214: In Trance, by JuJu

JuJu (United Kingdom/Gambia)
In Trance (2011)
7 tracks, 69 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Juldeh’s nyanyero was the first one-string fiddle I’d (consciously) heard, and it sounded crazy to me. I thought it was a flute at first, and sometimes it sounds like a natural trumpet, sometimes it sounds like a fiddle in the American or Irish traditions. But its sound is literally just horsehair on horsehair, one set stretched over a goat-skin covered calabash, the other into a bow. Yet out of that fairly simple instrument (there is only one string, after all), you get all these sounds, and a surprising range too. He uses his nyanyero as a solo instrument, and also to accompany his vocals in the traditional style of the Fula gawlo (griot).

And then you’ve got Justin Adams on electric guitar. Justin has been a staple on the world music scene for decades. He’s played with and produced everyone from Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart, Natacha Atlas and Sinéad O’Connor to Tinariwen, Lo’Jo, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino and even the Emirati band Takht al Emarat. His own style is one of electric blues spiced up with sounds from across north-west Africa, such as the musics of the Tuareg, Songhai, Berber, Gnawa and Arab people.

Get these two musicians together and the music they make is immense. Their playing slots so well together: Juldeh bends his slightly more into the bluesy frame, Justin crafts his whole thing around Juldeh’s own tradition. The end result is something that is a rocking mid-point between the two, but with neither musician being overly precious about changing and evolving their own sound, either. Together, the duo had already had a couple of albums: their first, 2007’s Soul Science, was very organic and rootsy, an artefact of the musicians’ first meetings with all the excitement that comes along with it; the follow-up, 2009’s Tell No Lies, was a much more polished record that even strikes me as a little poppy in places and showed a progression in their collaborative songwriting. For In Trance, they took it to a different place.

In Trance is harder and heavier than their first two albums, and that’s also reflected by them taking on the name JuJu – signifying their new-found bandification alongside drummer Dave Smith (later of Fofoulah), percussionist Martyn Barker and bassist Billy Fuller. But as the name also implies, there is more a focus on trance for this album. Unlike the previous two, the pieces included here aren’t a neat four minutes – three even stretch out near the 15 minute mark. Instead, the tracks are much more open-ended, the music based on endless loops over which mutual improvisation takes centre stage. The pieces evolve in their performance in a way a little reminiscent of jazz fusion, although there is little jazz in the music itself, save maybe for a few rhythmic conceptions. At its core it is still really – totally – bluesy, and Juldeh’s Fula sound permeates it all in the best way.

The track ‘Deep Sahara’ is probably my favourite of this set of great tracks, and it really shows how the album works so well. It’s actually based on the track ‘Sahara’ from Tell No Lies, but its treatment here turns it into something from another realm. Starting with an Arabic taqsim-like opening where Justin and Juldeh take turns exploring the scales and flexing their muscles in anticipation of what’s to come, the song itself starts after about two minutes. It’s rocky with a slightly loping, Moroccan-like rhythm and, of course, as much blues as you could hope for. But then the ‘song’ portion only lasts for another two minutes. After that, it’s all groove. Juldeh takes extended solos on his nyanyero, occasionally sings around and in-between the melody left implied by the song, which comes around every so often but with no regularity. Throughout, Justin’s guitar, mostly playing rhythm, is slowly getting more and more distorted and psychedelic…and then towards the end, so slowly as you won’t even notice it until it’s on top of you, there’s no vocals, or guitar, or nyanyero, it’s just all drums: drum kit, bendir, tama, bringing the track to a banging end at almost 15 mnutes. What a great way to end a piece. It’s all appropriately hypnotic, and although its structure is unusual, nothing at all sounds out-of-place. And that’s the case for this whole album.

In Trance turned out to be the only album that they’d release as JuJu – not too long after it came out, the band were snapped up wholesale by Robert Plant to become his Sensational Space Shifters. The band’s original set-up was literally JuJu but with Plant on vocals and occasional harmonica – not a bad mix to be honest. And that’s the way the band continued: they toured around the world, released an album, members came and went. Juldeh eventually moved back to Gambia in 2017 and was replaced by English folk fiddler Seth Lakeman, taking with him most of the last remnants of the JuJu sound.

