151: Standing in the Way of Control, by Gossip

Gossip (USA)
Standing in the Way of Control (2006)
10 tracks, 35 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Gossip are a group that prove you don’t need a big set-up to make a lot of noise. There’s just three of them (voice, guitar and drums) and their sound is simple, stark even – most of the time, Brace Paine on guitar doesn’t even play chords, opting for riffs instead. But they do make a hell of a racket.

The main focal point is obviously Beth Ditto’s stunning voice. It truly is jaw-dropping at times. She packs so much soul into her lines, you have to feel that if she felt so inclined, she could put up a fair showing among those such as Aretha Franklin, Koko Taylor and Etta James. There’s even a bit of Dolly Parton in the way she crafts her runs.

To ignore the rest of the band in favour of Ditto’s singing, though, would be missing the point a bit, I feel. As impressive as her voice is, it is within the context of the band that makes it really interesting. Between Paine and Hannah Billie on drums, the two make a sort of EDM-informed punk with a slightly blues-tinged White Stripes vibe on the side. It’s simple, but it’s super effective, and its juxtaposition against Ditto’s rich vocals makes something very special. All put together, it creates something that is filled with fiery and pent-up rage, but also has the ability to sound intimate and even conspiratorial at the same time.

Standing in the Way of Control is one of those albums where every track is a winner. Those first three tracks in themselves are just insane: ‘Fire With Fire’, ‘Standing in the Way of Control’, ‘Jealous Girls’, they are so good. It carries on like that all the way through, as well, with not an ounce of filler. That does mean it’s quite short overall, but that really doesn’t matter – it’s precisely the correct portion, not artificially padded out and not leaving anything lacking, either. And plus, if you’ve been enjoying it properly – that is, by hurling yourself around the room in a furious but ecstatic rage – you’ll be knackered enough by the end of it anyway.

150: Pleasing Melody 2, by Hlaing Win Maung

Hlaing Win Maung (Myanmar)
Pleasing Melody 2
9 tracks, 58 minutes
Soundcloud playlist (this album makes up the first nine tracks of this playlist – I’m not sure what the rest are!)

Before hearing this album, my only exposure to Burmese music was that of the pat waing, an instrument that consists of a circle of tabla-like drums that are tuned to play melodies. Very cool, but it left me with the impression that Burmese music was perhaps similar in many ways to Indian music. Then my flatmate’s mum visited Myanmar and brought him back this CD, and that’s not what it sounds like at all.

Hlang Win Maung is one of the foremost players of the saung, the Burmese classical harp. While traditionally the instrument accompanied voice, this album is almost completely solo – joined only by a pair of finger cymbals and a woodblock keeping time. In terms of timbre, the saung sounds a lot like a West African kora, probably due to their nylon strings. I actually find that the playing style is strangely reminiscent of the kora too, the way that the melody, harmony and basslines are sounded and interact with each other.

The music that it is used to play, though, is clearly more in the South East Asian cultural sphere rather than the South Asian as I expected (and yes, it’s obviously not in the West African sphere either…). The pentatonic melodies have much more in common with Thai classical music, and even sometimes put me in mind of Chinese sizhu (silk and bamboo) music. Similar to the Chinese style, most of the pieces on this album aim to evoke feelings and emotions of witnessing particular natural phenomena, with titles such as ‘Rain’, ‘Sagaing Hill’ and the wonderfully Communist-sounding ‘Myanmar Nationalities' Innate Nature & Myanmar Scenery’.

As with harp music from anywhere in the world, Hlang Win Maung’s saung has a very relaxing quality, and as it welcomes you to picture stunning scenery and beautiful nature as you enjoy it, Pleasing Melody 2 is a lovely listen. It is, indeed, a Pleasing Melody.

149: East of the River Ganges, by The Kumba Mela Experiment

The Kumba Mela Experiment (United Kingdom)
East of the River Ganges (2001)
10 tracks, 67 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

The early 2000s were the glory days of world dubtronica, and The Kumba Mela Experiment was a supergroup between some of the UK scene’s leading names. The publicity around East of the River Ganges, the project’s only album, calls it ‘a collaboration between members of Dub Trees, The Orb, Suns of Arqa, Tangerine Dream, Dreadzone and Uri Geller’ …yeah, that Uri Geller. Okay, his participation seems somewhat of a gimmick, but don’t let that put you off too much – the rest of the contributors all have pedigree and work together well, and everything is brought together under the production of Youth.

The group’s name is actually a misspelling of Kumbh Mela, the huge Hindu festival at Allahabad, which sees hundreds of millions of worshippers bathe in the Ganga river – the event in 2001 was one of the biggest gatherings ever witnessed. That reference may give you a bit of a clue as to the direction the album moves towards. Although the basis of the music is all sorts of dub, electronica, psytrance and chill-out, the whole sound is informed by Indian music, with the strains of sitar, shehnai, bansuri and tambura floating all the way through.

What I love about this album is that it is a whole experience of its own. Most of the tracks are long – often over 10 minutes each – and every one of them is a journey in itself. They evolve slowly and take their time, but it never feels like it stagnates. The movement is constant even in its calmness – just like the stately movement of the ancient river. The chill-out vibes are strong here, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of stonking beats and dub-infected bass drops.

I wouldn’t say this record has aged badly, more than it is a sound that definitely places it at a certain point in time. To be honest, I’m not in touch with the hippy electronica scene as – or if – it exists coming up to the 2020s, and so I don’t know what sort of sounds or personalities are being expressed nowadays, but this work of 18 years ago still lifts my spirit with the optimism it contains. It sounds utopian, seeming to promise the existence of one big blissed-out peace gathering of all creeds grooving to everyone else’s drum – a naïve fantasy, but it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t really seem to be heard in today’s climate of cynicism and forever-war. For shame. Luckily we still have these records to reminisce on those times. So turn off your mind, relax and float downstream – wash your troubles away to the sound of the Kumba Mela Experiment.

148: Chibite, by Hukwe Zawose

Hukwe Zawose (Tanzania)
Chibite (1996)
10 tracks, 66 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Dr Hukwe Zawose was a master musician of the Wagogo people of central Tanzania. Chibite was recorded near the beginning of Hukwe’s short but bright international career. As well as an amazing and powerful cover (the art direction of Real World Records in those first decade-and-a-bit was absolutely stunning), the music is likewise, especially given that the performance is almost entirely solo and built up through overdubs.

On this record, he shows just how he attained that role of patriarch: he was a master of such a wide range of his people’s music. He is most well-known for his performances on the ilimba thumb-piano, but here he also shows his equal prowess on the filimbi flute and izeze fiddles. And then there’s his voice – or should that be voices? Depending on the setting, Hukwe’s voice takes on so many forms. It could be crystal clear and forthright; at other times it could be so high-pitched and loud that it was like a whistle; then again, he sounds harsh and growling, reminiscent of Sámi joik or Siberian throat-singers.

There is something really special about this music that I cannot quite describe. It sounds like…what? A deep, placid lake, perhaps, or the movements of the universe, or a gentle breeze. I’m not even sure what I mean, but I think there are three things that all work together to give the music that effect. Let’s see:

• A lot of it comes down to how the music is tuned – again, a difficult thing to describe with words, but the pentatonic scales that this music works within seem slightly further away from each other than the equal tempered music we are used to hearing in modern music. Each new note comes as a slight surprise to the unconscious area of the brain, which leads to a pleasant tingle in the back of the skull throughout.
• In a related note is the harmonies that are created by the different instruments playing together and when he sings together with his nephew Charles, the only other musician on the album. I think this is actually best heard on a track from Hukwe and Charles’ later album Mkuki Wa Rocho called ‘Mkatale Kulonga’ (you can hear a lengthy clip of the track on the BBC’s website). The harmonies are super open – all perfect fifths and fourths, and loads of directly parallel movement. As you can hear in that track, they are so exactly perfect in their movement across quite complicated speech-rhythms that it sounds uncanny, like one person singing with two voices.
• And then there’s the buzz. I’ve talked about buzz before, most recently regarding the gyil and it’s used in the same way here. Many of Hukwe’s ilimba are absolutely covered in rattles on both the instrument’s lamellas and the body itself, meaning that when they are played, the complicated, interlocking lines are underpinned with an almighty buzz which highlights every one of every note’s fundamental frequencies. It would be cacophonous if it weren’t for that special tuning mentioned above. Instead it becomes intoxicating and rapturous. Add in the jingling of the nguga ankle bells and the harsh tones of the izeze and Hukwe’s voice and it is like a sound bath, a whole overbearing atmosphere of ecstatic noise.

