at Greenwood's experimental rock pedigree all the while. In a different film, this would be perfect music for slinking around dark New York streets, but for Inherent Vice, it fits equally well with wandering around Los Angeles in a heat- and dope-induced daze.

It’s the licensed tracks that stick with me. Whereas Greenwood’s orchestral OST helps build the emotions of the film, these tracks give a real sense of place – even when that place is a bit disturbing and jarring. The highlight is Can’s psychedelic ‘Vitamin C,’ which gets stuck in my head every single time without fail and is exactly as cool as the film itself. There’s also the laid-back country of Neil Young and soul from Minnie Riperton and Chuck Jackson...but then you’re hit out of left-field with the creepily cheerful crooning-and-whistling of Kyu Sakamoto or sort-of surf from the Marketts. It’s all pretty strange and it works.

There’s also a couple of tracks that are somewhere in the middle – technically-OST and Jonny Greenwood-composed, but tracks instead of orchestral pieces that do an excellent job of knitting the two together. It’s seamless in some cases, especially with Joanna Newsom as narrator, reading beat-like monologues from the film over the music every so often.

This album is a great distillation of the film’s soundtrack, and enjoyable enough to listen to on its own. But don’t let that suffice: its real magic is its place in one of my favourite films. Come over and we’ll have a smoke and a giggle and watch and listen and then we’ll have, y’know, world peace.

026: Music Furthest from the Sea, by Various Artists

Various Artists (East Turkestan)
Music Furthest from the Sea (2006)
19 tracks, 74 minutes
Download from RO&GC

I first found this free download via WFMU when I was studying the the classical and folk music of the Uyghurs. The Uyghur people are a culturally and linguistically Turkic people, mostly Muslims, from the area of Central Asia known as East Turkestan. The reason you may not have heard of East Turkestan is that it is currently internationally considered as part of China, where it is known as Xinjiang. The classical and folk music of the Uyghurs is based on the muqam, a set of melodic modes and compositions similar to the Arabic maqam. It’s often quite reminiscent of their Central Asian neighbours, especially Uzbekistan, but with occasional hints at their East Asian connections.

But this isn’t classical or folk music – this is pop, through and through! This album is a compilation of music from the streets of the capital Ürümqi, a mix of whatever was popular with the pirate CD sellers back in 2006. As such there’s all sorts in here – mostly Uyghur but with some Uzbek music too. Obviously, as with the pop music from literally anywhere, there’s a lot of musical tat within these 19 tracks, but even then it’s mostly still good fun, and they almost all have that thing that I really love – they’re so rooted in place, these sound so Uyghur, whether it is in their vocal ornamentations or the way they play their instruments or the scales they’re using. It’s pop music, but it all owes at least a little bit to the folk and classical music of the elders.

There are some proper gems in here too. There’s two stand-outs for me: the opener, a piece called ‘Dutarim’ by an unknown artist - it’s extremely cheesy but charming, the singer is talking about his dutar (a long-necked two-stringed lute), but the dutar itself is replaced in the music by a tinkly keyboard sound that is frankly nothing like one. Brilliant. The second is the piece ‘Hasret’ by Yurrekke Tolghan Dert – this is just a really short piece of acoustic guitar and vocals with bad audio quality, but his voice is filled with emotion and the piece itself sounds quite like American folk music. I’d love to hear more by this bloke, but I have no idea where I’d find anything else. Probably have to head over to East Turkestan.

There is a problem with that plan, though. It would be utterly remiss to talk about Uyghur art without mentioning the grave injustice and oppression currently being inflicted upon them by the Chinese government of Xinjiang. Huge restrictions have been imposed on Uyghur culture, religion and language, enforced by heavy surveillance and the restricting of movement, expression and association. Ostensibly for the purposes of ‘anti-extremism,’ we should call it by its name: this is a purge and attempted cultural extermination. Millions of people have been placed in the euphemistically named ‘re-education camps’ and public figures have been arrested and imprisoned without charge. As is always the way, musicians have been targeted especially, and detainees include such popular figures as Sanubar Tursun, Ablajan Awut Ayup and ‘king of dutar’ Abdurehim Heyit, who is featured on this compilation. While this has been covered in the British media once or twice, there is nowhere near the international outcry that such a huge humanitarian crisis deserves. If you are interested in learning more about this, have a look at the links in this text, and below:

• The CESS Blog - Securitisation and Mass Detentions in Xinjiang
• The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, a blog by Daniel Byler
• BBC - China's hidden camps: What's happened to the vanished Uighurs of Xinjiang?
• Human Rights Watch - “Eradicating Ideological Viruses”: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims

Thank you to Rachel Harris for the links and advice.

025: Introducing Bela Lakatos & the Gypsy Youth, by Bela Lakatos & the Gypsy Youth Project

Bela Lakatos & the Gypsy Youth Project (Hungary)
Introducing Bela Lakatos & the Gypsy Youth Project (2006)
15 tracks, 45 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

It’s already becoming clear that there are some gaps in my music knowledge, and – as we saw with the Bisserov Sisters – that Eastern European music is one of them. Which is fine, we can’t all know everything about everything. But my lack of knowledge doesn’t stop me from enjoying or listening to as much as I can! So with that said, let’s stumble through some thoughts on this album, from Hungary.

Béla Lakatos put together the Gypsy Youth Project to keep the endangered culture of the Hungarian Roma people, including their music, language and stories, alive into the next generation. Any undertaking that aims to continue folk traditions is important, but when they sound as good as this, it would surely be a crime to let it be forgotten.

The whole album is worth your eartime, obviously, but I think this is one of those that is perfectly encapsulated in the first track. The piece is called ‘O Bijav’ and it’s bloody good – it’s got everything that makes the rest of this album so enjoyable. It’s got some really bluesy, heartfelt vocals, choppy guitars and tinkly little mandolins even give it a bit of a country feel now and then. There’s nonsense syllables and encouraging shouts from the ensemble-at-large, some exquisite whistling and harmonies to die for – the ensemble can start all singing in unison before branching off into some proper extended chords before all ending up back on the same note at the end of the phrase. It’s all so charming, and an interesting mix of the jolly and rueful. The rest of the album contains each of these in bigger or smaller amounts, but this opener sets the scene perfectly.

