273: Club Meets Dub, Vol. 2, by Various Artists

Various Artists
Club Meets Dub, Vol. 2 (1996)
12 tracks, 72 minutes
YouTube playlist

This is what happens when dub…meets the club. It’s the purest form of what I insist on calling dubtronica. There’s all sorts of club music represented on this compilation, with trance, house and techno at the top of the list, all of it approached with a dubwise frame-of-mind. You can even hear the roots from which styles such as dubstep evolved. Tracks are included from big names such as Zion Train, Dreadzone and Iration Steppas, as well as a bunch of previously unreleased tracks from lesser-known wonders.

Dub usually lends itself well to the ambient side of electronic music, but this is no chill-out session: this is UV sculptures, psychedelic Celtic-/Indian-inspired artwork, laser shows and strobe lighting and going bonkers at 3am music. The tracks are also well-mixed by Quark of Acid Rockers, meaning that if you want a banging club night in your own living room, all you need is some right chunky speakers and Club Meets Dub. Bonus points if you get someone to flick the lights on and off in time with the music. Sorted.

272: Music of Central Asia, Vol. 8: Rainbow, by Kronos Quartet, Alim & Fargana Qasimov and Homayun Sakhi

Kronos Quartet, Alim & Fargana Qasimov and Homayun Sakhi (USA/Afghanistan/Azerbaijan)
Music of Central Asia, Vol. 8: Rainbow (2010)
6 tracks, 66 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Aaaand speaking of the Kronos Quartet (as we were yesterday), here’s a whole album by them! This album is part of the Aga Khan Music Initiative’s wonderful ten-volume Music of Central Asia series. We’ve covered the sixth volume of that series before; that one focussed on Azeri mugham singers Alim & Farghana Qasimov who also feature on this one. Where that album was a set of strictly classical mugham, here, four classical cultures are represented and brought together in different combinations. The Kronos Quartet are the key that links each of the collaborations here, allowing their Western classical string quartet set-up to blend into the other traditions, not to enhance, but to create a new, inter-continental style in a way they have before on such albums as 1992’s Pieces of Africa and 2009’s Floodplain

Rainbow is split into two halves of roughly equal length. The second half sees the Quartet collaborating with the Qasimovs in the mugham and Azeri folk song styles (which they also did on Floodplain), which is of course lovely. But it is the first half of the album that I hold close to my heart.

That first half is dedicated to one 29-minute piece entitled ‘Rangin Kaman’, composed by Homayun Sakhi and arranged by Stephen Prutsman. Sakhi is the world’s leading player of the Afghan rubab, a plucked lute instrument quite similar to the Indian sarod but with a slightly damper, earthier tone. He plays in the Afghan classical style, which is also similar in many ways to Hindustani music, and uses much of the same musical theory, such as ragas and talas as bases for melody and rhythm, respectively, but also bear resemblance in other ways to the Persian and Central Asian classical styles of dastgah and maqam. In this piece, his blending of the Afghan and Western classic styles is sublime, with each part giving the others space to breathe while always gently gravitating in the same direction; when all the instruments move together, it stirs the soul. Sakhi and the Kronos Quartet are joined for this by fellow Afghan Salar Nader on tabla and Uzbek percussion master Abbos Kosimov on doyra (frame drum) and qayraq (clappers), who each bring their own rhythmic traditions to the piece.

I have a beautiful memory of listening to this piece of music. I was with my ever-groovy friend Stephen doing one of those things I love the most – playing music at each other. Sometimes it’s things you both know and love, often it’s tracks that one thinks the other would dig and they usually do. It’s like a mutual DJ session that becomes a voyage of musical discovery. As it goes, we were playing different bits of music from all over the world for the other to pick up on, and chatting about the music, the meanings and life and nothing in general. The overall direction of the conversation and musical choices throughout the evening led me to stick this piece on. ‘This is a long one, so I’ll just play a bit of it so you get the idea.’ And then I did, and the conversation stopped. Not in a bad way, and without tension, but we were both immediately and completely drawn into the music. We sat there enraptured. Of course I’d heard the piece before, enough to know how good it was, but this experience was something else – in that 29-minute moment, it went from a nice piece of music to one of my dearest pieces of all. During the length of the piece, the light of the day faded from a dusky twilight to night time, and by the time Homayun Sakhi, Salar Nader, Abbos Kosimov and the Kronos Quartet drew the piece to its stirring conclusion, we were both sat, utterly dumbfounded, in the dark. The silence afterwards rang heavy while we contemplated what had just happened, like at the end of a long and satisfying book. ‘Wow,’ said Stephen.

That’s probably an overlong story that only really matters to me because I was a joint-protagonist in it and experienced half of it first-hand. It hits home the power and mysteriousness of music: that you can think you know a piece well, but then you listen to it in a different situation and it shows you a completely new side of itself, and changing what you think you thought about a lot of things. This album is just one of an amazing series of records, and just one of the Kronos Quartet’s 46 years of amazing work and collaboration, but for me, it represents 29 perfect minutes of my life.

271: Kayira, Vol. 2, by Awa Kassemady Diabate

Awa Kassemady Diabate (Mali)
Kayira, Vol. 2
4 tracks, 46 minutes
Awesome Tapes from Africa

One of the biggest and most hyped albums on the world music scene in the past few years has been Ladilikan by Trio Da Kali and Kronos Quartet. Globally-minded string quartet the Kronos Quartet we already know, but Trio Da Kali are a relatively new outfit, that were put together specifically for that project. Ethnomusicologist Lucy Durán brought three of Mali’s most exciting jeli (griot) musicians that as well as being well-versed in traditional music, had also worked in other fields – there was Fodé Lassana Diabaté, a balafon player extraordinaire who has adapted the ancient wooden xylophone to reflect the influence of jazz on his music; Mamadou Kouyaté, son of Bassekou Kouyaté and member of Ngoni Ba who plays a modified bass ngoni lute, and is also active in Mali’s hip-hop community; and Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté, daughter of legendary singer Kassé Mady Diabaté and a wonderful singer in her own right, who is very inspired by soul and gospel music. Together, this simple trio of musicians make powerful music that is at once deeply traditional but forward looking, and their collaboration with Kronos Quartet was incredibly successful critically, commercially and artistically – it is a musical relationship that has continued past the album’s life cycle.

It was an honour to meet Trio Da Kali on their first visit to the UK, when they were in London in (I think?) 2012 for initial meetings with the Kronos Quartet. They came and gave an intimate performance and seminar at my university, and it was a joy to hear and see the intricacies of the music and instruments up close. They were lovely people too.

So it was doubly interesting when only a few weeks later I stumbled across Kayira, Vol. 2 from Trio Da Kali’s Hawa (although with a slightly alternate spelling) on Awesome Tapes from Africa, in which she’s in a musical context I’d never heard her before. Born into a long line of griot musicians, Hawa had no choice but to take on the role too (it is a hereditary profession – you cannot become a griot or renounce it, you either are or you aren’t). Her music is therefore inextricably rooted in the jeli tradition, but that doesn’t mean she can’t also be a pop star. This is pop music as made in a culture of ancient, living traditions.

The tape is undated, but I’d guess it’s from about the mid-2000s, but its cheesiness level strikes me as an early 90s sort of sound. There are traditional acoustic instruments such as kora, ngoni and djembe, as well as some typically Malian guitar, but the rest of the accompaniment is bulked out by synthesised sound. The djembe is joined by drum machine, and all of the rest of the programming is even more interesting: a series of bleeps and bloops coalesce to form what is unmistakably a balafon part, a synth saxophone sound provides wailing solos that would be more expected of an electric guitar, and even more abstract synth timbres are used to take the music to other places entirely, sometimes even echoing (to my ears) the sound of the algaita shawms of the West African Sahel. Over all the electronic wizardry is Hawa’s voice, stunning and soaring, singing traditional jeli repertoire, including the famous title track ‘Kayira’, meaning ‘peace.’ I don’t mean to downplay Hawa’s wonderful vocals, only that it is the least surprising thing about the album. She sings amazingly soulful and deeply Malian music and it’s no different here – to have that offset by this crazy, slightly reggaeish synthfest next to acoustic Malian instruments is what gives this album its unique appeal.