Those are a lot of words attempting and failing to describe the indescribable. It’s no wonder why, after Hukwe Zawose first performed in the UK, he was invited back again and again until his death at 65 in 2003. His music was something incredibly special and, together with Charles Zawose who died just one year later, remains sorely missed.

147: Music from Azerbaijan, by Gochag Askarov and Mugham Ensemble Turan

Gochag Askarov and Mugham Ensemble Turan (Azerbaijan)
Music from Azerbaijan (2010)
5 tracks, 61 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Gochag Askarov was the very first performer of Azeri mugham that I ever encountered – actually, he was the first ever musician from Azerbaijan that I’d ever heard at all. Askarov and his group were performing at a festival I was at, and I literally went to check out his performance because it was new to me. I had absolutely no idea what to expect. There was so much in there that I recognised within this music that I didn’t know at all. The instruments and their roles reminded me of Arabic classical music, but the vocals seemed to have a direct connection to the qawwali music of South Asia.

Azerbaijan’s location in the Caucasus gives it access to all these musical histories spanning across the Asian continent – Azeris are a Turkic people, linking them with the cultures of Turkey in the west and Central Asia in the east, all the way up to the Uyghurs in modern-day China, but their proximity to Iran means that there is also very heavy influence from Persian cultures and, through that connection, Arabic and South Asian cultures too. The style that Askarov performs, mugham, is very much linked to all of these cultures, as it is just one of a whole continuum of styles that include makam of Turkey, maqam in the Arabic world, the Persian dastgah, the shashmaqom of the Uzbeks and the on ikki muqam of the Uyghur, and which can even be extended to include the ragas of South Asia with the slightest of imagination. These are classical styles that draw on the folk musics of their regions.

Mugham itself is a stately and virtuosic style that shows off the skills of its performers through their delicate manipulations of the melodies and scales and the mastery of the tiny ornaments that fill the music. For singers, such as Askarov, mugham demands a huge range of both pitch and dynamics, with melody lines often maintaining a very high pitch for a sustained period, and featuring varieties of yodels between various intervals of notes.

The living master of mugham is certainly Alim Qasimov, but Askarov is seen as the leading member of the younger generation of musicians, poised for ascendency. The accompanists here, Malik Mansurov on tar and oud (lutes), Elnur Mikailov on kamancha (spike fiddle) and Shukur Aliyev on ghaval (frame drum) and nagara (barrel drum), are all top-level players from the school of the arts in Baku, and accompany many of the country’s most famous musicians (I even saw them on Eurovision once). Their work together then, as heard on several albums, is a great way to get acquainted with the music.

This album in particular is a mix of different styles of mugham, with folk songs, ballads and instrumental pieces, but the centrepiece is the first track, a half-hour performance of ‘Dastgah Bayati-Shiraz’. In the Azeri sense, a dastgah is a complete mugham suite, including composed poetry, improvisations, unmetred sections and instrumental sections, and the main themes of the mugham are developed throughout.

Wow, I’ve done a lot of going on about this one. Sorry about that. Basically: if you don’t know about Azeri mugham, maybe you know a little bit now, and Music from Azerbaijan will set you up well for future adventures. Happy listening!

146: Dark Nights, by Avishai Cohen's Triveni

Avishai Cohen’s Triveni (Israel/USA)
Dark Nights (2014)
10 tracks, 53 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

This album is by jazz musician Avishai Cohen, originally from Tel Aviv but now based in New York. Weirdly, that sentence still leaves room for ambiguity. There’s a good reason why this guy usually goes by the name ‘Trumpeter Avishai Cohen’: to distinguish himself from the other New York-based Tel Avivian jazz musician Avishai Cohen, who is a double bassist. This album is by the trumpet guy.

Like yesterday’s, this is actually another artist I first heard at WOMEX, this time in 2015 in Budapest, Hungary. I’m not quite sure why he was there, to be honest. Well, playing a gig, obviously, but WOMEX is the ‘world music expo,’ and Cohen is pretty much straight-up jazz; there’s no obvious so-called ‘world’ influences to his music, on this album at least. But that’s okay, because I love it – always nice to have something a bit different show up.

This album is presented as ‘Avishai Cohen’s Triveni.’ A triveni is a poetic form in Hindi-Urdu with three lines, each of which relies on the other two; that’s why it’s a good name for a trio, and this one consists of Cohen himself on trumpet, Omer Avital on double bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. The name is an appropriate one for an ensemble like this, as the trio format – with no piano or guitar to bring the rhythms and the chords together – relies very heavily on the interplay between the individual musicians, with very little room to hide, as it were.

Not that these musicians need to. Dark Nights allows them each to show off their own prowess while remaining all of them understated. There’s no wild solos or viciously intricate head sections. It’s all rather stark and deliberate, without falling into sparseness – it feels as if there is always exactly the right amount happening at once. It’s not always just the three instruments going, though. An intriguing addition to the very classic sounding set-up is when Cohen’s trumpet is run through all sorts of effects and filters including distortion and wah-wah, and turning the trio into a quartet through the magic of overdubs. There’s quite a lot of ‘and Friends’ going on on this album too, with guest contributions from Anat Cohen (clarinet), Gerald Clayton (piano) and Keren Ann (vocals), but it doesn’t feel like a roll-call of special collaborations as they all slot into the ensemble so naturally without compromising that tightly-knit feel.

It’s always interesting to hear a style of music stripped back to its bare essentials, and Avishai Cohen’s Triveni does that with aplomb on Dark Nights, identifying the key elements that make the post-bop sound, taking away almost everything else and subtly updating what’s left to the 21st century. To quote Schoolhouse Rock, ‘no more, no less / you don't have to guess / when it's three, you can see / it's a magic number.’

145: Leyenda, by Ana Alcaide

Ana Alcaide (Spain)
Leyenda (2016)
12 tracks, 56 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Aren’t good things that you stumble across by accident imbued with that little extra sweetness? That’s one of the reasons I enjoy this album by Ana Alcaide.

I first heard of Ana at WOMEX 18, which was being held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in October last year. It was the first night of the showcase festival, and the music was spread across five stages in and around the Auditorio Alfredo Kraus. The whole place was a bit like a maze. I was heading over to catch the set from pan-Latin group Ladama on the Theatre Stage, so I found a theatre and ducked in. Wrong stage – this obviously wasn’t Ladama. When I walked in, it was just one woman on her own, sat on the edge of the stage, playing the Swedish nyckelharpa – a sort of fiddle with keys instead of a fingerboard, and loads of sympathetic strings – and singing. It was all very quiet, but the audience didn’t make a sound. It was absolutely captivating.

After that piece, I slipped out and made my way to the Theatre Stage, where I’d wanted to be all along. That gig was okay, but I couldn’t settle to it at all. Ladama’s was dancing-in-the-aisles music, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the other stage. So I wandered back there and the nyckelharpist now had a band, and together they were playing a real mix of styles, of Celtic and Arabic, Scandinavian and Eastern European music, underpinned by Spanish traditions. It was a wonderful performance, and I didn’t regret making that wrong turn one bit. I only found out after the performance that this was Ana Alcaide.