I particularly like the production of this album and the atmosphere it provides. Although it’s obviously made in a studio, I still feel like it would sound exactly the same if you were to slip a microphone into the Lakatos’ kitchen after everyone had gotten suitably merry. It doesn’t sound slick or that every note has been rehearsed to death. There’s no mistaking that these are accomplished musicians, but they keep their music sounding vibrant and alive, rather than a dusty museum piece.

The real shame about this album is that it’s the only recording I can find by the group…or so I thought, until I did a little bit of reading before writing this and found out they’re better known in Hungary as Ternipe (meaning 'Youth') and they’ve got quite a few albums out there by that name. So that’s good! I’m off to do some more listening, I’ve got some to catch up on…

024: The Mandé Variations, by Toumani Diabaté

Toumani Diabaté (Mali)
The Mandé Variations (2008)
8 tracks, 58 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

With 70 generations of jeli griots behind him, and his father known as the king of the 21-stringed Mandinka bridge-harp, the kora, Toumani Diabaté's path was all but laid out for him. By the time The Mandé Variations came out, he was already a star. Launching his career with an accomplished solo album, Kaira, in 1988, he’d gone on to release albums in collaboration with Taj Mahal, Damon Albarn, Danny Thompson, Ballake Sissoko and his own dance orchestra, and even won a Grammy for his duets with Ali Farka Touré. By 2008, twenty years since that first album, he decided to record another solo album: not as a talented young musician stepping out of his father’s shadow, but as the greatest living exponent of the kora.

This album is breathtaking. Every track is perfectly considered, and there is not one note out of place. Toumani’s nylon strings ripple like water, taking in unorthodox tunings to give textures traditionally inaccessible to kora players. There are breezes of influence from all through his career – flamenco here, Hindustani music there – but it all slots entirely into place. As is the way with the kora, it’s sometimes quite hard to get your head around the fact that what you’re listening to is just one person playing with two fingers and two thumbs; that’s even more the case with Toumani. It can sometimes feel like there’s three or four different melodies all happening at once, somehow juggled in the mind of a master.

The Mandé Variations is an album for contemplation. It’s always gentle, often bittersweet, and sometimes downright sad, but in the most beautiful way. Even one or two fun quotes (such as referencing The Good, The Bad and the Ugly theme in the track ‘Cantelowes’) don’t take away from the profundity of the piece, but just gives a glimpse into Toumani’s personality. For all his genre-bending projects before and since, this album remains the definitive Toumani Diabaté, and even quite possibly the last word in solo kora.

023: O2, by Son of Dave

Son of Dave (Canada)
O2 (2006)
11 tracks, 39 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

Son of Dave is a phenomenon. A powerful comedic mind wrapped up in a harmonica player and crammed under a big hat. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him several times and interviewed him too; that was one of the most surreal conversations I’ve ever had sober. He’s as odd backstage as he is on it, but he’s also genuinely friendly and supportive – a lovely rebuttal to the adage about never meeting one’s heroes.

So you can tell he’s a man that I hold in very high esteem, and I’ve not even got to his music yet. It’s just wonderful, of course. O2 is Son of Dave’s second album (under that moniker, anyway), and it basically shows him as he is live: one-man-banding with his harp, his surprisingly versatile voice, beatboxing, shaker in hand, stomping the floor with one foot and loop-peddling with the other, occasional eccentric banter with his audience (in this case, the sound engineer). With those limbs, lungs and his electric box, he makes so much sound that you will eventually just have to get up and dance yourself silly.

There are nods to more traditional blues with a handful of covers, including possibly my favourite – and the least macho – version of ‘Mannish Boy,’ but it’s actually hard to call what Son of Dave does ‘blues.’ He’s a superb harp player and can certainly raise the roof when he gets on a blues riff, but there’s so much more in there that it really becomes something entirely his own. Most of all, he’s a showman. It doesn’t matter whether he’s playing stonking beats for moving feets, or just a laid-back soulful groove (perchance with singer Martina Topley-Bird, a guest on this album), you know you will come out of it entertained. He’s a force of nature and everyone should see a Son of Dave live show at least once in their life – O2 give you a little bit of an idea of what to expect.

[A little postscript: Son of Dave is also a wickedly funny essayist. He wrote regular columns for the late Stool Pigeon music paper, some (but unfortunately not all) of which are collected in the book We Need You Lazzaro, You Lazy, Greasy Bastard, which you can get from his Bandcamp. As of writing, there are only two copies left, so literally go and buy it now while you can. Hard recommend!]

022: Axis: Bold as Love, by the Jimi Hendrix Experience

The Jimi Hendrix Experience (USA/United Kingdom)
Axis: Bold as Love (1967)
13 tracks, 38 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Let’s get this out of the way: Hendrix is God tbqfhwy. He’s one of those artists (see also: The Beatles, Robert Johnson) that I know I love, but that I take for granted occasionally for a while until I listen again and get blown away all over again. Every time I listen to Hendrix it just seems to get better and better.

That sort of goes doubly for my relationship with Hendrix, because for some reason I always come to his live albums when I do come back to him, for whatever reason, so the studio albums get left behind. Well, dear reader, don’t make my mistake. This album in particular is just an insane artefact of genius. But you know that already.

It’s not just Jimi’s earth-shattering skill at guitar or the way he presents it, which, considering it’s all over the album, is somehow understated. It’s not the just-the-right amount of psychedelia or blues or avant-garde distortion. It’s not the hundred of takes and retakes and overdubs that somehow sound like you could’ve rocked up at the studio and heard them playing it in one live session. It’s not Mitch Mitchell playing half the album as if he was in a jazz quartet, or Noel Redding’s hilariously terrible singing. It’s not the beautiful (although slightly culturally appropriative) artwork. It’s just all of it coming together, in the right place at the right time – three musicians from different musical and social backgrounds, bouncing off each other perfectly and making magic. Surely the best trio ever…?

Okay, maybe it really is not Noel Redding’s hilariously terrible singing. Leave it to Jimi, come on. Hell of a bass player, though.

If you’ve not listened to Axis: Bold as Love for a while, come back to it and have your mind blown all over again. If you’ve never listened to it…you’re in for a treat.