213: Clychau Dibon, by Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita

Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita (United Kingdom/Senegal)
Clychau Dibon (2013)
7 tracks, 56 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The idea behind Clychau Dibon is such an obvious one that when it came out, you just had to think, ‘why has this never been done?!’ But it hadn’t been done, and Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita turned out to be the perfect musicians to take it on.

Simply put, this is an album of harp duets that span continents. Catrin Finch is a Welsh harpist with a background in classical music and an interest in Welsh folk, and Seckou Keita is a kora player from Senegal. The two instruments have very similar yet recognisable sounds, and their playing techniques set them apart, but they both have the same delicate, shimmering sound that must surely be one of the most relaxing in the world of acoustic music.

They didn’t go overboard with it, either. This magical meeting could so easily have exploded into a ‘harps of the world’ project with a million contributors from across the globe and any subtlety of sound or style would be lost. But instead they kept it exactly the right size – just the two of them – and in Clychau Dibon, it was executed immaculately.

When Catrin and Seckou play together, it makes complete sense. Even though they are from rather radically different musical traditions, the music they make together feels completely natural, like this repertoire was always meant to accommodate both instruments and both cultures. The pieces that are included were put together quite democratically. They’re all co-composed or at least co-improvised to some degree, but as for the core melodies of the pieces, some are contributed by Catrin, some by Seckou, and some come from traditional pieces from their respective cultures. And none stand out among the others – they’re all treated with the exact same level of respect and achieve the same level of success. The whole way through it is an utter delight of rippling, trickling strings that paint a breathtakingly serene and peaceful landscape. It’s enough to make you well up: the world is beautiful, and Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita help make it so.

212: The Raga Guide, by Various Artists

Various Artists (India)
The Raga Guide (1999)
74 tracks, 314 minutes (4 CDs)
Spotify ∙ iTunes

The Raga Guide is a rare thing: a wonderful resource for every level of listeners, from complete newbies, to fans wanting to know more, to serious academic scholars. The standard is such that I’m sure even hardcore disciples of Hindustani classical music would rate this collection.

Because this isn’t just an album. The Raga Guide is, quite naturally, a guide of 74 of the most common ragas – melodic systems that are somewhere between scales and compositions – used in the northern Indian Hindustani classical tradition. The guide is split between a book and four CDs. The book, edited by ethnomusicologist Joep Bor, gives the history of each raga, a musical description and transcription (illustrated with Western staff notation), an example set of lyrics in English and Hindi and a reproduction of a ragamala painting from the 17th century – paintings that describe the mood and personality of each raga.

And then alongside the book, the four CDs contain examples of every one of those ragas. While in a true performance setting, performances of a raga can stretch to hours long, based as they are around fantastical improvisation and meditation on the tones and colours of the notes and their relationships to each other…but The Raga Guide gives you the down-low of each by presenting it in the form of a very short, unmetered and improvised introductory alap section, before the rhythm of the table kicks in for a composed section or song and then another short improvised section before it comes to a close. Most of them are only around four minutes long; the longest barely touches six minutes.

It’s tempting to think that, because these performances are conducted in such an unorthodox manner, that they must be doing this ancient and noble tradition a real disservice. But while the performances here are no doubt a little shallow compared to the full exploration of the true meanings of the raga in full, these are undoubtedly wonderful little self-contained performances in and of themselves. No wonder: four renowned musicians perform the 74 pieces between them – there’s Hariprasad Chaurasia on bansuri (bamboo flute), Buddhadev Das Gupta on sarod (fretless lute), and Shruti Sadolikar Katkar and Vidyadhar Vyas on vocals (female and male respectively).

The Raga Guide really is a stunning work, of both scholarship and musicianship. Anyone with the slightest interest in Hindustani classical music should consult a copy of the book and delve deep into the accompanying albums. If nothing else you will find one of the most comprehensive repertoires of ragas anywhere, all in bitesize chunks ideal for dipping into…or delving into, deep and headfirst if you feel that way inclined.