Of course, the record can’t live up to an experience like that – lived experiences always have so much weight, of memories and senses and connections and emotions – but it certainly does stand up on its own. All the songs are inspired by myths and legends that surround women and the feminine from around the world, and the music is a multicultural mix of styles that is in turns calm and uptempo, ethereal and weighty.

One of the best things about festivals is that opportunity to happen upon something new and unexpected; something that you’d never consider otherwise, but which hits you at just the right moment to lodge itself deeply within. It’s even better if that happens when you’re wandering around not quite sure where you are. Ana Alcaide is just one glorious example; who knows who it will be next?

144: Sigil, by Nuru Kane

Nuru Kane (Senegal)
Sigil (2006)
13 tracks, 62 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

The first time I saw Nuru Kane live was at Africa Oyé festival in 2006, the same year as his debut CD, Sigil, came out. I must have already heard the album, because me and me dad were right down at the front. Next to us, there was a scouser who had sufficiently imbibed the festival spirit and probably other heady brews; he looked an unusual sort to be hanging around an African music festival in full trackies and a shaven head. Nuru came out and started singing the track ‘Djollof Djollof’. He was a proper imposing figure: tall, slender and muscular, dressed in a mixture of white shirt and blue jeans but with deep blue and red scarves, guimbri around his neck, singing this deep blues. And our slapheaded pal went nuts: “Jimi Hendrix, la! You’re Jimi Hendrix!” He had a point, you know. Apart from his right-handedness, he did look stunningly like some reincarnation of the axeman from straight out of the desert, with the bass lute as his weapon rather than the electric guitar. It was an absolutely blinding set, and we all had a great time – slaphead was swept off his feet throughout.

Nuru Kane comes from Dakar in Senegal, but with his band Bayefall Gnawa, he explores a connection that has surprisingly little precedent, even now. He brings the music of the Gnawa, the black population of Morocco, which is most recognisable for its use of the guimbri (a large bass lute like an ngoni) and qaraqabs (metal castanets), into his sound alongside the Wolof music of his own heritage and with a big healthy dose of blues too. The Gnawa were originally brought to Morocco as slaves from West Africa, and their music and cultural practices still strongly reflect these roots. Nuru’s songs on this album also forge the connections between his own religious sect, the Bayefall, and that of the Gnawa, as they are both uniquely West African forms of Sufi Islam.

When this album first came out, I got absolutely obsessed with it. Having got massively into blues music around the same time, I reckon this was my first real exposure to African music that consciously drew upon the blues as a way of highlighting their various stylistic similarities and it blew my mind. Two tracks on the album ‘Gorée’ and the aforementioned ‘Djollof, Djollof’ are literally blues tracks with all the other elements added onto that framework, so naturally those were the ones I gravitated to. In them, Nuru’s soulful voice bends in and around the styles so subtly it’s as if they were always meant to be together, but his skills as a straight-up blues musician are such that he could take that one full-time and flourish. And obviously it’s not just the blueses that work well here; the track ‘Niane’ is a perfect blend of all three of the styles, with blues guitar and Wolof-style vocals all over a rollicking bed of Gnawa trance music.

Back when it came out, I played this CD to absolute death. I thought it was perfect. Now my tastes and ears have grown a little more refined, I think that may be a bit of an overstatement, but it’s certainly a great record. He may not be Jimi Hendrix, but if Hendrix grew up in Senegal obsessed with Moroccan music, I imagine he would indeed sound a bit like this.

143: Valiha Madagascar, by Various Artists

Various Artists (Madagascar)
Valiha Madagascar (1965)
17 tracks, 48 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

The culture of Madagascar is fascinating in its uniqueness. By virtue of being a large land mass separated from the nearest continent by quite a bit of sea, its culture has always been allowed to percolate among the many ethno-culturo-linguistic sub-groups to develop into something found nowhere else. That’s not to say the Malagasy are isolated – over their history they have had many productive relationships with the peoples of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and South East Asia, all of which made their impression on the island’s culture.

In fact, Malagasy people have just as much if not more in common with those of South East Asia – especially Indonesia and Malaysia – than those of East Africa. The island was first inhabited by settlers from Borneo and the Malagasy language is even considered to be in the Austronesian language group. This unique clash of cultures is very evident even in Malagasy music.

The compilation Valiha Madagascar is one of the earliest from Ocora, one of the great record labels of field recordings, and it was possibly the first time that Malagasy music was commercially available in the West. The label rightly has a great reputation for amazing recordings and, despite being so early in their catalogue, this album is no exception. As its name suggests, its main focus is on the valiha (pronounced vah-lee), probably the most recognisable instrument of Madagascar. It is a zither, made out of a thick trunk of bamboo, whose skin is partially peeled off and hooked over bridges to make strings (although nowadays, nylon and steel strings are more common).

You can hear from the first track that this is something different. The tuning, for one, sounds strange to Western ears, and not even much like those of other East African cultures, either. Even the instrument itself has parallels across the Indian Ocean: compare it with the Indonesian sasando or the Malaysian pratukong. But the music that is played on it doesn’t sound quite like anything else, South East Asian or African. The melodies are unrelentingly sunny-sounding but their rhythms are staccato and jumpy; combined with their fast tempo, you can tell this music is made for dancing all night. It’s also interesting to hear how other instruments – such as the occasional fiddle or flute – can handle the valiha repertoire while also bringing in elements of country or Latin music; it gives a good insight into the development of Malagasy pop styles such as tsipiky and salegy.

With music like this, which is so unlike any other music from anywhere else, it is hard to find the correct vocabulary to describe it. I gave it a go, but this is really music that just needs to be heard to be appreciated. There are several styles of playing presented on this album, but they all sound like a great time in one way or another. If you’ve never heard music from Madagascar, give this album a play now and hear something completely new.

142: Pyramid, by The Modern Jazz Quartet

The Modern Jazz Quartet (USA)
Pyramid (1960)
6 tracks, 37 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I bought this album in a jazz frenzy at the very beginning of my first year of university. Just around the corner from the campus was a record shop that had some mad deal on classic jazz CDs – something like three for £10. I would go in there and come out with armsful of them, stocking up on all the greats that were so far unrepresented in my record collection – Ornette, Mingus, Paul Chambers, Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum, all sorts. A group that I especially stocked up on was the Modern Jazz Quartet. Pyramid was the first album of theirs that I got.

Right from the first track, ‘Vendome’, I knew this was different from the jazz I’d encountered before, even the stuff from the same era. To me, it sounded just like Bach, but jazz. I knew less about classical music than I do now, and when I played that track for my friend Henry, he said “yeah, of course it sounds like Bach, it’s a fugue!” And of course it is. The piece itself is only very short – less than two and a half minutes – but the main motif that comes back around several times in several different guises is a fugue: a complicated compositional device where one melodic line is repeated across several instruments, offset from each other and in different keys; Bach is probably the undisputed master of the fugue (here’s one of my favourite examples). The Modern Jazz Quartet take that form and mix it up with post-bop improvisation and a shuffling rhythm and make it something completely new.

Although the MJQ were most definitely part of that exciting and fruitful hard-bop/post-bop scene of the late 50s and 60s, they were somewhat different. Each of the musicians – Milt ‘Bags’ Jackson on vibraphone, John Lewis on piano, Percy Heath on bass and Connie Kay on drums – had bona fide jazz chops and each performed regularly with other groups and musicians, but as the MJQ, classical was much higher on the menu. Just on Pyramid, there are clear influences from the likes of Bach all the way to Satie in their version of Jim Hall’s ‘Romaine’. They were probably the most well-known artists of the so-called ‘third stream’, which attempted to find a middle ground between jazz and classical, resulting in a music that is at once both and neither. Even their name signals that they were something different: this was a time when small-band jazz records and concerts were billed as the lead soloist only, or as the soloist’s trio/quartet/quintet/whatever. That MJQ purposely chose an anonymising name shows the equality of their set-up. No one musician was the leader, each made an equal contribution to the sound, the performance and the well-running of the group itself.