This isn’t ‘world music’ – it’s not music that is carefully and subtly polished and moulded to fit the ears of Western listeners as comfortably unfamiliar and pleasantly exotic. You won’t hear it played in your local hippie crafts shop. This is Malian pop music that gives the people what they want to hear, and it’s a real thrill to walk through that bustling foreign market and feed your own ears something unexpected.

270: Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 2, by Art Tatum

Art Tatum (USA)
Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 2 (1992)
15 tracks, 63 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

There’s a great story that Oscar Peterson used to tell. Peterson himself was a child prodigy of both jazz and classical piano. Once, his father thought he was getting a bit too big for his boots, he sat him down and put on a record of Art Tatum playing ‘Tiger Rag’. Understandably, it blew little Oscar away. ‘Who are these musicians?’ he asked; ‘Not musicians, one, one man,’ was the answer. That’s enough to break an ego. The addendum of ‘also he was blind’ was probably unnecessary, but certainly adds to the humbling experience. Peterson couldn’t play for several weeks, and had nightmares – all his preconceptions of what great piano, great jazz and great classical music were exploded. Eventually he came back to the piano with renewed fervour, became a true master and then, about 80 years later, was written about in a blog called 365 Good Albums, surely a pinnacle of a storied career.

What music can scare a piano prodigy into crying themselves to sleep at night? So many jazz musicians could be described as virtuosic in their performance simply because jazz itself often requires virtuosity, with high technicality and a constant pushing of boundaries almost innate within good jazz, but Art Tatum was something else. He did things with a piano that were barely thought possible.

As per little Oscar Peterson’s misunderstanding, the way Tatum plays sounded (and still does sound) as if ten digits and one brain just isn’t enough. For starters, just the way he played the notes is astounding: changing complex chords every beat (or more); incredibly intricate runs played with lightning speed; layering many levels of syncopation and polyrhythm on top of each other like a musical moiré; even the way he could play two parts of entirely distinct rhythmic and melodic shape at once. His original training as a classical pianist is very evident in the way he approached the keyboard and his arrangements. It works the other way, too: he had such a heavyweight jazz mind that his performance of pieces from the classical world are infused with a jazz that’s completely inherent in his playing – you can hear that in his stampeding version of Massenet’s ‘Élégie’ from Les Érinnyes that opens today’s album.

That’s because his virtuosity reached beyond even his extraordinary playing skills. His use of harmony changed the way jazz worked forever. This wasn’t him playing things that people thought were impossible, instead he was playing things that were possible, but shouldn’t sound good. His harmonisations are built in a way that, out of context, would sound strange, clashing and chaotic. Chords were extended so far to include dissonant intervals such as tenths, elevenths and thirteenths (for the musicologically uninitiated, the basic chord goes up to the fifth interval), he changed the shape of the chords so that the notes were spread out in entirely new ways, and he swapped up chords that the brain would expect for ones that were sometimes only vaguely related, allowing the ear to hear colours that would otherwise have been inaccessible. On top of all that, he also enjoyed using bitonality – that is, playing the melody in a different key than the chords. Put it all together and it should have sounded cacophonous, but it didn’t. It certainly sounded dissonant, but those dissonances were beautiful rather than aggressive. Don’t ask me how he did it – chords have always baffled me – but whatever it is, it became the blueprint for generations of jazz musicians since.

The way Art Tatum played could – and probably will – be studied for centuries. How rare for one person to completely change the direction of any discipline, let alone one as multifaceted as jazz, but Art Tatum did it, and those ramifications are still heard today, in jazz, classical music, hip-hop and beyond. And he did it all while being mind-bendingly virtuosic and a showman at the same time. No wonder it broke Oscar Peterson’s brain.

269: Diamonds in the Rough, by John Prine

John Prine (USA)
Diamonds in the Rough (1972)
13 tracks, 39 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

When I was a little boy, I really attached myself to John Prine’s version of ‘Diamonds in the Rough’ in a way I can’t really account for – it was one of my very favourite songs. Over the years, I stopped listening to it, and until a couple of years ago, I’d completely forgotten what it sounded like. Then, all those years later, I was making a present for my nephew – a mixtape-CD of my favourite music when I was his age – and I remembered this one. I listened to it back and…no, no recognition there, but damn, I had good taste as a little boy.

It’s such a simple song. It only has two verses, both sharing the same melody, with a plain little story about finding religion. It’s completely a cappella, just the three voices of Prine, his brother Dave and guitarist Steve Goodman. The harmonies are strong and powerful and only very slightly, humanly, imprecise and their voices, with their mix of registers, blend well. This performance of ‘Diamonds in the Rough’ is at once very blokey – in an old fashioned, stoic sort of way – and yet very full of emotion. It reminds me a bit of this video of Luke Kelly and the Dubliners singing ‘The Old Triangle’, in a way. The closeness of harmonies seems to reflect the closeness of the singers’ relationships, a way that men can show their vulnerability and love for each other in a society where that is usually frowned upon. It’s a style of singing that sounds perfect in a pub too, which is always nice.

The song is even more effective if you’re listening to the whole album. Coming right at the end of a whole load of jangly country music guitars and mandolins, the warmth and roundedness of human voices seems to resonate in the soul. Which is not to cast any sort of shade on the rest of the album either, because it’s really good. It begins on a strong note with a perky, upbeat song about shooting the shit with Jesus, and makes it sound like a jolly old time, but also contains an important and humanist message about being there for people. After the opener, there are a few more upbeat tunes and some introspective ones, but what I love about it is that whatever the mood, it is suffused with a heavy wistfulness, even a saudade if you want to go Portuguese about it. Among the standard love-and-loss lyrics are many observations of humble daily life, and there’s a great sadness in a lot of it, heightened by his inherited Kentucky accent. Listening to John Prine feels in some ways like reading a Great American Novel.

Considering that for a long time, I thought I didn’t like country music – or, more accurately that I’d just dismissed it out-of-hand – it was a sort of mini-revelation when I came to listen to this album for the first time in potentially 20 years. It was only relatively recently that I’d embraced country music and started to understand its place in the musical world, and to play Diamonds in the Rough was to realise that I’d actually ‘got it’ for a long time. There’s a lesson and/or challenge for you: go back and listen to the music that Little You liked. Trust their tastes – you may rediscover something great!

268: Scintillating Sax, by Kadri Gopalnath

Kadri Gopalnath (India)
Scintillating Sax (2003)
7 tracks, 58 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes (both under the re-released title of Saxophone)

You may not know, but in a former life, I was a saxophonist. Not an amazing one, but I was alright, and that was quite a big part of my identity for a while. Because of this, when I listened to music from other cultures, I naturally gravitated towards the sax players. That’s easy enough when listening to Latin music, and even a lot of African music, but when I heard that there was an Indian person who used the saxophone to make Indian classical music, you know I was there in a flash.

Kadri Gopalnath is a musician from the Karnataka, the source of the South Indian classical discipline known as Karnatic music, and that’s what he plays. Although he plays it on the alto saxophone, it doesn’t always sound like one; Karnatic music doesn’t have a tradition of sax players, but it does have a tradition of nagaswaram players – that’s a long double-reeded shawm (similar to an oboe). Gopalnath’s father was a master of the nagaswaram, and it seems Gopalnath carried on that family line, albeit with one reed instead of too. That gives an interesting angle to his playing which results in little idiosyncrasies: for example, he doesn’t use his tongue to start or finish the air flow into his instrument like a Western sax player does, giving each note a slightly less defined feeling and making the long, snaking melodies blend into one.