021: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, by Charanjit Singh

Charanjit Singh (India)
Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat (1982, reissued 2010)
10 tracks, 50 minutes
Spotify (not in the UK though) · YouTube · Boomkat

Acid house is often mentioned in relation to this album – the music contained within shares lots of similarities to acid house, not least the use of the TR-808 and TB-303 that provide the linchpin of the sound. It just so happens that Charanjit Singh’s music predated acid house by five years – this has led some hysterical commentators to suggest that this record shows ‘the invention’ of acid house and rewrites the history books, but really, this is something completely different.

I mean, he says it right there in the title: this is ten ragas - Indian classic melodic modes and associated performance rules - played to a disco beat. Disco was big in Bollywood at the time, and Charanjit had been messing around with his fancy synthesisers for long enough to actually use them together convincingly. Instead of record a straight-up disco album, he lugged his synths to the studio, programmed in his ragas and jammed for five minutes each. The subsequent record did not sell well, and Charanjit carried on his way as a reasonably successful session musician, sometimes-composer and hobbyist synth-wrangler. And that’s how it stayed until the record was ‘rediscovered’ by some Dutch blokes in the 2000s and eventually reissued to huge acclaim in 2010, allowing Charanjit to tour the world until his death in 2015.

It’s a fun story, and quite a familiar one that seems to come around every few years with different artists, but the main draw of this one for me is literally just how it sounds. We’ve already established that I love loops and repetition, and they make the basis of this record. Add on the retro synths playing in all these interesting scales and patterns and it’s intoxicating. Okay, it does sound quite a bit like acid house, but if history had pinged off in a different direction at some point. This is one of those ones that will stick in your head; not necessarily the melodies themselves, but the vibes it creates, with your brain filling in the blanks and improvising to itself for hours.

In the end, it does have a very filmic quality to it, and I would love to see a retro technofuture cyberpunk sort of thing with this as the soundtrack. An Indian Akira, something like that. In fact, now I just want to see that.

(I have to dedicate this one to Stephen, astral voyager and gonest cat as he is, for hipping me to this one in the first place – cheers!)

020: Renegades, by Rage Against the Machine

Rage Against the Machine (USA)
Renegades (2000)
12 tracks, 51 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Hmm, there does seem to have been quite a few angry albums in the last few days, right? I don’t think this is exactly representative of my standard levels of anger, but who am I to argue with the list (in conjunction with random.org)?

Rage Against the Machine sound quite angry, anyway. I mean, it’s right there in the name. Chill out lads. Their best known album is probably their self-titled debut from 1992 (the one with ‘Killing in the Name Of’ on. Chill out lads!!), but it’s this one that I come back to the most. I don’t really know the details, but Renegades smacks of contractual obligation: it was released months after the group split up, and it’s a full cover album, no originals at all. As far as I can tell, it had a mixed reaction from fans, but the critics seem to like it, and so do I.

It’s another one for me where one song completely dominates the rest of the album. The tracks are good quality throughout, I don’t think there’s any clangers in there, but when it gets to their version of Cypress Hill’s ‘How I Could Just Kill a Man,’ it blows everything else out of the water. It’s got a wonderful trifecta: funk, hip-hop and metal, all in equal measures and all mingling into a tasty, tasty Victoria sponge of a track. It’s gotta be a high point in rap metal. Compare it to something like Anthrax and Chuck D’s ‘Bring the Noise’: a classic, of course, but in a fun and cheesy way, with a cheeky wink – rap..and metal??! Wacky or what?! - but this one from Rage feels so sure of itself that it could have been the original. It all works so naturally in their hands.

That track’s a bomb, but as I say, the rest is definitely worth your ears too. It’s not all rap metal either. The proto-punk of the Stooges and MC5 work particularly well with Tom Morello’s electrics-soaked guitar adding interesting new flavours to ‘Down on the Street’ and ‘Kick Out the Jams,’ respectively. I reckon the most unexpected cover would have to be the last track, Bob Dylan’s ‘Maggie’s Farm,’ but they do a good job of it – and completely unlike the original, of course.

If you’ve gotta end your band’s run with a contractually-obliged album without writing a bunch of new songs, follow Rage’s example and absolutely smash it like they did with Renegades.

019: Star Rise, by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook (Pakistan/Canada)
Star Rise (1997)
9 tracks, 58 minutes (original CD version)
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is, for my money, simply the greatest singer ever recorded. And he was recorded a lot. Every time I listen to him, the shivers are real. At the heart of everything he did was qawwali. Qawwali is a style of poetry and song used by Sufi Muslims of South Asia to praise god. It’s a very powerful music, and its sound can send listeners into fits of religious ecstasy. A chorus of heavenly voices, a couple of harmoniums, tablas and hours of powerful handclaps – a qawwali performance is one of the most electrifying live experiences you can have.

But as much as he was undisputed Shahenshah-e-Qawwali – the King of Kings of Qawwali – Nusrat was super open with his collaborations with producers and fellow musicians. This is totally evident on Star Rise. The tracks on this album are remixes taken from Nusrat’s two collabs with Canadian producer Michael Brook. Each of the remixes were made by a leading light in the UK’s Asian Underground scene, which, at this point in the mid-90s, was in full swing. Just look at those names: Joi, Talvin Singh, Asian Dub Foundation, State of Bengal, Aki Nawaz and Fun^da^Mental, Black Star Liner, Nitin Sawhney, Earthtribe and The Dhol Foundation. It just goes to show the esteem that Nusrat was held in – when the call comes to work with him, you don’t say no.

Because of the number and variety of remixers taking part, the remix styles are similarly broad, with bits and bobs from techno to electronica, bhangra to Bollywood, and the ever-present dub, and there’s the whole range here from bangers to pure chill-outs. On the ‘banger’ end of the spectrum – I would go as far to say it is an ‘absolute banger’ - is the Asian Dub Foundation’s remix of the track ‘Taa Deem.’ This is my favourite piece of music of all time. ADF use Nusrat’s vocals with respect but without piety, and turn it into a hardcore dub-dance-punk with some exquisite drops. Words can’t really describe, just go listen.

Make sure your bass is properly set up before you press play on this album, though. If your insides aren’t wobbling all the way around your torso, you’re missing out.