When it comes from an era of intense musical productivity and innovation, it’s really cool to hear a group that remained true to that scene while taking things off at a right angle in terms of musical approach and band organisation. It also allows their sound to remain fresh and interesting after all this time, especially when you’re listening to a whole load of other stuff from that era at the same time – I picked up this album at just the right time. Pyramid is a great introduction to the band’s sound; give it a listen and get hooked just like I did!

141: Makorokoto, by the Four Brothers

The Four Brothers (Zimbabwe)
Makorokoto (1988)
10 tracks, 45 minutes
YouTube

It’s not that often that you get a band fronted by its drummer, but The Four Brothers were just that, led by Marshall Munhumumwe from behind the kit – even more impressive is that he was also the lead singer too. It’s like if Phil Collins [insert unprovoked and probably uncalled for musical insult about Phil Collins here].

But for all Munhumumwe’s impressive musicianship and musical direction, The Four Brothers are a sungura band, and in sungura, it’s all about the guitars. The other three Brothers – at this time – were Edward Matiyasi on lead guitar, Aleck Chipaika on rhythm guitar and Never Mutare on bass, and each of them played an absolutely essential role in the band’s sound. It’s not like in so many of those two-guitars-bass-drums set-ups where the lead plays the solos, rhythm plays the chords and the bass for the most part plays the root notes. No, here, each musician has their own melody, each unlike the others and unlike the vocal melody either. You put them all together and they interlock, creating a really tight lattice of interweaving lines that still manages to sound airy and light.

Sungura is a big mix of styles from all over the region – soukous and rumba from the Congo (with their own influences after Cuba and Guinea), benga from Kenya and maskanda and Township jive from South Africa. Its unmistakably Zimbabwean sound comes from the country’s own traditional music, most notably the distinctive interlocking sound of the mbira lamellophone of the Shona people. Whereas other Zimbabwean music is quite serious, such as the ultra-political chimurenga style or the deeply spiritual bira ceremonies, sungura is primary music to dance and drink beer to, the quintessential sound of the pubs in 1980s Harare. The music’s easy-going attitude also extended to the opinions of musicians – sungura itself means ‘rabbit’ in Swahili, a mischievous animal that reflected the musicians’ renown as those that freely enjoyed fun, beer and women.

Makorokoto is actually a sort of ‘best of’ compilation, although it’s put together so well that it doesn’t really sound like it. It brings together the band’s material since the early 80s, including their biggest hit, 1980’s ‘Makorokoto’, meaning ‘Congratulations’, which celebrated Zimbabwe’s independence. Unfortunately, all four of the Brothers have now left us, and sungura music and its evolution, the jit of bands such as the Bhundu Boys, are no longer really performed. As such, this album may well be the best collection of the music that you’re going to find out there. So if you’re ever in need of a good dance or a soundtrack to some beer – this is the perfect record for you.

140: Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike, by Gogol Bordello

Gogol Bordello (Ukraine/Russia/USA)
Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike (2004)
15 tracks, 63 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The first time I heard Gogol Bordello, their name had been floating around for a little while without me actually getting them in my ears, but their song ‘I Would Never Wanna Be Young Again’ was the first track on a Songlines covermount CD. It was so different from anything I would have expected from the magazine but it was electrifying. It starts with choppy, distorted guitars, joined by swirls of sawing fiddles and then a blood-curling, agonised scream before the song itself actually kicks off. What a way to grab the attention!

The band’s first two albums had already made them stars of the New York scene, but this album is what really blew them up around the world, and even started a bit of a vogue for Eastern European music among hip circles. The album’s title Gypsy Punks was really the perfect phrase for people to latch onto: it’s quirky and unexpected, but it also gives you a very clear idea of what they sound like. And it’s a combination that works really well – there’s something about Eastern European and Romani folk music that lends itself so well to the thrashing and screaming of punk, and Gogol Bordello pull it off flawlessly.

They actually bring in a much wider variety of sounds than you would actually expect from the album title, too. Punk is obviously the order of the day, but there are very strong elements of ska, dub and hip-hop all the way through, which blend just as well and only serve to add to the band’s globetrotting image.

An important part of listening to Gogol Bordello is not to take anything about them too seriously. Everything about them is a joke, or exaggerated or diminished for comic effect, or at least has the potential to be. I’ve seen them live a couple of times, but the best one (at the Manchester Academy, with Skindred in support), lead singer Eugene Hütz sang the most famous song from the album, ‘Start Wearing Purple’, entirely in Spanish, just to mix things up, make it different, and probably to annoy the audience a little bit too.

This album is probably the classic of the Gypsy Punk scene. It’s a distillation of all that made the style fun, new and exciting, and it is still an excellent choice to play loud and mosh around till your head hurts.

139: Grace, by Jeff Buckley

Jeff Buckley (USA)
Grace (1994)
11 tracks, 57 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Grace, Jeff Buckley’s only studio album released before his death, is a different prospect than the album we’ve already covered, his café sessions record Live at Sin-é, which was recorded just a few months earlier. There, he was on his own, just his guitar and his voice; here, the arrangements are full of atmospheric production and huge instrumentation, from many guitar overdubs with all manner of different effects to string arrangements and interesting timbres from harmoniums to dulcimers. However, what is the same is his own immense talent: his intelligent guitarwork, his agonised but strong compositions and above all, his soaring and swooping voice, a remarkable instrument full of fragility and emotion.

There’s so much variety on this album, it shows just how much he had to offer, musically. The three covers he includes illustrate this well – there’s ‘Lilac Wine’, a gently jazzy musical theatre song made famous by Nina Simone; then possibly the album’s most famous track ‘Hallelujah’, a tragic but passionate rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ballad; and then again ‘Corpus Christi Carol’, a hymn from the Middle Ages that fully utilises Jeff’s tenor range. Even these disparate covers contrast with the original material on the album too: ‘Corpus Christi Carol’ is immediately followed by ‘Eternal Life’, probably the heaviest song on the album that even owes parts of its sound to grunge and punk.

On Live at Sin-é, Jeff makes his famous statement about the legendary Pakistani qawwal Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, calling him “my Elvis,” and going on to sing a version of the qawwali ‘Yeh Jo Halka Halka Saroor Hai’. There are no Nusrat covers on Grace which, considering the target audience, is probably not too surprising, although hearing a full in-studio arrangement of the piece would have been really cool. But if you listen closely, Nusrat, qawwali and South Asian music in general are all over this album. They’re there in obvious places such as the introduction of ‘Dream Brother’, which is all drones, sliding guitars and tabla, but it’s also there in small elements such as the patterns he traces as he drifts away at the end of a phrase, or even in the way he sometimes constructs his guitar parts and chord progressions. All of it comes together on the title track, where his guitar and voice together sound so much influenced by the South Asian sound that I’m sure there would be room for an interesting cover highlighting those aspects.

Jeff’s death at just 30 years old is an unspeakable tragedy not only for his age and the circumstances surrounding it, but at the sheer amount of creative potential the man held. Everything he made was so beautiful, and his planned work was, by all accounts, just as captivating as that which he left us. It’s a story that seems to be repeated so often in music, and it gets no less saddening. But he did leave us with beautiful music, at least, and that shall ever be attached to the memory of this singular musician.