Not only was this my first time for hearing an Indian saxophonist, I’m pretty sure it was the first time I’d consciously heard Karnatic music too. Twice as new! Although Karnatic and Hindustani (North Indian) classical music have lots of similarities, especially in terms of music theory, they sound very different. Karnatic music is heavily ornamented in a unique way, in which even a simple melody can be transformed into rapid runs of notes dancing around and in between the ‘core’ notes. There’s also the ensemble: the Hindustani set-up is usually a solo singer or instrumentalist, an accompanist on harmonium or sarangi (if the soloist is a singer) playing a repeating motif, tabla and one or two tambura providing drones; in Karnatic music, the solo musician is joined by other musicians who follow the soloist’s melodies and improvisations a split-second after it is played, giving a strange sort of echo effect. On this album, Gopalnath takes the lead of course, and he is shadowed by A. Kanyakumari on violin. It makes it sound even more uncanny, and even less like a saxophone. There’s also a very different rhythm section, here made up of mridangam (a double-ended barrel drum), ghatam (a clay pot) and morsing (a jew’s harp); the size of the percussion section shows the importance of rhythm within Karnatic music too. The tambura is still there, though. Good ol’ tambura.

Through all this, there is an irresistible jazziness to Gopalnath’s playing, although I’m not actually sure if that is a legitimate element to his music or whether I’m only hearing that because I expect to – saxophone and all that. He has worked with jazz musicians in the past and since, but the programme here is a strict selection of classical music. There’s just something about those incredibly fast, intricate runs of notes that dart this way and that that has something incredibly bebop about it. Take a listen and decide for yourself.

Listening to Kadri Gopalnath for the very first time was a confusing experience. This was a saxophonist playing a saxophone like I’d never heard it before, and using it to make Indian classical music in a way that I’d never heard before either. You know I definitely tried to play in that way on my own saxophone and obviously completely failed. There is still something odd about hearing a saxophone in this context, but in Gopalnath’s hands you’d think the instrument had been part of the tradition for centuries.

267: Night Song, by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook (Pakistan/Canada)
Night Song (1996)
8 tracks, 48 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

When I was making up my list of Good Albums at the end of last year, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook’s Night Song basically gained an automatic entry due to its position on my ’10 days, 10 all-time favourite albums’ list that inspired this bigger project. Since then, it has been granted a fancy vinyl and downloads reissue from Real World Records, which I reviewed in the current issue of Songlines magazine. That actually throws up a bit of a quandary…I’ve just written about this album, what else is there to say?

In the review, I talked about how Brook’s production of chill-out, prog, electronica and dub works in sympathy with Khan’s heavenly qawwali vocals in a subtler, less bombastic way than the pair’s previous outing, the more successful but more controversial Mustt Mustt from 1990. I also talked about how the stand-out tracks are so effective because, even with all the additional elements and styles at play, it still retains a rolling structure in the same way as a traditional qawwali piece, which Khan’s vocals take to with a natural ease.

In magazine writing, though, and especially in reviews, restricted word counts mean that only broad strokes can really make it in, and the subtleties are often missed out. There are so many details that make Night Song impressive and important that get lost in a 200-word limit.

I didn’t get to talk about how the first track on the album ‘My Heart, My Life’ starts with the kora of Kauwding Cissokho. Just imagine: by 1996, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was world-famous for his traditional South Asian qawwali and his forward-thinking collaborations in dance music and electronica; you buy his new CD, stick it in the machine and what you’re greeted with is not the harmonium and tabla of qawwali or synths and drum sequences of electronica, but the rippling strings of the Senegalese harp. For the first minute of the album, it’s just kora and Khan’s vocals, an entirely unexpected combination that is nevertheless so delicate and peaceful. I myself could listen to a whole album of just that, but alas that never happened. As it is, this introduction helps to recalibrate the ears coming into this. You know not to expect what you had in mind, but you also know that whatever is coming up is going to be beautiful, in whatever shape it becomes.

I didn’t get to talk about how the fiasco around Mustt Mustt stemmed from Brook’s remixing of Khan’s vocals. While aesthetically reasonable from a Western standpoint – it is a classic album, after all – this technique paid little heed to the meaning of the poetry being recited, leading at points to important phrases being chopped-up half-way through, or even in the middle of words, rendering them meaningless. Even more seriously, it occasionally played with deeply religious utterances in a way that was perceived by some as corrupting and undermining the spiritual message and word of God. While Khan himself had agreed to the releasing of the album in its finished state, members of the Muslim community were understandably less than pleased. When it came to working together again on Night Song, the remixing was undertaken in a much more considered way, with Khan having a more hands-on input in the production of the album, as well as respected Muslim authorities brought in to consult on the manner in which the poetry was used. Although this is not something that can necessarily be heard by those who do not speak Farsi, Urdu or Punjabi, I think this was a very important step in world fusion: of musicians working together in equal collaboration, of differing cultural sensibilities being acknowledged and accommodated as a valuable part of the music-making process, and of artists making mistakes, owning them, learning from them and putting that learning into practice. It’s a wonderful thing to see, and the album came out even stronger for that.

I didn’t get to talk about how I connect to this album on a personal, emotional and nostalgic level. I remember sitting on the stairs of my first home, listening to this music and asking what it was. I remember lying by the patio windows in the warm sun and flicking through my dad’s record collection and putting this on, and the excitement I felt in that second or two between putting in the disc and the sound emanating from the speakers in anticipation of what I was about to hear, what I knew was my favourite album. I remember listening to it from a portable CD player in a den I built in the back garden out of posts and blankets, reading a book. I remember listening to tracks from the album on my very first mp3 player (it could only hold about 40 songs) at night while on a holiday with Scouts. Are these memories real? I don’t know. I’m not even sure the timescale lines up correctly with that first one. But listening to the album brings all those memories flooding back. Even if they’re not real, their existence in my brain is inseparable from the act of hearing the music of Night Song, just like listening to any piece of music is attached to innumerable memories and emotions that are different for every single person, meaning that everyone necessarily connects to music in their own individual way.

I didn’t get to talk about these things, and I didn’t get to talk about a million other points that make this album interesting or dated or Good or not as good as it could have been or important or influential or poignant or anything else that makes music such a vital art form in the lives and emotions of so many people. Every single album, even every piece of music, could be the subject of a detailed book about its background, its history, the making-of, the musicology of it, the production, the aftermath, the cultural significance (or insignificance), how it effects people’s lives and minds and relationships, the ramifications on the artists and other music going on into the future, and and and. Music is so deep that words themselves can never realistically hope to grasp its true nature. 200 words can never be enough…but then neither is 1000.

266: How to Speak Hip, by Del Close & John Brent

Del Close & John Brent (USA)
How to Speak Hip (1959/1961??*)
13 tracks, 36 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Learning different languages is essentially essential in our globalised world; not only does it allow you to communicate with a wider number of people, but it also allows you to view life and the world from a different perspective – by expanding your vocabulary into different languages, it opens up entirely new emotional resonances.

To that end, today’s album is an instructional record. How to Speak Hip offers valuable guidance ‘for English-speaking people who want to talk to – and be understood by – jazz musicians, hipsters, beatniks, juvenile delinquents and the criminal fringe.’ It is filled with language instruction and vocabulary building, as well as deeper dives into the wider culture, and we’re helped down this path by esteemed linguist Del Close and ‘actual hipster’ Geets Romo. Along the way, we discover the key differences between ‘cool’ and ‘uncool,’ learn how to properly identify the differences between ‘put ons,’ ‘put downs,’ ‘come ons,’ ‘come downs,’ and ‘bring downs,’ and really get to the bottom of the nuances inherent in the concept of ‘dig.’ We also learn about the hipster lifestyle on a series of field trips and exclusive access to a real hipster gathering to observe the spinning of a live riff or three. At the end of the journey, you should have all the starting tools to ‘convince a real hipster that hip is your language.’