211: New Fuji Garbage, by Barrister & Africa’s International Music Ambassadors

Barrister & Africa’s International Music Ambassadors (Nigeria)
New Fuji Garbage (1991)
2 tracks, 57 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Now there’s a title that grabs the attention. If you had no other information to go off, what would you expect from an album called New Fuji Garbage? Well, it’s not Japanese, I can tell you that much.

What it is is the invention of that regal-looking fella on the front of the cover, here known as Barrister but whose full (and possibly exaggerated) title was Chief Dr Alhaji Sikiru Ololade Ayinde Balogun. The best way for me to describe fuji is not to bother, it will only sound lame in comparison to listening to the music itself, so you may as well just go and do that. The second best way for me to describe it is layers-on-layers of drums and percussion, each playing their own infectious rhythms over, on top of and in between all the others, with occasional snippets of ultra-catchy vocals, synth or pedal steel guitar. Barrister conjured this music from all sorts of different Nigerian styles from the guitar-based pop of jùjú (made most famous by King Sunny Adé) to Islamic percussion music played by Yoruba teenagers at Ramadan, and from them all distilled a sound that is at once stripped back to its bare essentials as well as being incredibly complex.

On this hour-long album, there’s only two tracks, and the title of the first ‘Refined Fuji Garbage’ perhaps gives you the clue that this is generous: it’s refined, because in its usual form, there’s no way that you could contain a fuji groove to just 30 minutes – these things could go on for hours on just one handful of riffs and rhythms. It all stretches out and out and out for as long as you could want, until you’re more sweat than person and your legs have danced into another dimension.

So that’s fuji. Why is it garbage? Who knows. Barrister was certainly enamoured with the phrase (this is his fourth album to be dedicated as such) and it does have a proper punk ring to it, which I really appreciate. But surely it’s sarcastic. This ain’t no rubbish – everything is perfectly in place and it’s all fresh as hell. But when that first track kicks off and he’s telling you “rise up to dance to my new fuji garbage, rise up to dance to my new fuji garbage,” you really better listen to him. You can believe that I’m gonna be rising up to dance to his new fuji garbage.

210: Street Signs, by Ozomatli

Ozomatli (USA)
Street Signs (2004)
13 tracks, 52 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I’m heading off to Boomtown festival in a couple of weeks and Ozomatli are right at the top of my must-see list. They are seriously one of the very best live bands I’ve ever seen – they can turn any occasion into a party within seconds of arriving on stage and it doesn’t let up until they’re leading the crowd on a massive samba from within. While their sound has evolved across their 24 years, their core has stayed basically consistent: Latin music of all colours (from salsa to cumbia to mariachi to the aforementioned samba) with a whole load of hip-hop in there and a good measure of rock, and usually with some pointed lyrics too. This is the real sound of Los Angeles.

When you have a band whose live shows are such a tour de force, it’s sometimes hard for their studio albums to live up to the same standard. That’s not a worry when it comes to Street Signs, although it does stick out as a little bit different from the rest of the group’s albums. It was Ozomatli’s third full length release out of (currently) eight studio albums, and it is by far their most ‘world music’ of offerings. Their first two (1998’s Ozomatli and 2001’s Embrace the Chaos) were much more focused on the Latin hip-hop thing, and afterward they went in a more good-time pop-rock direction. On Street Signs, though, they brought all sorts of stuff to the table, from Arabic sounds to Balkan brass, flamenco to Indian elements, and all without taking anything away from that classic Ozo sound.

This eclectic mix is also apparent in the amount and variety of guests on the album. There are so many: there’s featured artists such as Nuyorican salsa piano legend Eddie Palmieri, Los Lobos frontman David Hidalgo and baritone rapper and erstwhile Ozo member Chali 2na, but there’s also more subtle and less assuming guest slots for other stars in their own right such as Gnawa master Hassan Hakmoun and French Roma jazz group Les Yeux Noirs. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan even gets a co-writer’s credit on ‘Believe’, although I’ve never been able to work out what for, exactly. Usually albums with a buttload of guests end up sounding stilted and try-hard, but not this one. Everyone just fits in where they’re supposed to, never take up too much room than necessary and just slot right into the Ozomatli party.