138: Impossible Broadcasting, by Transglobal Underground

Transglobal Underground (United Kingdom)
Impossible Broadcasting (2004)
12 tracks, 54 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Quick announcement up top: as sheer coincidence would have it, Transglobal Underground are playing a very special concert TONIGHT if you're reading this on the day it's published – on 18th May. They’ll be performing at the Islington Assembly Hall in London with an old-school line-up including Natacha Atlas on vocals, and supported by Dub Colossus from TGU founder member Nick Page, who fuse Ethiopian music and dub. It will be a great one!

Transglobal Underground were the first proper gig that I ever attended. I’d been to loads of festivals before, and a couple of sit-down concerts in large halls, but seeing TGU at Telford’s Warehouse in Chester as a 13-year-old in 2004 was the first time I went to see a band in a small, dark, standing venue. They were absolutely brilliant. I managed to squeeze my way to the front to see the group crammed onto the smallest stage, which was overflowing with equipment, and playing the most banging and eclectic mix of international beats, dub, funk and electronica, and with live sitar, tabla and dhol to boot. Everyone was dancing a frenzy and the whole place was hot and sweaty. I had only ever experienced this sort of atmosphere at festivals, and the realisation that I could get that feeling basically any time I wanted – and much closer to where I lived – was absolutely intoxicating. What an amazing show that was. That was part of their tour promoting their new album Impossible Broadcasting.

TGU had already had a lot of success with their earlier material, even charting in the UK in the 90s. Their particular sound was, I guess, less fashionable by this point, but I reckon this album slaps just as hard as any of their others so far. As well as their standard brand of world-spanning dubtronica, they also invite an impressive roster of guests, including two very disparate vocal trios of Trio Bulgarka (Bulgarian choral folk) and Tata Pound (Malian hip-hop). Each piece has its own personality; there is the most terrifying two-minutes-and-thirty-three-seconds in music with ‘Sentinel’, a menacing, psychological horror of a track mixing Egyptian-style strings with synth drones, a wartime public service announcement and some foreboding spoken word from TGU’s TUUP; but you also have ‘Drinking in Gomorrah’, which tells a great and surreal tale of barkeeping and international party-scene homogeneity, with backing that’s groovy as funk. There are tracks that would be sure to fill any dancefloor, and tracks that are much more cerebral, that make you want to sit down and really work out the deeper meaning to the sounds, but they all fit easily alongside each other as one brilliant album.

I realise I am most definitely biased by my personal experience with this album and TGU’s performance of it all that time ago in Chester, but I do consider it one of the best albums of its style for its range, depth and just how much it stands up even 15 years later (oh my god…). At 13, it certainly took me long enough to get that first gig under my belt, but with TGU on such high form, I can barely think of a better way to make that milestone.

137: Blood on the Tracks, by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan (USA)
Blood on the Tracks (1975)
10 tracks, 52 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Bob Dylan is an artist I feel I should like more than I do. I’ve always been aware of his skills as a wordsmith, and I do really enjoy his blueses, such as the classics of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’ and ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’. But I think a barrier to my full enjoyment comes from my inability to listen to lyrics. It’s a weird thing – I can listen to lyrics, but it takes my full concentration to be able to really divine meaning from lyrics if they contain any depth whatsoever. It’s probably a joint function of having dyspraxia and having grown up surrounded by music that is either instrumental or sung in languages I don’t understand. Either way, it doesn’t really help my relationship to Bob’s material, where lyrics are full of rhetorical turnarounds, deeper meanings, obscure references and esoteric word-play and the music serves mostly to function as a setting for the words.

THAT BEING SAID, there’s always been something about Blood on the Tracks that has appealed to me. The music feels like a much more integral part of the work than on his previous albums. It is slicker, more interesting and with a fairly big ensemble, but which is used in a way that still feels intimate and close; it retains an acoustic feel, even though there are electric instruments used throughout. His voice is more mature than it was in the decade before – still high-pitched but less acerbic, still unique without being distractingly so.

Of course, the lyrics are still the most important thing about the album, and they are superb. Blood on the Tracks is my favourite Dylan album, but it’s only been quite recently that I’ve been able to fully appreciate that element of it, and that’s because of a set that came out just last year. In fact…

Bob Dylan (USA)
The Bootleg Series Vol. 14: More Blood, More Tracks (2018)
11 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify (only ten tracks for some reason) ∙ iTunes

I think it’s really interesting to compare the originally-released version with this one. A lot of pieces that appeared on Blood on the Tracks were rerecorded a little time after the original sessions with a different ensemble to create the more luscious sound, and the production added a lot of reverb as well as making most of the tracks a little faster than were performed. More Blood, More Tracks presents remastered versions of the original sessions.

The one-disc version of this reissue presenting the alternate takes of every track that made the final album, plus one extra (it was also released as an exhaustive six-CD box set of every take from the sessions, but really, who needs that?). And they are spectacular. They are completely stripped-back, just Bob and his acoustic guitar, and occasionally an unobtrusive bass guitar in the background. The vocals are almost completely dry of production, so it’s as if he’s singing directly out of your speakers. It’s all so much more fragile and poignant, the lyrics telling witty tales but so often of sadness, loss and longing. The directness of the instrumentation and sound really hit home not only the lyrics themselves, but also their meanings and emotions.

Blood on the Tracks is still my favourite Bob Dylan record, but it is a great experience to listen to the flipside of the whole album in this way. It gives me a new appreciation for the album as a whole, as well as Bob's enormous skills as both a songwriter and musician. Now I just need to work on my lyric-listening ability and get stuck into the rest of his stuff.

136: This Was, by Jethro Tull

Jethro Tull (United Kingdom)
This Was (1968)
13 tracks, 47 minutes (2001 CD version)
Spotify ∙ iTunes

To compare two bands that have probably never been compared ever before, Jethro Tull are a bit like Maroon 5, who we talked about the other day. They both came out of the gates with a really strong album, but over the next few years, changed their sound rather dramatically.

Jethro Tull are now known as folk rock icons, albeit with a much heavier emphasis on the rock than the folk, but their debut album, This Was, is in quite a different realm. There are lots of cues from psychedelic rock and what would go on to be prog rock, and there are definitely elements taken from UK folk too, but what really sets this album apart from their later work is the heavy influence from blues and jazz. It’s these that really permeate every single track, whether they’re full-on country blues such as ‘Some Day the Sun Won’t Shine for You’ or the driving rock of ‘Dharma for One’ whose psychedelic elements bear a lot of resemblance to jazz fusion.

The unique blend of styles on this first album comes out of the fact that they had two main creative forces in the group at that time: singer and flautist Ian Anderson and guitarist Mick Abrahams. Anderson was definitely a jazz head and you can tell that by his tone, often imitative of Rahsaan Roland Kirk; Abraham was the one that brought the heaviest of the blues to the table.

You know by now that jazz and blues are two of the styles that most reliably hit me in the right spot, which is probably why this album is the one that does it for me. It’s not just those elements, of course; I love how they’re entwined with the rest of the sound in a way that sounds completely effortless. The way that a cover of Kirk’s ‘Serenade to a Cuckoo’ – an absolutely wonderful, flute-based instrumental track that I think is even better than the original – can sit alongside the heavy prog of something like ‘Cat’s Squirrel’ is a testament to that. The whole thing has a proper 60s production to it that really roots it in its time (in the best possible way) and it has performances to match: acidic, wry wit and intense musicianship all wrapped up in an exceeding amount of cool.

Shortly after This Was, Abrahams left the group after a falling out with Anderson over the musical direction and went on to found the group Blodwyn Pig (a lovely bit of bizarre music trivia is that, after Abrahams left, his first – if short-lived – replacement in Jethro Tull was Tony Iommi, lead guitarist of the band that were soon to be Black Sabbath). Blues stopped being a main element of their sound, and jazz fell by the wayside eventually too, to be replaced by more obvious folk roots, which then were faded out themselves in favour of a more standard rock sound.