Yes, this is a comedy record. It is devilishly funny and that it still holds up so well 60 years* after its first release is an amazing feat. Where a lot of the contemporary lampoons of hip culture really do seem naff and dated today, I think the reason that How to Speak Hip still works is that it is a lampoon made with love. Both Close and Brent were members of that same bohemian fringe, meaning that this album is comedy about hipsters, by hipsters and for hipsters – the joke is as much on straight society as it is the hip. In that way, it does actually offer a window into the hip scene in a ‘satire is a mirror’/‘many a true word is spoken in jest’ sort of way.

I consider How to Speak Hip to be one of the coolest records I own. Not only is it hilarious and eminently quotable (samples from this album show up in many unexpected musical surroundings, and I’ve slipped in Geets Romo quotes in lots of my professional writings too), it also has the feeling of being a real cultural artefact direct from one of the coolest subcultures of them all, just as much as a Charlie Parker record or a Beat novel.

Del Close and John Brent are laying down these riffs, and if you’re into jazz, hipsters or anything cool, you better pick up on it – let these cats hang you up. And above all: dig it.


* Time for me to get a bit nerdy about dates. This is a mystery I have yet to solve and I wonder whether it ever could be, if it’s even possible. Almost all sources – even bona fide academic texts – list the album as being released in 1959. 1959 was so important for jazz and it would stamp this album as being one of the many scene-defining works of that year. However, near the end of the album is a really short clip – just four seconds – of the solo from ‘We Free Kings’ by Roland Kirk…which was recorded in 1961. Therefore, in this particular state, How to Speak Hip couldn’t have been released in 1959. A few places, such as discogs or the British Library list the record as being from ‘1961?’ but those revisions only happened after I sent emails/comments to the same effect. So who knows when this is from? Not I. It doesn’t really matter. But it’s definitely a puzzle!

265: Volume 1: Sound Magic, by Afro Celt Sound System

Afro Celt Sound System (United Kingdom/Ireland/Senegal)
Volume 1: Sound Magic (1996)
9 tracks, 66 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

This is the second time we’ve encountered the Afro Celt Sound System on this blog, and this time we’re actually talking about a real album. In total, ACSS went on to release a total of five studio albums in their original incarnation and a further two (so far) in their current set-up with a different core membership. But of all those albums, it is still this one, their very first, that grabs me the most and grabs me hardest.

The excitement of the record is palpable in its music. World music fusions had been created before this point, but 1996 was still a time when it felt like everything was possible and full of potential – as opposed to now, where it does feel a little bit as if almost every conceivable crossover has already been attempted. When Sound Magic first arrived, nothing like this had been heard before. The combination of Irish and Scottish music with West African music was already exhilarating – firstly in even daring to bring two such apparently distant traditions together as one, and then, on listening, the amazement that the styles worked together so well – but to also set that meeting in the sonic surrounds of club, rave and dub music just adds a hundred possible more mouth-watering directions for completely new experimentation.

When I play this album today, all those possibilities and the surprises they conjure up still send me reeling. Senegalese kora dueting with Irish sean nós singing; tama and bodhrán drums trading rhythms while weaving between programmed beats; very-90s-sounding synths taking their rightful place alongside uilleann pipes and low whistles in the Irish heterophony; snatches of sounds from other traditions here and there in the Armenian duduk, Kenyan nyatiti and Siberian throat singing. Even now, after nearly 25 more years of musical innovations since, it still sounds a little hard to believe, but each combination manifests beautiful flowers.

There’s barely a wrong musical turn on the whole album, which is even more incredible when it’s taken into account that these musicians often couldn’t speak the same language. They were making up the rules on the fly and communicating through their instruments. It doesn’t become a confusing amalgam either, where everything is thrown together with a dance beat and a hope that people will be too busy moving to pay too much attention, as some fusions tend to sound like. No, there’s an obvious amount of deep and careful thought behind every piece of music, every texture change and every new instrument introduced. The club bangers work brilliantly – ‘Whirl-y-Reel 1’ is still an enduring favourite in my bounce-your-head-off moments – but the long, thoughtful and calm pieces such as the final medley ‘Eistigh Liomsa Sealad/Saor Reprise’ are just as delightful and perfectly complementary.

One of the reasons the Afro Celt Sound System were so exciting was precisely because the Afro Celt Sound System had never existed before, not only in our realm, but even in most of our wildest imaginations. That some imaginations could fathom such an ensemble, such an unexpected sound, is something that the rest of us must be thankful for. ACSS changed the face of world music and their impact on how musicians and audiences approach cross-cultural fusions cannot be overstated. And it all started, appropriately, with Volume 1…Sound Magic indeed.

264: Released, by Nina Simone

Nina Simone (USA)
Released (1996)
21 tracks, 70 minutes
Spotify playlist

It’s hard to really call this compilation a ‘greatest hits’ disc, if even just for the fact that it doesn’t contain some of her greatest hits. Its lack of ‘Feeling Good’, ‘Sinnerman’, ‘Mississippi Goddam’, ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’, and the original studio versions of ‘I Ain’t Got No (I Got Life)’ and ‘I Loves You Porgy’ basically disqualify it from such a label. Which just goes to show the profundity of Nina Simone’s performing and composing genius that this collection of not-even-greatest hits is so deeply soul-touching on many different levels.

Released is quite a focussed compilation, with 16 out of the 21 tracks being taken from three album between 1967 and 1968, Nina Simone Sings the Blues, Silk & Soul and ’Nuff Said!, and it works as proof to just how fruitful that period of Simone’s career was. As well as passing through a number of different styles in these tracks – primarily blues, soul and showtunes with elements of gospel, jazz and folk too – they also show the width of her emotional range. Just in the space of these 21 tracks in this collection, Simone comes across as feisty, funny, deadly angry, bitter, soft, seductive, bereft, joyful, pensive and heavily political. She takes you across the spectrum of human emotion and every one of them is delivered in an entirely sincere manner.

For me, there’s none that captures this more than the song ‘Why (The King of Love is Dead)’. It’s a lament for Martin Luther King, powerful, despairing and agonised yet celebratory of this great man. This recording was made live, during a performance at Westbury Music Fair on 7th April 1968 – just three days after Dr King was assassinated. The song was written by bassist Gene Taylor and then taught to the band in just one day, and it’s one of the rawest, saddest songs I know. Truly heart-wrenching. It’s such a simple piece too, a slow, gospel blues with all the instruments just quietly doing their thing, no flashiness, but it is so intense. Whenever I hear it, I have to stop – this is not background music – and it makes me teary every single time without fail. I can only imagine how it must have felt to be there on the day. I am sure that the audience must have been in floods. Although Simone would play it at future shows, the group never gave it a studio recording, because it simply didn’t need one. This performance was its perfect rendition, and must surely be close to a perfect song.

⁂

Can we also just take a small moment to acknowledge what a mean piano player Nina Simone was?! People focus on her voice, and rightfully so, but what she created with her fingers contained as much mastery as her vocal cords. She was classically-trained but was just as comfortable playing dirty, barrelhouse blues or righteous gospel too, and each in such an effortless manner to make it seem completely natural, as if the music was radiating from her, and manifesting in the vibration of the piano strings. The one that stood out particularly in this listen through was ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’, her rendition of Blind Willie Johnson’s holy blues. It’s just Simone on voice and piano, and those keys are so forthright. This is the blues, and she ain’t here to mess around. Her fingers introduce the subtlest little ornaments to the piano’s accompaniment and her classical background seems to inform the shape it takes, but at the same time it is 100% blues. Listening to this particular recording, I am sure it must have been a huge influence on Diamanda Galás; her playing has exactly the same darkly beautiful but no-nonsense feel.