Because, for all its difference from the band’s other records, Street Signs still has that same atmosphere. Tracks such as ‘Saturday Night’ and ‘Street Signs’ are typical Ozo bangers with some amazing raps and blaring horns, but even when they do something different such as the brooding opener ‘Believe’ or Chali 2na’s Egyptian-flavoured guest number ‘Who’s to Blame’ have a suitably political message while all but requiring you to dance along.

Street Signs is Ozo’s most esoteric album of their career so far, but I still reckon it’s their best all-round set. But as good as it is, you don’t want to hear this coming out of your stereo speakers – you want to hear it all going on in front of you in all its sweaty, chaotic glory. Ozomatli: see them live at any cost; if you can’t, Street Signs is still as good a time as any.

209: Jazz Epistle Verse 1, by The Jazz Epistles

The Jazz Epistles (South Africa)
Jazz Epistle Verse 1 (1960)
8 tracks, 43 minutes
Only the so-called ‘complete’ collected recordings of the Jazz Epistles is available online, which can be found here: Spotify ∙ iTunes. They’re actually not complete though, as they lack the track ‘I Remember Billy’ from this album – you can listen to it here.

The Jazz Epistles are considered to be the first ‘progressive jazz’ group in South Africa. While there had been jazz and jazz-influenced styles played in the country for a few decades, the Jazz Epistles were the first coherent group to work in the small-band style of the bebop and post-bop idioms as opposed to the big band of swing or the solo piano of ragtime.

If there’s such thing as a pre-supergroup, then the Jazz Epistles would fit that billing. Of the six bandmembers, at least three of them were or became South African jazz legends. First there's alto saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, who was already a popular name in South African jazz as the leader of marabi band the Jazz Dazzlers, and then there's Kippie’s protégés, Hugh Masekela on trumpet and Dollar Brand on piano. The Epistles’ sessions were the first time either of these musicians had been recorded, and both went on to be huge international stars in the worlds of jazz and beyond (Dollar Brand eventually becoming known as Abdullah Ibrahim). The remaining three of Jonas Gwangwa (trombone), Johnny Gertze (double bass) and Makaya Ntshako (drums) went on to become valuable members of Masekela’s and Ibrahim’s bands, even if they never made the leap to bandleaders themselves.

Recorded in the epochal year of 1959, Jazz Epistle Verse 1 – the only album recorded by the group – is very much characteristic of a late-50s American jazz record, with its mix of blueses, bops and ballads. In fact, the music here is virtually indistinguishable as South African as opposed to American, although maybe there is a slightest hint in Ibrahim’s piano playing on his own compositions of ‘Uku-Jonga Phambili’ and ‘Gafsa’. Nevertheless, even without a unique flavour of the band’s heritage, the music is very accomplished, especially being the first of its kind in the country. Even at this point, the players’ personalities are strong: Moeketsi’s style is more that of the old fashioned bebop, Ibrahim’s a much further-forward take including super-extended chords and unusual progressions, and Masekela’s flits between the two but mostly settles in the post-bop realm.

Perhaps Jazz Epistle Verse 1 is not the most groundbreaking record in the history of jazz, but it’s certainly an important milestone in the evolution of South African popular music, made even more interesting for its recording debuts of two of the country’s most successful ever musicians.

208: Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, by Skip James

Skip James (USA)
Hard Time Killing Floor Blues (2003)
12 tracks, 51 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Recorded in 1964, the session that this album collects was the first time Skip James had recorded in 33 years. After only very mild success pre-war, James had become basically unknown until the big blues revival of the 60s, when young fans were eagerly digging through old record collections, tracking down the names the found there and persuading them out of retirement.

For me, of all the old guard of pre-war delta blues, Skip James is among the very top of them. He’s not as recognised outside blues circles as others such as Robert Johnson or even Son House, but his songs really touch the soul. The song that names this album, ‘Hard Time Killing Floor Blues’ is a low-down rumination on despair and a hard life lived, real stereotypical blues stuff, but delivered with such voice-cracking emotion that every word is gut-wrenching, and the worksong-like hummed chorus is utterly transcendent.