It’s proper stereotypical to say of any artist ‘oh, I preferred their earlier work,’ not to mention strange, when we also – rightly, I think – expect artists to evolve in their work over time. Yet it’s such a common sentiment, and here I am saying the same thing twice in only a few days. There must be some reason for that mind-set, that has probably been discussed by better minds than mine. Answers on a postcard…

135: Bwarouz, by Danyèl Waro

Danyèl Waro (La Réunion)
Bwarouz (2002)
14 tracks, 64 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

The first time I ever heard of maloya or Danyèl Waro was seeing him on stage at WOMAD in 2011 at about 1 in the morning. I was absolutely awe-struck. Here was a little man with crazy hair, large, strong glasses and strange, jerky dancing (a function of his playing the square kayamb rattle) looking very much like Not a Musician, but with the most captivating voice. The music was unknown to me, and I only had a vague idea even of where La Réunion was (it’s a small island in the Indian Ocean to the east of Madagascar, officially part of France), but there were so many connections with music all over the world that were pinging inside my brain. It was an amazing show, and I had to hear more – immediately after the end of his ovation, I dashed off to the CD tent to grab whatever they had. They were closed, so I had to wait until the next day, but that’s not the point. I ended up getting this album, Bwarouz, and the later Aou Amwin from 2010, and both are fantastic.

Right from the first moments of the opening track, ‘Boulouze’, you can hear why I like it so much. It starts with the shuffling rhythm of the kayamb, which you can tell even in the space of a few seconds is ever so slightly limping behind the beat. Then Danyèl’s beautiful voice comes in. It’s a curious voice, fragile but powerful at the same time. It’s high-pitched and reedy, and he wavers in his upper range. He sounds like he is always a fraction away from his voice cracking and giving out altogether, but of course it never does. The power comes not in the form of beefiness, although he can belt it out when he needs to; instead, it is a power that comes from a sense of deep wisdom held within. It all suffuses his voice with a capacity to acutely represent emotion, even to those who don’t speak Creole or French.

The music itself helps, too. It’s mostly a percussion-and-voice music, which means that the melody is super-important in driving the emotions of the piece. There’s actually a feature in the most recent edition of Songlines magazine, a beginner’s guide to maloya; in it, the writer Bastiaan Springer says that ‘maloya is often called the blues of La Réunion, although, musically speaking, there are hardly any similarities with the American blues, except its call-and-response structure,’ but I think that’s a bit of a mad statement to make. Just listen to Danyèl sing in ‘Boulouze’! Of course it is not exactly like the blues – the two styles developed thousands of miles apart from very different origins – and the way the melody is constructed is not like blues…but it is absolutely full of that blues emotion. The personality of blues music really comes from the blue notes – notes that are ‘between’ the standard notes of a scale, quartertones almost, and maloya is absolutely full of blue notes. You’ll know them when you hear them: they’re the notes that sound as if they’re pulling on your heart, aching to be resolved.

And I’ve not even mentioned the harmonies yet! The harmonies are used in an interesting way: usually when the rest of the band join Danyèl in his singing, they all sing the same notes in unison, but every so often, one singer will break away and make a simple harmony – maybe just a minor third over the last couple of notes in a long phrase. It’s so simple, but it gets me every time.

I’ve gone on a lot, and I’ve only really been talking about the very first song on the album. And it’s a great one, but it’s not alone on the album; where each of the tracks brings something new but all of them have that same power and fragility that Danyèl’s voice brings. In terms of sheer emotional reaction to one person’s voice, I would have to say that Danyèl Waro’s is definitely one of my favourite in all music. Listen to this and pay attention, but prepare to get your heart broken along the way.

134: 1.22.03. Acoustic, by Maroon 5

Maroon 5 (USA)
1.22.03. Acoustic (2004)
7 tracks, 29 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I believe that there is opportunity for good in every music, and pop music is no exception (although I admit you may have to look a little harder to find the good among the pap – but it’s there! Usually!). For a while at least, Maroon 5 were, in my opinion, making some of the best pop music out there. Their debut, 2002’s Songs About Jane, was a hit around the world, and the soulful melodies, band performance and lead singer Adam Levine’s voice all set them apart from the rest of what was on the radio at the time.

This album is something a bit different. It’s only a very short one, sort of an extended EP in a way, and as you can tell from its title, it’s an acoustic set (mostly). It was recorded live at the Hit Factory in New York, and the sound quality is…fine, I guess. It’s not the best recorded live album I’ve ever heard but it’s definitely far from the worst. But of course, it’s the performances here that are what makes this one special.

The songs included are mostly from Songs About Jane, but there’s something about this performance that really highlights both the band’s musicianship and their songwriting. Performing their songs on two acoustic guitars, piano, electric bass (cheats) and a bit of a badly-tuned djembe, together with Levine’s lead vocals and some nice harmonies here and there, it’s nice to hear the songs stand on their own without the added studio flashiness. The influences from Stevie Wonder, Van Morrison and the Beatles are clear (they actually feature a quiet cover the latter’s ‘If I Fell’ here), and somehow the acoustic setting also serves to bring out the latent funkiness of the band’s music, along with the standard soulfulness that coats all of the studio album. What interests me the most, though, is the piano - pianist Jesse Carmichael has a habit of adding quite a lot of extensions on his chord playing on most of the track, which even lends a jazzy flow to the set.

I should probably also mention the bonus, non-acoustic track, a cover of AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’. It’s a bit amusing but doesn’t make for great listening, and it’s basically an unnecessary addition to the end of the album. Ah well. Ignoring that bit though, I think they were really onto something with this album. The live setting leaves it a bit lacking, but there’s great ideas here; it would have been great if they’d have used the live experiences to record proper acoustic versions of the set in a studio, ironing out the kinks and making the sound extra sparkly while leaving the organic feel. But they didn’t. Again, ah well.

It was really disappointing to hear Maroon 5’s descent from a promising band navigating the pop world with something different in their sound to basically making electropop that sounded like everything else that was out there. Perhaps their album tracks were somewhat different, but I wouldn’t know – their singles definitely didn’t reflect that. Luckily, that doesn’t take away the pleasure of listening to their earlier stuff, and Songs About Jane and 1.22.03. Acoustic both still stand up, proving that pop music – sometimes – can be really good.

133: Ténéré, by Groupe Tinarwen

Groupe Tinarwen (Mali)
Ténéré (1993)
8 tracks, 39 minutes

You’ll notice I’ve not put up any download or streaming links up at the top, because there just aren’t any. This is a cassette from Tinariwen, recorded in 1992 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire and released in 1993 for a West African, especially Tuareg, audience. That was eight years before they made their first international release, and this cassette fell into obscurity. It’s never been reissued in any capacity; the most I can really do is embed this YouTube video of the album’s opening track:

I actually did manage to find a download for the whole thing ages ago, but that seems to have disappeared now – get in touch if you want to hear the whole thing.

So what’s so special about this then, compared to the album Amassakoul that I wrote about in March, or any of their other six albums that have made them famous around the world? Well, just listen. Those albums don’t have drum machines, piano loops and layered synths all over them for a start. Nowadays, Tinariwen are known for their moody, stripped-back and atmospheric grooves; this mad cheesy production sounds completely bizarre in comparison and I absolutely love it.

Those production elements are only on the first side of the album, with the second four tracks being closer to that classic essouf sound – the mixture of Tuareg traditional music with elements of rock and Algerian raï that Tinariwen are believed to have invented – which gives an idea of how that sound evolved, but of course it’s those first four tracks that intrigue me the most.