Even though Released is a compilation album, I listen to it like I read a favourite book: maybe I’ll dip in occasionally, picking out the best bits and feeling their various feels, but listening to it all the way through provides its own joy, and I find something else to fall in love with on every go around. What an amazing musician Nina Simone was. And this isn’t even her greatest hits…

263: Unhalfbricking, by Fairport Convention

Fairport Convention (United Kingdom)
Unhalfbricking (1969)
8 tracks, 38 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Fairport Convention are the monarchs of English folk rock. Having started out in 1967 and going strong today (after a five year blip in the middle), and having gone through an orchestra’s worth of band members in the process, they didn’t just change the face of the scene, they became it.

Nowadays, Fairport are basically known as a continuation of the English folk tradition, with their repertoire either composed of ‘Trad. Arr.’ songs or pieces written in those styles, but they actually came together inspired by the US folk revival, figured-headed by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel and the like. It was around the period of this album that their tone started to shift, so the flavours at play give Unhalfbricking an interesting range of styles.

There is definitely a UK lean to a lot of the music – with ‘Genesis Hall’ and the traditional ‘A Sailor’s Life’ very much rooted there – but the American influence is still very much there, not least in the form of three Dylan covers. What made them so exciting, though, was how they reinterpreted the music of these scenes. These are obviously folkies through-and-through, but the other styles they work within are what makes their sounds stand out even today: it’s the opener ‘Genesis Hall’ with its slight-but-just-enough psychedelic twinge, which is followed up by ‘Si Tu Dois Partir’, the group’s own translation of Dylan’s ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’ rendered in a unique sort of morris/zydeco hybrid; later on, it’s the Louisiana blues of ‘Cajun Woman’ followed by the soft-rock of ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’. What I especially like is that they can flip it around the other way, too: Dylan’s ‘Percy’s Song’ is a ballad that in Fairport’s hands sounds as English as a pork pie and ale – save for one or two geographical references in the lyrics.

Although still very early in their career, it is Unhalfbricking (together with its follow-up Liege and Lief) that has pretty much ‘the classic’ line-up, including Sandy Denny on vocals, Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol on guitars and Dave Swarbrick on fiddle and mandolin (although Swarbrick technically wasn’t a member of the band yet, he plays on four of the eight tracks as a guest). You can hear why it’s the classic as well – they all bring something else to the table a little different from the rest, whether it’s a musical approach or a particular way of playing or songwriting.

And the most impressive of all for me is that this was their second album of 1969…and they went on to release Liege and Lief in the same year too. Not only did they manage to release three albums in one year – which is insane on its own – but to do it with a catastrophe in the middle (in which the band were involved in a road accident that killed drummer Martin Lamble and another passenger) and still produce three albums of which two are still seen as genre-defining fifty years later is just unthinkable. With all the amazing things happening in folk music both sides of the Atlantic at that time, Unhalfbricking holds up as probably the most successful album to blend UK and US traditions so thoroughly.

262: Never Trust a Hippy, by Adrian Sherwood

Adrian Sherwood (United Kingdom)
Never Trust a Hippy (2003)
11 tracks, 58 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Adrian Sherwood was already one of the biggest names in modern dub by the time he released this album, and that’s even more impressive when you account for this being his debut.

Okay, that’s splitting hairs a little bit. Sherwood is most well known as the founder and producer of On-U Sound, the legendary UK dub label with a stable including African Head Charge, Dub Syndicate, Tackhead, Gary Clail and New Age Steppers as well as many Jamaican legends such as Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Prince Far I. As the producer of most – if not all – of the On-U catalogue, Sherwood curated the label’s whole sound and developed his own musical brand while he was at it.

On Never Trust a Hippy (oddly released on Real World Records rather than On-U Sound), you can hear Sherwood revelling in the even-freer-than-normal reign. Everything here is the juiciest dub, but he’s not content to stick to King Tubby, Lee Perry-style productions. Sherwood brings in so much more than just roots reggae with a heavy bass and some delay – the sounds here are so diverse, with techno trance, acid jazz, Asian underground and new age among many, many other styles that are explored, in depth or in passing, over this hour-long whirlwind. That doesn’t even count the many diverse samples that he uses throughout too, that are so chopped and changed as to become entirely new elements, which then evolve further in Sherwood’s ever-shifting musical contexts.

A boon of releasing on Real World is that their own back catalogue became fair game for Sherwood’s treatments, and he took good advantage of that privilege to include two remixes among his original compositions on the album: ‘Dead Man Smoking’, from S.E. Rogie’s beautiful palmwine ‘Dieman Noba Smoke Tafee’, and ‘Paradise of Nada’, from Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali as already filtered through the dubwise lens of Temple of Sound. Both of these remixes shed a light on Sherwood’s approach to his work. Both sound radically different from the originals, with completely different structures, atmospheres and even styles, but the musical meaning at the core of both pieces are pristinely intact.

Listening in this way helps to understand the way he moulds his own compositions too. The individual pieces may vary wildly in their styles and approaches to sound, but Sherwood makes sure that they all have the same consistent meaning running throughout, yes building, yes changing, but always with the same deep respect for ears and minds and always, forever, the deepest dub.

When you have already pioneered and pushed boundaries for decades before you release your first solo album, there’s no way that that album is going to be anything close to ordinary. With Never Trust a Hippy, Adrian Sherwood explored a whole deep jungle of music with his signature daring and inventiveness and emerged with something extraordinary.

261: Offal, by Jay Foreman

Jay Foreman (United Kingdom)
Offal (2012)
22 tracks, 46 minutes

Okay, bit of a strange entry today. There isn’t anywhere to stream this album or download the tracks online, and, although you can purchase real 3D copies of Jay Foreman’s other albums from his website, Offal ain’t on there. Sold out, I presume. That stumped me a bit.

So what I’m going to do instead is recommend you somehow try to find a copy of Offal to listen to in the standard linear fashion, but for now, we’ll have a round of Jim’s four favourite songs by Jay Foreman that all happen to be on YouTube, in no particular order. I guess a slight intro is needed though.

If you’ve delved into the crazy world of YouTube, you’ve probably come across Jay Foreman. As well as funny songs (yes, we’ll get there in a minute, chill yer beans) he also makes very silly and very informative videos about transport infrastructure, maps, UK politics and other potentially dry subjects made unboring by his brilliant presenting style.

But we’re supposedly here for the music, and that’s how Foreman started to get attention in the first place, through impressive musical feats such as his ‘Every Tube Station Song’ (self-explanatory) and his uncanny talent of being able to sing any Beatles song, one syllable out-of-sync. His songs are steeped with the same silliness as the rest of his work but are composed in a really intelligent way, with influences from vaudeville jazz and blues and folk from both sides of the Atlantic. I also personally hear a lot of Terry Scott Taylor in The Neverhood-mode in his work, and I don’t think that’s any coincidence – songs from that game’s soundtrack seem to crop up in his videos very often. So now that you know a little bit what you’re expecting and without further ado, here’s…

Jim’s Four Favourite Songs By Jay Foreman That All Happen To Be On YouTube, In No Particular Order

‘Skin Sofa’

First of all: comedy song in the second-best time signature (five-time!) = always going to be a winner. Second of all: this song is so mad and disturbing and horrible and absurd, I love it. It is so completely surreal in a way that feels unsettling and sickening, a real, visceral body-horror of a song, and Foreman manages to capture all that in a completely U- or possibly PG-rated way. All while using a really quite beautiful melody that I cannot help but sing any three syllable word or phrase to (‘marmalade, marmalade, mmm-mmm-mm-mm, mmm-mmm-mm-mm’), and grossing myself out in the process. Sterling work.