Considering that James was 62, very ill and (presumably) a little out-of-practice at the time of this recording, his quality is simply stunning. His voice, high-pitched in his earlier recordings, is lower but just as sweet. His fingers are slightly less nimble on his guitar but still capture the same magic. His age also lends another aspect to his music, particularly in the songs ‘Washington DC Hospital Blues’ and ‘Sickbed Blues’, which are sad and subdued blueses written of his illness that would eventually get the better of him five years later.

I can’t really be drawn as to which are the better recordings for music fans – besides, the correct answer is obviously ‘go listen to both’! Being recorded so far apart, they really are different listening prospects, even though much of the repertoire is the same. The older recordings are very noisy due to their age and recording methods, which may not suit everyone’s ears, but you do get to hear James’ piano playing, giving an interesting twist on the delta blues. So really, whether you decide to come at Skip James as his 29-year-old self or his 62-year-old self, you will be approaching the work of a true master not just of finger-picked guitar or of blues songwriting, but also of emotional evocation.

207: Deal With It!, by Brass Jaw

Brass Jaw (United Kingdom)
Deal With It! (2010)
15 tracks, 58 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Brass Jaw started life as a saxophone quartet of alto, two tenors and a baritone – you can hear that formation on their first album Burn. As a young saxophonist at the time, I was thrilled to see them live and hear saxes used in this way, providing really high-class jazz and making every sound themselves. Then I was disappointed a few years later when I caught them again and they’d replaced one of their tenors with a trumpet instead. It is a shame that they dropped the sax quartet thing, but I have to admit that their sound is much more nuanced that way.

The quality is of little surprise: their line-up of Ryan Quigley (trumpet), Paul Towndrow (alto sax), Konrad Wiszniewski (tenor sax) and Allon Beauvoisin (bari sax) have an amazing pedigree in the Scottish jazz scene. Their names are consistently sprinkled across so many great albums and projects, but Brass Jaw is a bit of a unique prospect. Because there’s no rhythm section, the whole thing is based on textures. Beauvoisin usually (and understandably) takes the bass part, which flutters from his bari sax as nimbly and deftly as any feather-fingered double bassist, and the other three juggle the melodies, countermelodies and harmony together among themselves. With so many roles swapping hands all the time, and the harmonies often being build out of four simultaneous melodic strands, it often resembles an intracate jazz counterpoint.

Deal With It! was Brass Jaw’s first album with a trumpet and, although in some regards they were still in a period of transition, the standard is as high as you’d expect. There’s quite a few covers on this one, with their sleazy and slurred rendition of ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ and the lightning-paced version of Horace Silver’s ‘Señor Blues’ the highlights, but their own compositions such as ‘Holding Pattern’ and ‘Pigeon English Sunrise’ taking things into different directions and showing their creativity on the experimental side.

Brass Jaw are still a quartet, but nowadays they’ve changed shape yet again – Quigley on trumpet has been replaced by trombonist Michael Owers. I’ve not seen them with that line-up yet, and there’s no albums, but a 2014 EP gives a little bit of a glimpse: of course, it sounds as good as ever. I can’t wait to hear what they come up with next!

206: Fun House, by the Stooges

The Stooges (USA)
Fun House (1970)
7 tracks, 37 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

After the idyllic soundscapes of yesterday chilled us all right out, let’s get angry today.

Fun House is the second of only three albums by original incarnation of The Stooges, and the last one before Iggy Pop took a starring role in the band’s name. They remind me quite a lot of their contemporaries The Doors, actually. They were both taking the psychedelic rock of the 1960s into fresh new places, but where Jim Morisson’s crew seem to lean more into the prog rock side of things, Iggy’s were definitely what we can now call proto-punk.

This music is simply incandescent. It has so much from music that preceded it, from Hendrix’s psych-blues and The Who’s hard rock, obviously a lot from the psychedelic era and even cues from free jazz with Steve Mackay’s saxophone, but there is something in there that sets it so apart from all of these others. It’s aggressive, anarchic and chaotic; it’s angry but it also sounds like it was a whole lot of fun to make – and it is to listen to, too. Although this record pre-dates punk by a good few years, that aesthetic is clearly starting to take shape on Fun House, and it ends up being an electrifying ‘best of both worlds.’