018: Dead Bodies in the Lake, by Ho99o9

Ho99o9 (USA)
Dead Bodies in the Lake (2015)
10 tracks, 26 minutes
Soundcloud · Spotify · iTunes

This is terrifying. I admit my taste in music isn’t exactly hardcore, and so I’m sure this stuff is tame for some of you lot out there, and you’ll probably be rolling your eyes throughout reading this (leave me alone, I’m a delicate flower). But I remember the first time I listened to Ho99o9 (pronounced Horror) was on my way to a house party – I was on edge all evening.

And that’s great! I always find it interesting when music – or any art – invokes such a visceral reaction. It’s why I get so frustrated at music that is ‘nice.’ I often use the word ‘nice’ in a negative way when talking about music – not to mean that it is gently enjoyable (there’s lots of music that is nice in a nice way, of course), but to mean that there is a complete lack of anything to inspire emotion. It’s musical ‘meh.’ Sometimes a visceral reaction can tip over into revulsion and any chance for enjoyment disappears, but at least you feel something. But to be ‘nice’ – that’s a sin.

Dead Bodies in the Lake is not nice. It’s sludgy metal with electronics, it’s dark hip-hop with hardcore punk. It’s like a psychological horror film in audio form. It’s disturbing and disorientating, and it’ll get your hackles right up. The version I know is the mixtape – no gaps between tracks means there’s no let up and no way out. It forces you through the experience and it’s thoroughly uncomfortable. How amazing is it that music and art can make us feel like that? To feel such strongly negative emotions and come out the other side having had a whale of a time. Ho99o9 do that as well as any band I’ve discovered. I think this 26-minute long mixtape is enough for me for now though.

017: Diwân, by Rachid Taha

Rachid Taha (Algeria)
Diwân (1998)
11 tracks, 69 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Rachid Taha was a revolutionary of raï. The style started as Bedouin folk music used for weddings, but when it evolved to take on the characteristics of chaabi and Latin music and European pop styles in the 1980s, it became the all-pervading sound of Algeria, and the Maghreb in general. Then Rachid Taha came along, all anger, alcohol and cigarettes, and kicked down the door. He brought a real punk aesthetic to the music, with screaming guitars, heavy beats and his own growl, as well as his overall demeanour and dress-sense. In the West, he’s particularly known for his brilliant (and Arabic-language) take on the Clash’s ‘Rock the Casbah.’

This album is a bit different, though. Diwân takes Rachid back to his roots, with a bunch of covers of classic pieces from raï’s forefathers and early stars. He hasn’t left the punk entirely behind (the production and electric guitar of Steve Hillage assures that), but it’s not the foundation of the sound this time around. Instead, oud (lute), gasbah (flute), riqq (tambourine) and bendir (frame drum) dictate the whole feel of the album, with Rachid and Steve being able to imprint their own personality on it from there.

The opening track is Dahmane El Harrachi’s ‘Ya Rayah,’ one of the most famous anthems of raï and chaabi music, and Rachid’s take on it here is as definitive a version as you can get for a song that has been covered so many times in so many different styles. His version of the Egyptian film song ‘Habina Habina’ by Farid El Atrache is similarly iconic, with a really well-utilised club beat and heavy bassline laying a great foundation beneath the massed strings and qanun (plucked zither).

Rachid Taha’s punk redefined a genre that was already the biggest musical phenomenon in the region, but for me, Diwân is his best work. The music is unmistakably his but it retains the beauty of the originals, and shows his deep respect (and huge skill) for that classic raï sound.

016: Takes One to Know One, by Elmo Williams & Hezekiah Early

Elmo Williams & Hezekiah Early (USA)
Takes One to Know One (1998)
10 tracks, 31 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Blues music has come a long way since the days of field hollers and the itinerant singer-guitarist. The style represents a starting point in the histories of some of the world’s most popular music today, via its evolutions and influences into jazz, gospel, R’n’B, soul, rock’n’roll, rock, hip-hop and onwards and onwards. And there’s also the hundreds of fusions that have cropped up with various staying-power, from blues rock, punk blues, electronica remixes and the almost-ever-interesting combinations of blues and West African music.

The music that Elmo Williams and Hezekiah Early make feels like it by-passed all that. It feels more like the result of someone zapping an electric guitar, a drum kit, a harmonica and a truckful of distortion back to 1920s Mississippi and telling the masters to make as loud a music as possible.

It’s raw, it’s rough and it’s noisy. The spirit of punk is there, and there’s some musical similarities too, but we all know that’s because the spirit of blues is in punk. Elmo (guitar/vox) and Hezekiah (drums/harp/vox) were both in their 60s by the time this record was recorded, but they sound like 17-year-olds bouncing around being angry and ecstatic and loving it. They're obviously having a blast, and their amplifiers sound like it too. It’s amazing that the record is just the two of them, but I think any more would be a health hazard. This is the original blues of the 1990s. Be careful – it’s not for the fainthearted.

015: Out of Africa, by Biggie Tembo

Biggie Tembo (Zimbabwe)
Out of Africa (1991)
8 tracks, 41 minutes
(I couldn’t find anywhere to listen to the full album online, but you can hear the opening track ‘Punza’ on YouTube, here, and you can buy the CD second-hand on Discogs, here. Alternatively, hit me up, and we'll sort something out.)

When people ask, ‘Tupac or Biggie?’ I know my answer – Biggie Tembo every time. Ahh! See what I did there? Haha I am so funny.

Biggie Tembo was already fairly well known in the UK as the frontman and lead singer of the Zimbabwean jit band The Bhundu Boys, who were championed by both John Peel and Andy Kershaw and who, at the height of their fame, were performing with Madonna at Wembley Stadium. By the 1990s, though, Biggie had left the Bhundu Boys acrimoniously, and Out of Africa was his attempt to stay in the spotlight.

The album was his first solo effort, and it’s not a masterpiece, by any stretch. But it was the sound of many of my childhood summers, and therefore objectively good and I won’t hear otherwise. Although he skewed it a bit for modern UK-based audiences, Biggie kept mainly to the script of the jit music he helped to create: the potent mix of sungura dance music (itself a style with influences from Cuba via the Congo and Kenya), jive and rock'n'roll from the US and traditional mbira thumb-piano music adapted for twinkling electric guitars.