‘Grandma’s Food’

Great bit of observational comedy. If even I – who’s never had any grandmas – can relate to it (for me, it was aunties who had the ever-so-slightly strange food), then I’m sure most people can. Again, a silly song with witty rhymes made all the more brilliant by its music, which has a lightly Latin tinge and more than a hint of Leon Redbone, including a very serviceable throat-tromnet solo.

‘The Sooty Show’

Sooty! A tragic and apparently true tale of a little kid meeting their favourite bear. It’s another child-friendly body horror song with a catchy and somehow oddly touching melody-and-guitarwork paring. Bonus points for the very awkward semi-circular standing audience in the back.

‘Make Sure He’s OK’

And all of a sudden BAM now you’re crying because this song is absolutely heartbreaking. This one isn’t funny, it just hurts. And it hurts in its realness, highlighting the cruelty of dementia in its mercilessness and inevitability. Approaching it as he does in first-person, looking on into the future where the friendly and familiar ‘me’ becomes the distant ‘someone,’ a stranger. It’s really upsetting, and doubly so when it comes at the end of an album of light-hearted silly songs. An incredible piece of music, songwriting and album sequencing.


…and that ends Jim’s Four Favourite Songs By Jay Foreman That All Happen To Be On YouTube, In No Particular Order for today. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried and, most importantly, we’ve learnt. Your takeaway should be: Jay Foreman is very good at many things, not least at music. Watch his YouTube videos and buy his albums. Maybe you can’t buy Offal, but that doesn’t stop it from being a Good Album. And haven’t you got enough to be going on with anyway?

260: Finger Poppin' with the Horace Silver Quintet, by the Horace Silver Quintet

Horace Silver Quintet (USA)
Finger Poppin' with the Horace Silver Quintet (1959)
8 tracks, 43 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I think Horace Silver is probably one of the most famous jazz musicians that could still claim to be underrated. While most music fans would probably recognise John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk as important figures in music (even if they may not be overly familiar with their output), Silver’s name never really seems to come up in that sort of context. In that way, he’s sort of a jazz fan’s musician – incredibly popular and influential but with an acclaim that never really exceeded the jazz sphere.

Finger Poppin' with the Horace Silver Quintet – yet another classic jazz album from 1959 – is a wonderful distillation of everything that made Silver great. As a pianist, he is in top form here, but really, it’s the whole ensemble that are on fire, and Silver’s compositions and leadership is at the heart of that; there’s a reason why this line-up (Blue Mitchell on trumpet, Junior Cook on tenor sax, Gene Taylor on bass and Louis Hayes on drums) became the nucleus of his most fruitful period.

In many ways, this album sounds quite simple compared to the mad mathematic experiments so excitingly pioneered at this time by Coltrane and Coleman, and without the fragile subtlety of Miles’ cool period that was in full swing. Instead, Silver came out with a jumping collection of hard bop, with a couple of blueses and sultry ballads thrown in for good measure. It’s not that he wasn’t making his own experiments with this album – elements of Brazilian and Cuban rhythm and harmony sneak their way into his playing and the whole feel of the ensemble in a way that would go on to become his distinctive sound, together with the music of his father’s native Cabo Verde – but that wild experimentation wasn’t necessarily the goal of this one.

For me, Finger Poppin’ is a terrific example of the joyousness that could be imbued into hard bop. It is played with serious minds and serious chops, but the music itself is less serious – you can feel the enjoyment in the studio leaking out of the speakers and into your ears. This album isn’t one that requires you to recalibrate your internal gyroscopes to understand a whole new jazz dimension, it’s just great music played really well and with a lot of fun.

If you're well into your music but are less of a jazz nut, dig this album. You'll be able to impress the jazz cats with your knowledge and you never know, maybe you'll discover your new favourite pianist.

259: H, by Grégory Dargent

Grégory Dargent (France)
H (2018)
7 tracks, 40 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

H is a multimedia art project from L’Hijâz’Car bandleader and oud player Grégory Dargent, of which this album is only half. Together with a 112-page book of artful, haunting photographs taken by Dargent himself, this music is a meditation on the nuclear bomb tests conducted in the Algerian Sahara in the 1960s and their impacts on the land, nature and the local nomadic peoples. Dargent created the project after learning about the tests in 2013 and visiting the sites and speaking to the people in Reggane and Tamanrasset in 2017.

The album is created by a trio of Dargent on oud and electronics, Anil Eraslan on cello and electronics and Wassim Halal on Arabic drums and percussion. As with the subject matter, the music of H is harrowing. Its concept was to sound irradiated, and this is achieved with unsettling accuracy. Between the trio’s acoustic instruments they create a style based in equal parts on Arabic and European classical music and Maghrebi folk music, but the introduction of electronics changes and corrupts those traditions with acrid and abrasive noise, turning it at points nearly into non-music.

Despite, and in a way, because of, its disturbing and distressing element, this album becomes strangely beautiful. The ethereal art music struggles against the ugliness of the electronics as the natural struggles against the artificial, a fragile rose blooming from cracked concrete. This music is despair and hope, pain and healing, loss and regrowth. H is a powerful listen and its sonic journey is not one to take lightly, but it is an important one to take nonetheless. Through image and sound, Dargent has created an incredibly impactful work of art.


Image © Grégory Dargent

258: Brand New Second Hand, by Roots Manuva

Roots Manuva (United Kingdom)
Brand New Second Hand (1999)
17 tracks, 65 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

You know that as much as I enjoy hip-hop, it’s not exactly a sphere that I’m most well-practiced at writing within. I know well what I enjoy and can analyse why certain aspects may appeal to me more than others, but I am very aware that there are many cultural nuances and inter-references that I’m missing just by virtue of not being as immersed in that scene as I am in some others. And it happens that most of my favourite hip-hop artists are from the US… so when it comes to UK hip-hop, I’m ashamedly even more in the dark. I am certain that there are many, many artists, sub-genres, distinct regional scenes, narratives and other complicating factors that I am just not aware of at all and that necessarily would hamper my ability to comment intelligently on any portion of the UK hip-hop scene. But Roots Manuva is an artist that I really dig, and Brand New Second Hand, while not being my first exposure to him (that was on this great track by Ty), was the first time I really got to dive into his work and appreciate it as a body of art. So when I did my research for this entry and found out that this album is considered a classic and high-water mark for UK hip-hop, I can’t help but feel a little relieved that at least my instincts were right, even if I may not know the most about it.

What I love the most about this album is established immediately from the beginning of the first track and keeps it up for the whole thing: it’s the combination of the instrumental production, the flow of Roots Manuva’s raps and the unique timbre of his voice; in short, then, it’s the sound of it all.

The production obviously plays a big part in this. Even though there are seven producers across the whole album, it all sounds incredibly coherent, as each of the tracks share the same darkly atmospheric vibe. A lot of the music is very minimalist; it’s not out-of-place for tracks to simply comprise of a lo-fi drum loop, a slow sample and Roots Manuva doing his thing over the top. Even when the texture is fuller, such as in the track ‘Soul Decay’, the samples used and the simplicity of the beat highlight the starkness of it all. This works particularly effectively on the ‘Shifting Sands’, where the sample comes from Miles Davis’ masterpiece of unsettling atmosphere Bitches Brew, and on the closer ‘Motion 5000’, where live violin and cello add a sadness and longing to the already complex emotionscape.