This is one of those ‘cult’ albums that never really achieved the success it deserved in its first run, but blew up later. It’s a sign of a band truly ahead of their time – the world mustn’t have been ready for the Stooges’ sound at that point. Once people’s ears had gotten more used to the looser, unpredictable and flailing attitude that would come to embody punk, Fun House began to make sense again. It’s strange that such an amazing album – now rightly regarded as one of the most influential in rock – wasn’t rated at the time, but at least we know now.

The version I have is actually a two-disc affair with a bunch of demos, outtakes and other miscellanea on the second disc, but that’s really only for completists. Stick to the original seven tracks if you want a tightly-packed 37 minutes of intense but perfectly balanced noise that sounds as much a part of what came before it as what came after.

205: How Our Birds Sing, Vol. 1, recorded by Hans A. Traber

Hans A. Traber (Switzerland)
How Our Birds Sing, Vol. 1 (1988)
32 tracks, 52 minutes
Spotify

It’s my birthday! So as a treat to myself I’m actually picking today’s album rather than letting the robot decide, and I’ve gone for something a bit different.

It’s just a bunch of birds!

I love the sound of birdsong. I feel like it has a real restorative quality to it. When I lived in Berlin, a few times a year my job required me to be getting home at about 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning after a really long and intense day at work. To be walking home through the communal garden at that time to a complete cacophony of what sounded like hundreds of birds after a whole day of stress was like a beautiful massage for the mind, and I’d often just sit there with them for half an hour, letting the sounds bathe me before heading to bed. Now I live in London, and there are far fewer birds here. When I can, I cycle into the countryside to enjoy the quiet…and it’s interesting that the birdsong never intrudes into this quiet, it never registers as ‘noise.’ Those beautiful calls fill up my soul, ready to come back to the city and run on that as fuel.

And when that isn’t possible…that’s when Hans Traber’s work comes in. There are actually quite a few different recordings that I could have listed here (including extended Youtube videos of dawn choruses), but the variety of How Our Birds Sing is really lovely. The 32* birds recorded here are from Central Europe, so although most of them are the same as you’ll hear in the UK, including superstars such as the robin, the blackbird and the wren, there’s also a few that are more foreign to these shores, including the usually elusive nightingale.

It is truly lovely to sit and appreciate these recordings for the sounds they contain. Some are simple and short chirrups, squeaks and bleeps, others are virtuosic and long, taking wild and sometimes unpredictable turns while remaining reminiscent of human music. It’s mad when you think that it’s all basically small feathery things bellowing “fuck me” or “fuck off” isn’t it? At least they have the decency to be poetic about it.

I don’t know whether you’ll have the same reaction to these birds as I do. It may be because I’ve come from a rural area to a big and busy city; your mileage may vary. But whether or not you listen to this album, I urge you to get up (or, more fun, stay up) to see a dawn chorus every so often and revel in the sheer mastery of the bird world. Nature provides its own Good Albums, we only try our best to imitate it.

*There’s another 75 recordings across the other three volumes too!

204: Blue Wild Angel: Live at the Isle of Wight, by Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix (USA/United Kingdom)
Blue Wild Angel: Live at the Isle of Wight (2002)
18 tracks, 119 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

“A bit more volume on this one Charlie, it’s gonna need it! Let’s have a welcome for Billy Cox on bass, Mitch Mitchell on drums…and the man with the guitar…Jimi Hendrix.” The words that opened Jimi Hendrix’s performance at the Isle of Wight Festival in the early hours of 31 August 1970, as well as this recording of it and several other live compilations, have been burnt into my memory since childhood. Simple yet effective. A few seconds of tuning up…and then straight in with the trio’s anarchic version of ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. Not a bad way to start a set.

It’s Jimi #3! I’ve already covered Axis: Bold as Love and People, Hell and Angels before, and Blue Wild Angel is going to be the last Jimi on this blog, and the only live album of his. I obviously chose this one because I enjoy it (it is a Good Album, after all), but so many reviews and discussions of this set talk about how Jimi sounds dispirited, his music lacking in passion and the overall performance falling flat. That seems so strange to me, it’s as if I’m listening to a different record than the rest of them. I won’t claim that the performance is perfect, but there are so many sparkling moments all the way throughout that by far make up for any jetlag-fuelled moments of less-than-peak energy.