Some bits of the album have aged badly, but in a rather endearing way. The synths especially – and that’s probably why they’re one of my favourite bits of the album: completely untamed use of the pitch-slider and occasional timbres that sound straight out of the Tron soundtrack. Bonkers and brilliant. The whole album is all very cheesy, but cheese is tasty, so whatever.

The critics weren’t kind and the record sold poorly, and Biggie slipped into a deep depression that ended up killing him in 1995. As recorded in music history, Out of Africa is probably regarded as the point where Biggie’s turn of fortune became obvious, but I do urge you (if at all possible) to revisit this album and approach it for what it is: a fun, sunny album that’s a bit naff but ultimately charming and mostly undeserving of the negativity it has been burdened with in the past.

014: Neverhood Songs, by Terry S. Taylor

Terry S. Taylor (USA)
Neverhood Songs (1996)
39 tracks, 57 minutes (original CD version)
Bandcamp · iTunes

(Okay, this one has been released several different times throughout the years with various bonus tracks and extra discs and all that, but I want to write about specifically the original release of Neverhood Songs...or, as it exists in my own collection, Disc 1 of Imaginarium, which was released in 2000. But that’s boring discogs.com talk. About the record itself, and a bit more besides…)

This album is the first video game soundtrack to be featured on this blog, and there’s going to be quite a few, actually. I’m terrible at video games, but I really appreciate them as an art-form, and I’m particularly interested in how they use music not only to bolster the atmosphere they wish to create, but also to match the style of gameplay that is involved. Of course, the best soundtracks are not only perfect in situ, but can also hold their own as their own art. The music from The Neverhood, a point-and-click adventure game from 1996, fits that bill. In fact, it is still one of my all-time favourite albums.

The Neverhood itself is one of the most underrated video games and its visual style has never really been matched: it’s somewhere between Hundertwasser and German expressionism, and it was created entirely in claymation. And considering the silent protagonist and only a sparse cast of supporting characters, the game is outstandingly funny.

But we’re here about the music, and the soundtrack to The Neverhood is absolutely perfect for the game. It sounds like it was made out of the same clay as the rest of it – it’s just as gloopy and thumb-moulded as the world looks. The composer Terry Scott Taylor (betterwise known as part of Christian rock band Daniel Amos) mixed trad jazz, blues and rock’n’roll to create a wonderfully evocative nonsense, almost all sung in a made-up language (bah diddly cuddly op...). There’s a little or a lot of influence from Leon Redbone, I think – more about him at some point in the future.

I think the music for The Neverhood was the first time I experienced music being funny in and of itself, without the need for comedy lyrics or whatever. The music is irreverent and madcap, but its musicians are obviously top-notch as evidenced by some off-the-wall jazz ramblings. Sometimes it isn’t even really music. The last 17 of the 39 tracks are more like skits: funny musical snippets, bizarre comedy skits and other assorted recording studio high jinks that made it into the game in one way or another. Neverhood Songs is a brilliant album, and it’s still unique after so long. Give it a listen, tap your feet and laugh yourself silly.

013: Dance of the Cobra, by Jaipur Kawa Brass Band

Jaipur Kawa Brass Band (India)
Dance of the Cobra (2013)
12 tracks, 52 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Brass bands have a rich history in India, evolving from the military bands imported by the British colonial rulers. Moving away from their original function, the brass bands eventually became the stalwarts of weddings, and Rajasthan had the best bands of all.

In the UK, it is the Jaipur Kawa Brass Band that are best known of the Rajasthani brassheads – they’ve released two albums, tour semi-regularly and they’re always a smash hit at festivals. They’re loud (blaring trumpets, honking euphoniums, shrill clarinets and loads of snares and cymbals), they look great (rainbow turbans, rainbow angarkhas, pristine white pyjamas. Sharp.) and they bring a dancer and a fekir in tow to do some mad tricks (watching a man repeatedly bounce a 10kg granite ball off his elbow is really...sickening).

This album is their most recent and the music featured in it is basically standard wedding repertoire: folk songs, pop songs, Bollywood hits, all that good stuff. This is one of those albums that I’ve picked for one track more than anything else. The song ‘Gore Gore O Banke Chhore’ has a long history: originally based on a cod-salsa piece sung by Carmen Miranda in the 1945 film Doll Face, adapted as a Bollywood song for the 1950 film Samadhi and sung by Lata Mangeshkar, and now it’s here as a brass band piece. Give it a listen:

What I love about the Jaipur Kawa Brass Band version is that it is obviously a footy chant waiting to happen. That melody is so easy, so fun and so catchy without getting annoying after five seconds. I don’t even know the words and I want to sing them while stumbling down the street after a few too many. I’ve told this to lots of people and I won’t stop until I hear The England Band play a shoddy version of it at an obscure European qualifying tie against Lithuania in Vilnius, uninspiring 2-0 win, yes m8.

012: Congotronics, by Konono No. 1

Konono No. 1 (DR Congo)
Congotronics (2004)
7 tracks, 51 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

So it’s only the twelfth day of this one-album-a-day lark, picking an album at random out of an almost 365-strong list, and already you can see some patterns of my taste starting to come out. It would seem that I have a particular weakness for music based on continuous repetition – as seen in the albums of Kel Assouf, Donso and Laraaji so far. Here’s another one, and they take it to the next level.

The music of Konono No. 1 (for it is they) is, at the very heart of it, traditional music played for the modern day. It is based on the interlocking patterns used in the ritual trance music of the baZombo people from Angola and south-west Congo. This music, in Konono No. 1’s hands, is more or less the same, except played on likembé lamellaphones and all cranked through DIY, no-fi electronics. This was their debut full-length album, and it not only chucked the band into the international spotlight, but also created an entire Congotronics hype all itself, spawning a whole catalogue on Crammed Discs and influencing the sound of artists from Vampire Weekend to Björk to Batida.