The instrumental atmospheres are ideal groundings for Roots Manuva’s wordsmithery. His voice is gentle and low-pitched and his delivery is calm. His rhythms aren’t the most complicated and performed at an easy pace that makes it clear that it is the words and meanings that are of importance above flashy shows of intense technicality. His flow is reminiscent of both old-school New York rap and Jamaican ragga, amalgamating the two but being absolutely uncompromising in the use of his own voice; Roots Manuva is a South Londoner of Jamaican heritage, and that accent informs his rhythms, inflections and melodic cadences in a way that stamps his identity indelibly on the music. His delivery is also at times strongly suggestive of spoken word poetry, and his lyrics reflect that. Not for him are the trivial concerns of bling, rep and glorified violence; he instead focuses on deeper subjects of reflective autobiography, religion and solemn advice for sharpening consciousness and embracing a fulfilling life, as well as addressing political factors that make the UK much less conducive of such a lifestyle, particularly for black men and boys.

So those are my little thoughts on Brand New Second Hand by Roots Manuva. I hope I have not mangled its meanings, importances or profundities too much by my ignorance of the UK hip-hop scene from which it grew and went on in turn to deeply impact. If you, dear reader, have any recommendations for UK hip-hop branching off from this starting point, please do share them here. There is a whole world of music of which we can only just scratch the surface, but we can certainly guide each other to the richest seems to mine together.

257: Punt – Made in Ethiopia, by Invisible System

Invisible System (United Kingdom/Ethiopia)
Punt – Made in Ethiopia (2009)
12 tracks, 64 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Albums with lots of guests are usually a mixed bag – of qualities as well as styles. Just like with supergroups, it seems pretty accurate that the number of big names involved in the album-making process has a direct correlation with the likelihood that it comes out limp at the end of it. So when the back of the CD case for this album lists guest slots from no fewer than 19 musicians, you’d probably be forgiven for your misgivings. On the other hand, there’s me seeing the names Mahmoud Ahmed, Justin Adams, Juldeh Camara, Samuel Yirga, Count Dubulah, Mimi Zenebe, Neil Perch and Martin Craddick and just getting too exciting to hear all of their musical brains working together. What can I say, it’s a drug.

Luckily, with Invisible System guiding the ship, it all works to make an enjoyable trip (well, for the most part). Invisible System is the musicking moniker of Dan Harper, who works within electronica, dub and trance to create intelligent but dance-heavy fusions with African music. As an environmental worker, Harper lived for spells in both Ethiopia and Mali, two intensely musical cultures, and dove into the music scenes of both places, learning ways, making contacts and recording as much as possible. The Invisible System discography shows close work with musicians of both cultures, but for this first official release, it is Ethiopian music that takes the fore.

And, yes, it works. Maybe the track-by-track quality does fluctuate a little bit because of the supergroupification, but on the whole, the contributions of the Ethiopian musicians gel really well with Harper’s dubtronica, and it’s especially exciting when it bends towards the proggier side of things too. Because when this album hits its stride, it really hits. The third track, ‘Melkam Kehonelish’, is a stand-out for me. It brings together the old and new guards of Ethiopian jazz (legendary singer Mahmoud Ahmed and pianist Samuel Yirga, respectively), sticks Justin Adams providing trippy, atmospheric guitar in the background with Harper’s electronics providing a brooding dub – and bonus points for a wailing sax solo, the identity of whose performer evades me.

Harper himself is very vocal in reminding people that it was as part of the Invisible System project that Count Dubulah first connected with Ethiopian musicians, the meeting that eventually led to the creation of Dub Colossus. That Ethio-dub outfit ended up far eclipsing Invisible System in terms of popularity and success, and Harper’s perceived lack of recognition on the part of Dubulah remains an obvious sore point that seems to make its way to any mention of Invisible System’s output (although I’m sure Harper wouldn’t be happy with me putting it that way). I’ll be honest that it puts me off a little bit – for this project to be tainted with a palpable bitterness on the part of its main creator is a disservice. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t take anything away from the album’s most important aspect – its music. To turn the improvised jams of 20-odd musicians into an album that is not just coherent but tightly structured while still allowing a free-flow of creative ideas is an impressive feat that should not be overlooked.

256: Kwacha Malawi, by Body, Mind and Soul

Body, Mind and Soul (Malawi)
Kwacha Malawi (2009)
11 tracks, 43 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Body, Mind and Soul are not a group that have ever really ‘broken’ onto the international scene. I’ve worked in various roles within the world music industry for the past seven years and have been a punter on the scene for much longer, and I still find it hard to predict which artists are really going to capture the imagination and become superstars in the field and which, for whatever reason, never quite reach that level. Sometimes a group will come along obviously destined for greatness from the word go, and skyrocket to success in a very short amount of time as if it were fate (most recently, Songhoy Blues would fit this description); other times it feels like the other way around, where an artist’s huge and enduring success feels wildly out-of-proportion with their actual musical output (I’m not naming any names on that one!). Body, Mind and Soul are in a third – and probably the most frustrating – category. In this category, artists seem to have the right combination of factors, excelling equally in their music, style, story and charisma, but never seem to attract anything more than passing attention. It’s infuriating, and I think more than a couple of artists featured on this blog probably fit into that category too.

The first (and only) time I saw Body, Mind and Soul live was at the Africa Oyé festival in 2008. They actually played on both days of the weekend, and during their first set on the Saturday, I wasn’t paying a huge amount of attention. I think I went to get food, looked around some of the stalls, that sort of thing, but all within ear-shot of their set. After they had finished, and then all through the day, and through the night until the next day too, their songs stayed with me, repeating over and over in my head. For a group’s music to worm their way so thoroughly into your brain after only hearing each song once, from a distance and without paying particular attention is really impressive. You can bet I paid more attention the next day, and bought their record too.

It’s great, of course. Full to the brim with funk, with powerful reggae and gospel vibes when appropriate, and all based around the rhythms of the band’s native Mzuzu region in northern Malawi. Over all that is frontman Davie ‘Street Rat’ Luhanga’s singing, which is alternately soulful and staccato in his half-sung half-rapped style and brings in bits of scatting that work as a great balance to the funk. The sound is slightly rough around the edges as may be expected from their first real recording, but in a way that can be charming and can throw up interesting new ways of doing things – even to the tiny and endearing detail of starting the album’s title-track opener with a polite ‘hello.’ I love that.

I’m really interested in your thoughts about this. How do you tell whether a band is going to make it big? Are there any artists that you think tick all the boxes to become stars but mysteriously haven’t? And what do you think of today’s album by Body, Mind and Soul? Do they have the ‘it’ to hit the international world music scene with any force, or am I off the mark on this one? Let me know, but either way, enjoy the album!

255: The Contemporary Fortepiano, by the Rembrandt Frerichs Trio

Rembrandt Frerichs Trio (The Netherlands)
The Contemporary Fortepiano (2018)
15 tracks, 70 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

One musical cross-section that intrigues me in particular is the continuum of styles between Western classical music and jazz. It’s a meeting of two highly complex musical forms, each with their own, often rather antithetical, ways of performance, composition and ceremony, but which can permeate each other’s worlds with beautiful results. We’ve examined it a little bit before with the Modern Jazz Quartet and Miles Davis and Gil Evans as they voyaged the Third Stream in the 1950s and 60s, but today’s album shows how musicians are still exploring the jazz-classical continuum with exciting results in the 21st century.

To see them from a distance, the Rembrandt Frerichs Trio may look like your standard jazz trio – keys, bass, drums. But get a little closer, and really listen to those timbres, and the standard becomes unique: the instruments they play are all from the baroque era of European music. Bandleader Frerichs plays the fortepiano, an almost-forgotten cousin of the modern piano with a slightly more muted tone but with the ability to have a sharper attack somewhat like a harpsichord; Tony Overwater plays the violone, the forerunner of the double bass with six strings and frets; Vinsent Planjer plays a self-designed drum set called a ‘whisper kit,’ using historical drums and percussion whose sound is somewhat softer and more spacious than a standard drum kit. With these unusual sonic textures at their disposal, the trio can approach various musical styles from a different angle, and by doing so illuminate different and unexpected connections.