I actually asked Justin Adams, producer of several of Tinariwen’s earliest international releases, about this particular tape a while ago. From what the band had told him, the keys and drum machines were the idea of the Ivorian producer tasked with making the album, as he felt it would make for a more attractive commercial product for that market. And I think that’s what I like about this album, it sort of explodes the rather popular idea that Tinariwen’s music is a sort of lost-in-time sound, a mummified ancestor to the blues that was discovered caked in desert sand; that their use of cheap and gnarly electric guitars was their only concession to the century as it existed outside of the Sahara. There’s no doubt that Tinariwen’s music draws on deep histories, but when they first became famous among the Tuareg it’s because they were essentially a pop band. Their lyrics were the most important thing to their Tamasheq-speaking audiences, but the way they played and produced their music was shaped by ideas on what would sell the most tapes. And when it came time to make records to sell abroad, their sound changed subtly to be most attractive to that market as well.

I can see why this album has gone unacknowledged by the band’s European/American record labels to this day – it does break down a part of the mythos that is, by now, sure to have been quite carefully curated, and let’s face it, it’s not really in keeping with the musical brand they’ve got going on nowadays. But I reckon if they reissued this tape, it would get people’s attention and sell well for that. Here’s hoping, at least.

132: Straight Outta Compton, by N.W.A

N.W.A (USA)
Straight Outta Compton (1988)
13 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Haha what a contrast with yesterday’s album, I love it. This is another one of those bona fide classics that have already been written about ad nauseam, so I doubt I’ll be bringing anything particularly new to the table, but I’ll give it a go anyway.

I was actually quite late to listening to this one all the way through as an album, as opposed to hearing tracks randomly here and there. When I did finally listen to it, it actually struck me as quite funny. Straight Outta Compton’s reputation preceded it as the record that solidified the moral panic around hip-hop and rap, especially with its stand-out track ‘Fuck tha Police’, but listening to it now, it seems rather tame. For starters, the rap style that was characterised as ‘hyperaggressive’ at the time seems nothing of the sort now; it’s not quite the nursery rhyme style that was around a few years earlier, but the rhythms are still quite simple and slow and the rhymes nowhere near as complex as they would become in the next decade of hip-hop. Even the lyrics – much criticised for their violent content – seem over-the-top in a cartoonish, rather than scandalous, way.

At more than 30 years since its first release, it’s no surprise that the record has aged somewhat. It’s not all turned more light-hearted in the interim though. For example, while some of the ways the group refer to women were shocking when it first came out, the deliberately provocativeness of the language has faded and now they just sound sad and disgusting, and to be honest a bit embarrassing in retrospect. What is still shocking, though, is ‘Fuck tha Police’, not in how much it has aged, but how much it hasn’t. It is clear how much black people, especially black men and boys, are the target for so much institutional racism from police forces (in the UK as well as the US), being so much more likely to be stopped by police, searched, arrested, beaten up and murdered by police for no reason other than the colour of their skin, with almost always zero repercussions – this is in 2019. It is absolutely disgusting and – again – embarrassing that a piece of music written more than 30 years ago can so accurately describe the exact same problems facing a huge portion of the population then as they are now, and seemingly nothing at all has changed. It’s pathetic.

…but politically-induced emotions aside, this is still a fun album. The music is funky – due in a large part to the many samples of straight-up funk used to create the instrumentals – and the lyrics are witty and clever, even if the rhyme schemes aren’t that complex. There’s no doubt that the controversy around N.W.A and Straight Outta Compton helped to elevate it to popularity at the time, and into legendary status since, but it is pleasing to know that the album still stands up now that the controversy has (mostly) died away.

131: Medieval Music, by Gerald English with the Jaye Consort

Gerald English with the Jaye Consort (United Kingdom)
Medieval Music (1967)
25 tracks, 44 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I first got this album from the estimable News From Nowhere, an excellent radical bookshop in Liverpool which also has a great music selection, and (on this day at least) a bargain bin of old LPs for 50p each. At that price, of course I raided it for a load of music I would never have heard otherwise, and this was the best of the bunch. Although I have had a fringe interest in early music for quite a while, I chose to pick this one up in part for its cover, which features a bunch of reconstructed medieval instruments. Several of the instruments bear a strong resemblance to those played in other parts of the world, which I find fascinating – what catches my eye the most is the lute in the foreground which looks remarkably like the Central Asian long-necked lutes, specifically the Kyrgyz komuz. Much as I was going on about the other day with Matthaios Tsahouridis’ Pontic lýra, I love being able to see and hear how music changes across cultures, geographies and time, and the organology of instruments are a very clear way to see this.

The music contained within is also full of those sort of connections, although more temporal than geographical. The repertoire that the Jaye Consort perform here covers quite a range, encompassing pieces from about the 13th century to the end of the 15th and from all across Western Europe, mostly Britain, France and Germany. A span of 300 years and half a continent is a lot in terms of musical history (for comparison, what we refer to as the ‘Classical period’ of Western art music lasted only 90 years), but because we are so far removed from that time culturally, it all does sound musically contiguous, to non-educated ears like mine, at least. What is fascinating is that at the time these pieces were written, the line between folk music and art music was far less defined than it is now, and you can really hear that in some of the pieces. Take the 14th century Italian piece ‘Lamento di Tristano’, which, depending on how you orchestrated it, could pass as an orchestral piece or a folk song even today.

There’s a lot of interesting pieces all the way through this album, both in how they sound and their historical context, but there’s one in particular that I want to mention. One of several estampies (dances) in this set (the one on track 9) is played on an interesting instrument, which you can see on the cover: a portative organ, which is a hand-pumped keyboard instrument like our modern-day harmonium, but using pipes to create its sound rather than reeds. That’s already intriguing, but the piece itself is particularly historic – it is the first known piece of keyboard music of which we have record. There were doubtlessly pieces beforehand, but this is the earliest piece of written keyboard music that we know of, from the Robertsbridge Codex, written around 1360. The manuscript is actually slightly damaged at the bottom of the pages, which is probably why the ending sounds so abrupt. I just love how there is music that is so old, that we can recreate almost exactly as was intended when it was written.

Of course I recommend this album for people like me, because I like it, and I reckon it is a good and pleasant introduction to medieval music. However, as I’ve stated, I know very little about early music, so there may well be much better examples out there than this one that I just don’t know about. Please, do recommend if there are others I – and we – should be listening to!

130: The Rough Guide to Asian Underground, by Various Artists

Various Artists (United Kingdom/South Asia)
The Rough Guide to Asian Underground (2003)
15 tracks, 78 minutes
Another one that can’t be listened to or downloaded online for some reason. Here’s a Spotify playlist I made, but it is missing a few tracks, unfortunately. You can still buy the CD at the World Music Network, or even more cheaply second-hand on Amazon.

For a really long time, the Rough Guide series from the World Music Network was one of the most valuable resources in world music, providing impressively in-depth and well-rounded introductions to music scenes by region, culture or genre in the space of a single CD each, often with short but informative essays and track breakdowns in the sleeves. There were so many excellent Rough Guide compilations that I had to be careful not to fill this blog up with them. It’s a shame that lately, although WMN still puts out Rough Guides, they are nowhere near the standard they once were – nowadays they seem to mostly be excuses to repackage material from their sister label Riverboat Records, and there’s not a sleeve note in sight. Ah well. This is a blog for Good Albums, so let’s look at one of them, then.

The Asian Underground scene was quite a big deal in the UK of the 1990s, and must surely have been one of the most exciting musical movements to be a part of (although I cannot speak from experience – I was a little kid growing up in the middle of nowhere in the north-west, but still). UK-based musicians and producers with backgrounds from all over South Asia were diving into the latest styles of electronica and dance music, as well as hip-hop, jungle, new age, dub and punk, and bringing along a unique Asian spin on things by introducing elements from what they heard at home: Indian classical music, Bollywood songs, qawwali, bhangra and all sorts.

The Rough Guide to Asian Underground has all of the factors that made the Rough Guide series so essential for listeners of good music from anywhere. For starters, it was compiled by DJ Ritu, who was one of the key players in the scene herself and responsible for a lot of the attention that came its way – who better suited to give the most succinct yet detailed introduction to it?