The aesthetics of Congotronics is harsh – the amplification is distorted and noisy, the percussion is full of snares, rattles and cymbals. On top of that, the likembés are all tuned ever so slightly differently from one another, making the sound ‘beat’ against itself, which can be quite disorientating. Add in the fact that the music is almost entirely based on incredibly short passages – sometimes just one or two measures – repeated seemingly into infinity and slowly evolving through tiny variations, and this is music for deep trance. I once saw Konono No. 1 play an hour-and-fifteen set in three songs. If you’re not feeling it, you’re doomed. But when it clicks, it will fill your head and fly you away into a maelstrom of sound.

I like repetition! I like it, I can’t help it and Konono No. 1 are masters of it. And if you like repetition too, stick around: there will be more repetition here before long, I'm sure.

011: Jamiila: Songs from a Somali City, by Various Artists

Various Artists (Somalia)
Jamiila: Songs From A Somali City (1987)
8 tracks, 40 minutes
Listen on YouTube

I’m a big fan of Somali music, and I’m really glad it’s getting some recognition in the West in the last couple of years with various reissues of the funk and soul music of the 1980s. But those recordings, great as they are (some of them will feature here at some point over the year) all fit the very fashionable and palatable template of ‘African rare groove.’ There isn’t too much heard over here of the more traditional music and poetry, or the pop music from the last couple of decades, which is a shame.

This album is a compilation of recordings made by John Low in the southern Somali port city of Barawa. It also presents pop music from the mid-80s, but it has much more in common with traditional music than the funk of Dur-Dur Band and the like. There are only a handful of musicians featured on this album in various different combinations, but there are quite a few styles. Some are very traditional-esque, played on oud or acoustic guitar by a musician accompanying his own sung poetry, and occasionally joined by a taruumbo flute player. On other tracks, the acoustic guitar is joined by an electric organ, which also provides programmed bass and drum patterns and providing a very different atmosphere to the songs.

It’s a really cool set of recordings as they captures a time when the popular music of Somalia was changing, from the unaccompanied serious poetry of the past to the synth-led love songs that are the dominant form today. You can even hear it in a state of flux on the album itself – when the musicians are playing oud and flute, the traditional tunings and rhythms are used, but when they bring in guitar or organ, the tunings become the Western equal temperament and the rhythms even have a hint of reggae to them.

There’s also an extra bit of interest in this album for me, if I’m wearing my academic’s hat. These recordings, as well as the rest of Low’s recordings in the Sablaale district of Somalia, also play a major part in Emma Brinkhurst’s PhD thesis, including a particularly lovely story regarding Amin Xaaji Cusmann, a singer, oud- and guitar-player featured heavily on this album. The thesis – entitled Music, Memory and Belonging: Oral Tradition and Archival Engagement Among the Somali Community of London’s King’s Cross – is a wonderful piece of writing and research, and it gave me lots of inspiration for my own master’s dissertation. If you fancy a bit of entertaining but academic reading, I can’t recommend it enough.

If your interest is sufficiently piqued, you can listen to the entirety of Low’s Somali recordings (as well as his recordings from Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, Congo and Zambia) at the British Library Sounds website, here.

010: Music from the Pirin Mountains, by the Bisserov Sisters

The Bisserov Sisters (Bulgaria)
Music from the Pirin Mountains (1990)
26 tracks, 70 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

The first line of the AllMusic review for this album says ‘The Bisserov Sisters are to Le Mystère de Voix Bulgares as the New York Dolls are to Blink-182,’ and...I don’t really get the rock music references, sorry. And to be honest, I don’t know all that much about Bulgarian music either, so we’re off to a good start. But I do know that the Bisserov Sisters know their stuff, and I know they made a great record here.

The Bisserovs and their instrumentalists, the Trio Karadzovska, present traditional folkloric music from the south-west corner of Bulgaria, and especially their small village of Pirin. Their music provides a fascinating snapshot of all the historical pathways and cultural connections of their region. Bits and pieces of their music reveal shared heritage with the Balkans and Russia, Greece, Italy and Turkey; the bulgars of klezmer obviously owe a lot too.

They manage to cram in 26 tracks into just 70 minutes of CD, including an epic eight-minute medley at the end, so a lot of the pieces are quite short – right down to 29 seconds at the shortest. This many pieces means that the ensemble get to show off many different types of repertoire, from the iconic tight vocal polyphony to all-instrumental dances and special showcases of individual instruments – my favourites are the two solo performances by Krastjo Dimov on kaval flute and some kind of bagpipe or double-clarinet (Bulgarians, please get in touch!). The whole album was recorded live in concert at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, although the quality of recording is high enough that you wouldn’t really know it until the rapturous applause at the end. What a concert that must have been.

Music from the Pirin Mountains is a great introduction to the wide variety of traditional musical styles that exist within Bulgaria, even if it does present the merest glimpse of that range. It’s beautifully performed, interesting and intriguing right until the end, and it makes me want to listen and learn more and more!

009: Resonance/Dissonance, by Khyam Allami

Khyam Allami (Iraq/United Kingdom)
Resonance/Dissonance (2011)
7 tracks, 51 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

Resonance/Dissonance is a completely solo album: it’s just Khyam Allami and his oud.

As an Iraqi born in Syria and raised in the UK, Allami took up the distinctive Arabic lute at the age of 23 to connect more closely with his own culture and history as it was being destroyed by invading forces from the US and the UK. Only six years after he started playing, the BBC recognised him not only as a prodigious talent, but as the next in a long line of Iraqi master musicians to both transmit and innovate their classical music. He became the first to work with the BBC’s World Routes Academy, which led to his performance as part of the Proms and solidified his status as the most highly-regarded oud player in the country. This album, his debut, was released the next year.

This whole album is full of extremely intricate and virtuosic playing. It is moody, contemplative and astoundingly beautiful. But honestly, I chose this album for one track more than anything. The piece ‘An Alif/An Apex’ is a masterpiece. For it to stand out so far in an album that contains so many wonderful pieces, it must really be next-level. The piece is entirely within the soundworld of the Arabic classical tradition, but there is so, so much in there. If it was played on distorted electric guitar, it would be straight-up metal. If it was on a piano, it would slot into a Western classical suite without raising any eyebrows. Add some palmas and it’s flamenco. Allami’s oud playing is so delicate but moves somehow imperceptibly into passages of blistering technique and then onto intense, barely-bridled passion, before it’s back again to strokes so gentle as to be almost whispered…

This is proper gives-you-shivers stuff. This whole album is the work of a master, but listening to ‘An Alif/An Apex’ is something else, an all-consuming atmosphere that will leave you dead to the world for eight minutes, before waking you up having experienced something incredible. It truly is one of my favourite pieces of classical music ever.