As such, it’s not just jazz and classical that the trio work within on this album. For the most part, they have created a tridimensional music that draws on the art music of three cultures, the European (baroque), the American (jazz) and the Arabic (maqam). There are further stylistic journeys throughout the album – through French musette, Latin jazz, Armenian folk music and more – but it is those three traditions that permeate and mingle most often, and in the most pleasing ways.

Just by bringing their instruments into play and playing classical music with jazz harmonies, or jazz melodies with a classical construction, would have been an interesting enough experiment, but the profundity of the trio’s music comes from a purposeful lack of distinction between the two artistic traditions. The pieces here are solutions rather than mixtures – they cannot be pulled apart into their component parts, too deeply entwined are they. Somehow by bringing in the third, Middle Eastern dimension, the jazz and classical elements are bound tighter, as all three styles can work with each other for mutual influence, like musical trigonometry.

Although it wasn’t the trio’s first album together, The Contemporary Fortepiano is an amazing statement for modern developments in jazz-classical music, musical fusions in general and, yes, a bold new contemporary repertoire for the fortepiano. The Rembrandt Frerichs Trio’s intelligent and subtle experimentation continues, too, with this year’s album It’s Still Autumn in collaboration with Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor solidly within my favourite albums of the year so far. They’re playing with Kalhor at London’s Southbank Centre in October; it’s sure to be a whirlwind of intense invention and brooding, twisting, worldwide art. I can’t wait.

254: Attish: the Hidden Fire, by Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali

Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali (Pakistan)
Attish: the Hidden Fire (1998)
6 tracks, 66 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali are a qawwali party from Pakistan of the Chishtiyya Sufi order. Nowadays, they’re one of the most famous exponents of the traditional qawwali style in the world, but back when this album, their debut, was released, they were emerging talents. Led by Rizwan and Muazzam Mujahid Ali Khan, their uncle was the great qawwal Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who had just died the previous year leaving an emptiness in his place that has still never been filled. Nevertheless, people were looking for the ‘next big thing’ in qawwali, and up stepped Rizwan-Muazzam, already fully-formed and raring to take on the international scene. They later went on to experiment with various international sounds just like their uncle, but with Attish: the Hidden Fire, they showed off their chops in a traditional setting with a modern attitude.

It’s qawwali, and it’s very high-quality, so I think there is little in general that I can say that I haven’t said before about the beauty of the style. Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali are perhaps a little unusual by the fact that they have two lead vocalists instead of a soloist, but that’s not unheard of by any stretch, and their recognisable voices add a novel element as the album progresses.

So this album is another one where I’m going to be focussing on one piece of music in particular. Specifically, the last track on the album and therefore, I guess, probably the one people are most likely to miss. It’s called ‘Ali Ali Khena’, a song of praise to Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law and the one through whom Chishtiyya Sufis trace their spiritual lineage. A few years ago, I was playing this album for the first time in quite a while, and this track absolutely floored me to the degree that I play it very often nowadays. The reason why has become a slight mantra for this blog, and so I hope you won’t be too annoyed when I say: BLUES! This track is as close to a blues qawwali as you’re going to get without some ill-advised cross-cultural fusions. It’s not just a slight hinting at it with one or two notes here or there either, when that refrain comes around, ‘dam dam dam Ali Ali khena madhe Ali Ali khena, it hits every single note of the blues scale, and doesn’t deviate from it either. The groove, even though it’s based on the typical qawwali rhythm, seems to roll along with a real strut, and the harmonium sounds like it’s being played by someone well-versed in Hammond organ at times, especially at the beginning.

I wonder how much of that track’s bluesiness is intentional. It is entirely possible that it’s a complete coincidence – the scale used (that corresponds with the blues scale) is very similar to the raga Puriya Dhanashri, perhaps it’s just a natural progression from there. Whatever it is, I love it. And there’s a lesson in listening: never drop that attention before the end of the album – you never know what surprises await in the humble last track.

253: Ouled Ghnou & Lâriche, by El Hanaouate

El Hanaouate (Morocco)
Ouled Ghnou & Lâriche
7 tracks, 44 minutes
Download from Awesome Tapes from Africa

It’s an album courtesy of that beautiful blog again, and this time it’s from the very north of the continent, from Morocco.

To be honest, I know incredibly little about this album or its artists, and the little bit that I do know comes from the comment section from when the tape was originally posted on AFTA. And even those comments are contradictory! The most accurate-seeming explanation comes from user K7al L3afta, who explains that the artists are a duo called El Hanaouate, who perform a style of halqa. Halqa – meaning ‘circle’ and named for the crowd of onlookers that inevitably form around a performance – is a type of improvised long-form storytelling based on the life of Sufi saints and marabouts; there are many styles of halqa and the stories can be told in many ways.

El Hanaouate are, for all intents and purposes, a comedy duo. Their performance of halqa is half-musical and half-spoken, setting the scene and the main plot points with song, and then getting to the finer points in dialogue. So this one is an interesting listen for someone like me, who can’t speak Arabic. I can (and very much do) enjoy the music – it’s a simple but effective pairing of the wtar lute, which sounds kinda like a half-and-half between an oud and a banjo, and the bendir, a frame drum with a gut snare that makes a gnarly, throaty rattle when struck, over which the duo sing bluesy, ornamented melodies – but then there are sometimes lengthy spoken sections that, of course, leave me very much out of the loop.

This is comedy! The words are all important and I’m understanding none of it. I reckon I’m only capable of appreciating about a third of the art this album has to offer…but that music third that I do get is really good, so imagine what the rest is like. If you know Arabic, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this album – who knows, maybe I’m best off not knowing what they’re saying! But for now, I’ll appreciate the Moroccan groove and revel in the mysteries of the storytelling of El Hanaouate.

252: Hot Shot, by Shaggy

Shaggy (Jamaica)
Hot Shot (2000)
14 tracks, 53 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

With Bob Dylan, making a point to listen to his lyrics as their own art-form for which the music was complementary but not strictly necessary was a revelation and greatly aided my appreciation of his work as a whole. For Shaggy…well, not as much.

Hot Shot was on my list because when it came out, little 8- or 9-year-old me really dug it. It had a couple of big hits on it – ‘It Wasn’t Me’ and ‘Angel’ were both number ones in the weekly charts, and reached number one and eight in the year-end charts for 2000 too – that were fun and sounded good, and that carries on for the rest of the album too. There are some solid tracks on here; even lesser-known ones such as ‘Why Me Lord’, the coolly romantic ‘Leave It to Me’ and the Bollywood-sampling ‘Hey Love’ would be nice additions to appropriate playlists. It’s basically a nice collection of pop-dancehall with heaps of soul and R’n’B, which make it a little more palatable for the charts. It’s very Year 2000 but still good for a cheesy laugh and good vibes.

But, oh, the lyrics. Today was the first time I’ve properly given them my attention, and I sort of wish I hadn’t. Actually, that’s not strictly true: I once did a karaoke duet with a friend singing ‘Angel’. What a lovely song that is, I thought, all romantic like…except half-way through singing it comes the sinking feeling accompanied by a gradual realisation that the premise of the song is that Shaggy’s character has been abusing his ‘angel,’ went to prison for it and now she’s taken him back and he’s very appreciative. Grim. The awkward part is that the whole album is full of that crap too: tales of cheating, carrying guns, casual misogyny and the like…even when the lyrics aren’t offensive in their content, they’re not exactly enlightening or even particularly inventive either.

How depressing. Hot Shot is an easy listen and remains pleasant and enjoyable as long as you don’t pay too much attention. It’s not aged well in the 19 years since its release: for the music, that lends it a certain charm and adds to its nostalgia quality; for the words, though, it just ends up making the previously fun, happy-go-lucky character of Shaggy just seem like a creep. Sad. Does one outweigh the other? That’s your call.