There’s even bits where some of the performance’s rougher edges are turned into moments of genius. The epic 22-minute version of ‘Machine Gun’ sees Jimi’s solo interrupted by walkie-talkie chatter from the festival’s security personnel interfering with the sound equipment. So what happens? He just builds it into his solo. Without warning and completely on the fly, he turns something that would derail other musicians into something that makes this one a truly unique performance. It goes almost without saying that Jimi’s guitar playing is immense all the way through here, because I don’t think he was capable of any less. His band – half Experience and half Band of Gypsies – have an easy confidence to them and, as always, I’m in awe at the drumming of Mitch Mitchell, who seamlessly turns jazz technique into the perfect accompaniment for Jimi’s heavy blues rock.

Despite what you think of this album as a whole, it’s still mad to think that, just 18 days after it was recorded, Jimi was dead at the age of just 27. What madness to achieve such a height at such a young age. His death was obviously not natural, so it obviously had no bearing on his performance at the Isle of Wight, but it nevertheless gives the whole thing a slightly surreal aspect to it. You can’t help but marvel that the fleetingness of life and the suddenness of death, even when music like this makes you feel so alive.

203: Space Echo – The Mystery Behind the Cosmic Sound of Cabo Verde Finally Revealed!, by Various Artists

Various Artists (Cabo Verde)
Space Echo – The Mystery Behind the Cosmic Sound of Cabo Verde Finally Revealed! (2016)
15 tracks, 69 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

This was a weird one when it came out. To me, the prospect of psychedelic synth music from Cabo Verde was enough to get me interested, but perhaps the wider listening public needed a bit more persuasion. So when the record label, Analog Africa, announced the album with a press release, where there would normally be a story of how the musical subculture came to be, and how the album came to be compiled, there was…well, a different story instead. It started with a strange but plausible story of how a shipment of synthesisers and electronic music equipment disappeared between the US and Brazil in the late 1960s, only to appear in Cabo Verde a few months later to kickstart a wave of synth music there in the 1970s. But then the story evolves, with the ship appearing to have fallen from the sky and for modern research to reveal that it had in fact fallen from space – a truly cosmic origin for the music’s intergalactic sound.

It’s an amusing story – and you can read it in full on Bandcamp – and I was taken in by it to start off with before the fun reveal. But the amount of times the first part of this story was recounted as fact by respected music journalists and papers such as the Guardian actually baffled me. Surely they did more than skim the press release before regurgitating it into their piece as fact? Maybe I have too much faith in music journalism. The writer of the Guardian article did say they asked the label, Analog Africa, to confirm the ‘true’ parts of the story, but even that doesn’t really stand up to much scrutiny. But there we are.

It seems I’ve not left much space to really talk about the music, so let’s power through: it’s really good, of course. There’s synths all over it, as you’d expect from the above, and there’s lots of influences from the Americas with each track showing varying amount of soul, disco, funk, rock and even Mexican and Cuban music. But those are all just influences – all the music here is so Cabo Verdean. The pieces may have the blingy instruments and flashy foreign sounds, but they’re all based on the Cabo Verdean forms of morna, coladera, tabanka and, most excitingly, funaná. The latter is traditionally the music of accordions and iron scrapers, replaced here with synths and hi-hats. All of the styles, with their unique soulful longing, the saudade that makes Cabo Verdean music sound so heartwrenching, may seem like a strange fit for the up-tempo astral voyages of synthfunk, but it all works so well.

There have been so many reissues and rereleases of African music from the 60s to the 80s over the past decade, and along with them so many amazing and surprising rediscoveries to be had among them. Space Echo is a wonderful example of this, but also perhaps a lesson not to let your surprised amazement have you believe every fanciful and exotic story you read in a press release…

202: Vignettes EP, by Lee Westwood

Lee Westwood (United Kingdom)
Vignettes EP (2017)
6 tracks, 20 minutes
Bandcamp

I knew Lee Westwood’s music from his work with Dizraeli. As part of Dizraeli and the Small Gods, his expert acoustic guitar playing straddled the line between folk-baroque and jazz; knowing this, when the Small Gods had disbanded and Westwood released some of his own material, I expected to be at least somewhat like that, or perhaps more on the jazzier side of things. I was wrong. Vignettes is one piece of music split up into six short movements. It’s an experimental classical work for a duo of flute (played here by Philippe Barnes) and oboe (Suzie Shrubb).