008: Specialist in All Styles, by Orchestra Baobab

Orchestra Baobab (Senegal)
Specialist in All Styles (2002)
9 tracks, 50 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

Orchestra Baobab do well with their album titles. I reckon they have two of the best: the compilation Pirates Choice from 1989, which was followed by Specialist in All Styles in 2002. How cool and self-assured are those? I reckon Pirates Choice probably pips it in terms of title - and legendary status - but for me, it’s Specialist in All Styles that is the real stand-out musically.

The band are one of the premier exponents of explicitly Afro-Cuban son-derived music in West Africa. The Cubanity is all-pervading in Baobab’s music, but it couldn’t be from anywhere else but Senegal: the traditions of the géwél and jali (the Wolof and Mande griots) are strong, especially in the declamatory vocal style, and the transposing of the signature sound of son, the montuno riff, from the piano to the electric guitar makes theirs a style that straddles continents. It was the pop of 70s Senegal, before it was usurped by the behemoth that is mbalax. The band fell from favour and eventually split up; this album was their triumphant return after 14 years.

The quality of music and production is exquisite throughout Specialist in All Styles, but it’s a particular bit of album sequencing on the second half of the record that really does it for me. Three tracks: ‘On Verra Ça,’ ‘Hommage à Tonton Ferrer,’ ‘El Son Te Llama,’ one after the other. Amazing! The first is probably the best track on the album, the one I play again and again. The second is a slow, sultry piece with guest vocals from legends across an ocean, Ibrahim Ferrer and Youssou N’dour. The third is a Cuban classic, played at a lightning pace and rendered extra spicy with Senegalese flair. Bam bam bam. Excellent. This record could just be these three tracks and clock in at 16 minutes and I’d be happy.

007: Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, by Laraaji

Laaraji (USA)
Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980)
5 tracks, 49 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

Laraaji’s music is just lovely. It’s a little bit of an outlier for me, as I don’t really listen to ambient stuff and don’t know much about it. It also smacks of vague ‘Eastern spirituality,’ which is usually a bit of a turn-off. But Laraaji is so jolly and takes his music with such humour that it all just fits into place.

As far as I can tell, everything the man touches turns to bliss. This album is entirely made with various types of zither, but under the fingers of Laraaji (and helped out by the production of Brian Eno), it becomes soft waves and fluffy clouds of sound. Short themes are repeated at length with tiny variations providing elements of colour, which eventually develop into entirely new themes themselves. Eno’s introduction of many layers of electronic processing and delay makes everything shimmer into and over everything else, and the haziness of it all makes it seem like the soundtrack to a dream, or maybe an impressionist painting.

And I know that this short write up is about the album, but I also just want to point you in the direction of this Boiler Room session that Laraaji did in 2015, which was the first time I’d ever come across him. It’s not like any other Boiler Room session and it’s gloriously mad, seriously uplifting and, of course, relaxing af. Take an hour out of your day and de-stress with this:

006: Dr John's Gumbo, by Dr John

Dr John (USA)
Dr John’s Gumbo (1972)
12 tracks, 40 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

One of the things that gave me the idea to start this project was that Facebook tag game that was going around last year. The idea was to post the covers of ten all-time favourite albums over ten days; being me, I had to write about each of them, I enjoyed it and I thought I’d see if I could do that for longer. Of course all of those albums will be featured on this blog, and the first one is here. Here’s what I said last year about Dr John’s Gumbo:

‘After making a name for himself as a psychedelic high priest of voodoo, he busts out this album of New Orleans R’n’B classics. The albums I’ve chosen barely have a dud track between them, and this is not an exception. You can pick any piece on this album and rock. The Good Doctor also shows off just how great a piano player he is with some stunning solos. This is one of the many albums that I got used to seeing sitting in my dad’s collection for years before actually sticking it on and being blown away. Dr John is the #1 artist that I have never managed to see live – I hope it doesn’t stay that way for too long.’

2019 update: I've still not seen Dr John live 😞

005: Bitches Brew, by Miles Davis

Miles Davis (USA)
Bitches Brew (1970)
7 tracks, 105 minutes (1999 CD release)
Spotify · iTunes

Although I’d been listening to music since I was very little, and always used to fall asleep listening to Jazz FM when I was in primary school, jazz was always something that I thought was a nice relaxing thing to have in the background. Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew changed that.

I can’t really remember how old I was when my parents gave me the album (for Christmas I think) but it was young enough for me to still think it was cool and subversive just for having a swear word in the title. But it’s cool and subversive on the record too. It’s mysterious and aggressive and exciting. It was like nothing I’d heard before – it was jazz, somehow, but it required concentrated listening, and even then I didn’t quite get it, but it was intoxicating.

I think the success of the album is that it struck a lot of people in a similar way (although without the childish perception of jazz). It marked the next evolution of jazz, or at least one of the possibilities, in that it was rock in a jazz frame, or jazz in a rock frame, with a bucketful of electronic doodads and studio wizardry. The brain can’t categorise it, but the ears approve nonetheless. In a way, it wasn’t a million miles away from the technique pioneered by Ornette Coleman on the album I wrote about the other day: a roomful of amazing musicians given a vague brief and then told “off you go!” for twenty-odd minutes of collective improvisation. That the two albums sound so different shows just how wide the box labelled ‘jazz’ can stretch, and also just how much music can change in ten years.

In general, I’m not a massive Miles fan – he did some amazing work, but others of his era touch me more – but this one remains a firm favourite. Listening to this in a pitch-black room with no other sounds going on is always an intense experience. Transcendental, psychedelic…it will fill your soul and haunt your dreams. And, if you’re a lad just getting your ear used to jazz, get ready to have your soundworld exploded forever.