All the obvious and most well-known names of the scene are here of course, such as Asian Dub Foundation, Black Star Liner, the State of Bengal and Fun^da^Mental (whose track ‘Ja Sha Taan’ is probably the best on here, making excellent use of samples from the qawwali of Nawazish Ali Khan and the 1940s jazz-blues of Hot Lips Page). But there’s also some interesting and unexpected entries here. The album starts with ‘Streets of Calcutta’, a great track from sitarist Ananda Shankar from all the way back in 1975 that shows how deep the roots of Asian Underground go; there’s also some of Talvin Singh’s earliest work under the moniker Mahatma T with the track ‘Jihad’ from the 80s – he would later go on to be one of the biggest names in the Asian Underground scene, even making it overground as the first (and so far only) British-Asian winner of the Mercury Prize in 1999. And then there’s also a handful of tracks that were as-then unreleased, including one by another big name, Joi.

Now that is how you introduce a musical scene in a way that can get newcomers hooked and show them what they need to know while also including new bits and pieces to interest those already familiar with it. Bravo, DJ Ritu; World Music Network, take note.

129: Peace of Love, by Zarbang Quartet

Zarbang Quartet (Iran/Greece/Afghanistan)
Peace of Love (2011)
8 tracks, 52 minutes
Not only can I not find this album anywhere online to stream or buy, I can barely even find mention of it. As far as I can tell, it was also released with the tracks in a different order as Dance of the Sea, but even then, barely any information anywhere at all. Bizarre. I’ve stuck it on Google Drive for you to download it, though.

Some collaborations just make you think ‘what on Earth made you think to combine these musical elements in this way?’ Usually, projects that beg that question end up falling flat and losing the best bits of every style involved. That’s not the case with the Zarbang Quartet.

Zarbang are actually quite a well-respected Persian percussion group based in Germany, playing with many different line-ups over the years, but in this quartet form, they’re a little different. Zarbang founders, percussionists (and brothers) Behnam and Reza Samani, are the two in the four that represent Iran, and welcome Afghan percussionist Hakim Ludin and Greek player of the Pontic lýra (bowed lute) Matthaios Tsahouridis to their sound.

There’s something really cool about the way the quartet is set up, the massed percussion backing one single melody instrument. The percussion mostly consists of hand drums of various shapes – the tombak goblet drum, the large daf frame drum and the small riqq tambourine, as well as occasional cameos from the cajón box drum and the udu water pot – which are all capable of stunningly complex rhythms and overlapping harmonics, but they never overpower the lýra.

The way Tsahouridis plays the lýra (and sings) traces the influences to and from the Pontic tradition, reflecting the cultural identity of the region of Pontus as a Greek settlement in what is now Turkey. In his hands, the instrument’s position in a long temporal and geographical chain becomes apparent: not only is the lýra’s connection to other Greek instruments clear, it also resembles the Turkish and Persian kemençe/kamancheh and the Arabic rebab, and then onto the kobyz of Central Asia and the sarangi of India, as well as the gusle and the gadulka in the Balkans, in the other direction. It’s amazing how the most subtle playing techniques, a melodic twiddle here or a rhythmic flick of the wrist can imply so much history and geography.

I find it really strange that this album has almost completely disappeared from the internet’s knowledge. It’s a really great listen, and it definitely deserves more notice than the absolute zero that it has at the moment. Why not do the world a favour: give this album a listen, and if you like it, tell someone else about it too!

128: Songs of Paapieye, by S.K. Kakraba

S.K. Kakraba (Ghana)
Songs of Paapieye (2015)
6 tracks, 33 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

SK Kakraba plays the gyil, a xylophone of the Dagaare people. It’s not that big – only about a metre to a metre-and-a-half long, but the sound it makes is immense. The wooden keys are amplified with calabash gourds which are stretched over with spiderwebs, which gives every note a harsh buzz. This buzz serves to amplify the sound, but it also obscures the sound in the exact same way as distortion does, highlighting obscure harmonics and adding a whole load of grittiness to the purely acoustic tones.

When you get someone like SK Kakraba, a master who can hold the most complex polyrhythms in his head while his hands skate across the keys at a million miles an hour, it means that those layers of buzz accumulate into something overwhelming. The whole effect is hypnotising and, although the gyil is used to play all sorts of music, it’s easy to see why its sound is considered sacred in the hands of the most proficient.

At just over half-an-hour long, this isn’t the longest album, but that length is pretty much ideal – enough to really dig that intense sound of the solo gyil and leave you wanting to explore more, but without the risk that the almighty buzz will set up home in your brain forever, rendering everything in psychedelic noise.

127: Jazz Greats: Summertime, by Sidney Bechet

Sidney Bechet (USA)
Jazz Greats: Summertime (1996)
20 tracks, 63 minutes
Spotify playlist

When talking about Sidney Bechet, the album that you’re listening to is really neither here nor there. That’s because most of his best work was recorded in the 1930s and 40s, before albums were really a thing, so to get the most listening pleasure, you’re probably going to have a ‘Best Of’ album, like this one. As it happens, this particular album is from a long-defunct magazine called Jazz Greats, and features two bonus tracks on the end by Jimmie Noone and Duke Ellington, but there are hundreds of compilations out there. So instead of talking about this album specifically, I’m just gonna bang on for a bit about a few of the tracks and Bechet’s style in general.

Today, the most well-known musician of the Dixieland jazz era is Louis Armstrong – for good reason – but for my money, it is the clarinettist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet whose music is the more exciting. A lot of his repertoire was adaptations of songs, and this allowed him to show off the lyrical quality to his playing; he could play the breakneck lines of ragtime music excellently, but he could also play the slower, more emotional songs with such subtlety and nuance as to rival the best singers. His version of ‘Summertime’ is rightly remembered as a highlight of his career, and it’s probably my favourite version of the song that has been covered and adapted by basically everyone.

I know that Dixieland and ragtime jazz – or, as it’s called when they’re played nowadays, trad jazz – have a reputation within the jazz scene as being quite naff and the reserve of mouldy figs with no appetite for the adventurousness that came with later jazz styles, but that’s a bit of a mad position to hold when you listen to, for example, Sidney Bechet’s recording of ‘Weary Blues’. The leading trio of two clarinets and a trumpet (Bechet, Mezz Mezzrow and Tommy Ladnier, respectively) all play in that polyphonic way such as we were talking about the other day. None of the three are really playing the tune – they are all improvising in and around it so that the melody sounds obvious to us, even though it is basically only implied among this group improvisation. That is insane! The level of musicianship is such that they don’t even have to play the tune any more – instead they’re programming your brain so that it will play it instead. Amazing.

There’s also a track on this compilation that is really pioneering, even though you may not be able to tell on first hearing. While all of the other tracks here are Bechet playing with various ensembles of his own or others’ direction, his version of ‘The Sheik of Araby’ is different: it was recorded by the Sidney Bechet One Man Band in 1941. As far as I can tell, this is the first recording of a multitracked ‘one man band,’ with Bechet playing clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophones, piano, bass and drums all by himself by recording them all on separate masters and mixing them down together. The sound quality suffers a little due to the equipment available at the time, but the music is still tip-top. It actually freaked out the American Federation of Musicians enough that they banned their members from using this pioneering technique for years out of a fear that it would put musicians out of business.

So there you are, just a few semi-random musings on Sidney Bechet all from a free covermount CD from a magazine. The moral: take good music wherever you can find it!

Oh, actually, one more quick, half-formed musing: when the Sherman Brothers were writing ‘I Wanna Be Like You’ for The Jungle Book (released in 1967), I wonder if they were taking cues from Sidney Bechet and Muggsy Spanier’s ‘That’s a Plenty’, recorded in 1940. Give it a listen! Okay, I’m done now.