004: Donso, by Donso

Donso (France/Mali)
Donso (2010)
11 tracks, 49 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

This is the first album of Malian music on my list and it took four whole days! Malian music is massive. Musicians from Mali have a worldwide reputation for their prodigious skills, and the country seems to produce a new ‘world music’ star every month. There’s plenty more to come as well, but for now…

Donso stand out from the rest with a mix of styles that isn’t often heard. Their name comes from the Bamana word for ‘hunter,’ so it makes sense that the band’s sound is based on the music of the Bamana hunters. Hunters’ music is incredibly powerful both sonically and spiritually, with its never-ending 6/8 rhythms, bluesy pentatonics and the harsh tones of its two main instruments, the karignan iron scraper and – most importantly – the donsongoni, a rattling, thumping bridge-harp. It’s a fantastic tradition that is unfortunately overshadowed by other styles of the region – particularly that of the jeli griots – in the West.

A music with such deep roots may seem an ill fit with dance music, but that’s just what Donso do, and they do it excellently. The two Malians and two Frenchmen that make up the band mix so much into their music, but at the core is that mix between electronics and acoustics. Donsongoni, jelingoni (a fretless lute related to the banjo), guitar and synths play off each other to create a tapestry of timbre while drum kits, karingnan, tama (talking drum) and drum machine make mad polyrhythms that are 100% designed for dancing, and it’s all tied together by the voice of Gédéon Diarra.

It feels like it shouldn’t really work, or if it did, it shouldn’t work this well. But of course it does. While their spirituality may be different, Bamana hunters’ music and electronica share their focus on repetition and trance, and they lose none of that when they’re combined. Turn your brain off when you listen to Donso, and let it make you feel how it wants you to feel. Play loud and dance out of your head!

003: Free Jazz, by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet

The Ornette Coleman Double Quartet (USA)
Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1961)
2 tracks, 54 minutes (1998 CD version)
Spotify · iTunes

This is a manifesto in sound. It gave a name to the exciting new direction in jazz, the natural progression from be-bop to hard-bop to post-bop to...free jazz. Ornette Coleman had already been exploring more avant-garde solos and compositions for a few years, but this was the next level – eight musicians improvising non-stop for a full album. It’s intense! The original two sides are nearly 40 minutes long in one unbroken track, but it remains an enjoyable listen as it leaps into the void. That it was made by eight of the top jazz players of the day probably helps, too.

It’s not ‘free jazz’ as the stereotype would suggest: it’s no free-for-all of everyone playing random unplanned notes, everyone is in the same key and on basically the same rhythm, which is probably just as well. There is a structure to it – all eight players get their solo while the others interject when they feel appropriate, interspersed with group sections introducing the next soloist. But everyone is still doing their own thing. Dissonances and consonances come and go, sometimes players pick up on something their mate is doing and go along with that for a bit before they diverge once again. It’s chaos, but it’s managed chaos. It all sounds like great fun, too.

Stereo is used really well in this album. The ensemble is not an octet, it’s a double quartet – two ensembles of two winds, bass and drums – with each hard-panned to each side of the stereo. It makes listening on headphones a barrage from all sides, especially in the more fanfarical sections.

This isn’t dinner jazz. It requires concentrated listening, but it’s all the more rewarding for that. Ornette Coleman created something powerful, and this is where he let it free.

002: Tikounen, by Kel Assouf

Kel Assouf (Niger/Belgium)
Tikounen (2016)
12 tracks, 50 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

When I saw Kel Assouf live for the first time at WOMAD in 2016, it was a breath of fresh air.

For a long time, the Tuareg guitar music that was so exciting when Tinariwen first crept onto the scene – seemingly direct from the heart of the Sahara desert with their loping grooves and tagelmust headdresses – had really lost its shine. There were just so many Tinariwen-alikes, none of whom came close to the original, and very little variation on the theme. Maybe there was a drum kit here, a little distortion there, but nothing mind-blowing. Even earlier on at the same WOMAD festival, Imarhan, who had been touted as the next big stars of this genre called essouf, just struck me as more of the same.

But then, Kel Assouf happened. Their sound was huge. Fronted by Anana Harouna brandishing a flying-V with relaxed ease and backed by a mix of Belgians and Nigeriens on drums, synths and bass, this was some of the heaviest punk blues I’d heard for a long time. It still had all of those elements so striking of Tuareg music – the forever repeating riffs on one chord, the camel-gait rhythms, the spacious pentatonic melodies – but it all came together with crashing cymbals, aggressive distortion and delays, and funky bass from the synth. There were also rhythms from further north, Morocco and Algeria, and organ that could have been straight from Billy Preston. They actually looked and sounded like they were having the time of their life. Yes! This was the kick up the arse that it needed to be!

Tikounen is the album that captures the heaviness and excitement of Kel Assouf the best, so far, but that may change next month: their first album in three years, Black Tenere, comes out at the end of February, so that’s one to keep your ears out for. But until then, this album will more than suffice – get it on, get it loud and get moshing!

001: Burlesque, by Bellowhead

Bellowhead (United Kingdom)
Burlesque (2006)
13 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify · iTunes

Although I pride myself on the breadth of my listening, for the longest time I dismissed the folk music of these islands – English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, the lot – as being hokey, boring and vaguely embarrassing. I’ve changed my tune now, obviously (and rather drastically), and I put that down in a large part to Bellowhead.

Their arrangements of English folk songs and tunes really revolutionised those traditions for me and, I think, many others. They kept the original melodies and tunes (mostly) but the old-school line-up of fiddles, melodions, acoustic guitars, bagpipes and the like were bolstered by a full horn section, strings and a kicking percussion section. They added elements from funk, jazz and disco, all while keeping things more or less acoustic and all with a fantastic humour.

The album I've chosen here is their debut album as it’s really their statement of intent – it encapsulates the sound that they continued to perfect – but really their skill was always their live shows. In their time, they must have been one of the best live bands around, their ability to get the crowd jumping from the first beat was uncanny. Unfortunately they hung up their horns in 2016, and to my knowledge there hasn’t been as rollicking a folk band since...and it may take a long time until they’re surpassed.

Together with the Imagined Village (who will feature at some point later in the year), Bellowhead really opened my ears to the possibilities of English folk music. It didn’t need to be all pass-me-the-tea-vicar, village-fête-and-bowling-green boredom after all. That also helped to configure my ears correctly to properly appreciate the more traditional side of things. If you don’t like folk music, here’s a folk band for you.