Because they’re both melody instruments (that is, they can only play one note at a time instead of chords), there is no space for either instrument to play a secondary role to the other. The whole piece revolves around the relationship between the two instruments, and across the 20 minutes, they both develop as characters, with distinct personalities. It’s a little as if this piece is a dance, but instead of bodies, the physical movements, shapes and gestures are reflected in the travels of the two woodwinds. And it does feel like travels, or journeys or adventures. Each instrument has their own melody line that are sometimes very close to each other, in harmony or even in unison, but sometimes they can be far apart from each other, playing seemingly unrelated tunes before coming back together again. Sometimes they are close, but separate, their timings slightly out of sync with each other, or their usually complementary lines clashing in dissonance occasionally. It’s bizarrely easy to anthropomorphise these two intersecting melody lines, and I find that so impressive.

The music itself shows quite a lot of influences in its short duration. While its performance is in the Western classical idiom, there are plenty of harmonies and small melodic quirks that are actually quite jazzy. There are portions that are quite Debussy-esque, but also parts which must surely have been informed by styles such as gagaku, the elegant and dramatic Japanese court music.

It is really amazing how effective – and affective – just a relatively short duologue between a flute and an oboe can be. From tensely cinematic to lightly playful, there is so much to hear here. Come on this adventure and experience it yourself.

201: Love Songs, Vol. 2, by Yishak Banjaw

Yishak Banjaw (Ethiopia)
Love Songs, Vol. 2 (1986/2016)
8 tracks, 46 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ iTunes

When I first heard this it blew my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I certainly couldn’t stop telling people about it, and playing it to anyone foolish enough to stand still next to me for enough time for me to get me iPod out. I’d listened to a lot of Ethiopian music before – and even been there myself – so when I was asked to review another Ethiopian album (one called Love Songs, no less), I thought I knew what was coming. Obviously I did not.

Yishak Banjaw’s music is traditionally Ethiopian in its scales, its rhythms and its composition. The only thing he really does differently is play it all on a Casio PT keyboard with enthusiastic use of all the various synth options and some programmed beats. And it seems to change it completely. There are similarities with Charanjit Singh’s 10 Ragas to a Disco Beat in terms of the story of how the records came to be and the way they were made, but whereas the Indian record came out sounding like acid house five years before that even became a thing, Banjaw’s music gives me realｖａｐｏｒｗａｖｅtingles.

Everything about this record sounds a little off-kilter. It’s all ever-so-slightly warped and washed out, and there’s a hiss from the tape transfer, which all lend a faintly unsettling vibe to it in a way that is hard to pinpoint. As all the synths swirl together in those unmistakably Ethiopian shapes while using the alien-sounding timbres, your mind gets dragged along into the maelstrom, having the same effect as the hypnotist’s spiral.

I really love this album and its retro vibes, but what’s really exciting is that I just found out he’s still making music and releasing albums as late as 2017, and they’ve not stopped being any less enigmatically cool as his work from the 80s. Check this shit out. The synths are more modern, the sound is a little cleaner and the sensibility is slightly more to the pop side of things, but it’s so good to hear that he’s still making his unique music three decades later. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some more Ｅｔｈｉｏｐｉａｎｗａｖｅ to catch up on…

200: Une Meeles, by Maarja Nuut

Maarja Nuut (Estonia)
Une Meeles (2016)
12 tracks, 39 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The whole charm of Maarja Nuut’s music in the atmospheres. Une Meeles is almost completely solo: just her fiddle and voice which are looped and electronically altered to create amazing, spine-tingling sonics (the only exceptions are a sample of an Estonian soundscape and one fiddle duet). Her music is heavily informed by her deep studies into the folk music of Estonia, which she uses to create her own compositions. Each piece is carefully and intricately constructed, and the whole way, it is the atmosphere that is at the centre of the sound. It’s chilly, ethereal and sparkly; arboreal; sometimes spooky; it’s misty and mystical and magical. The whole thing rings clear like a glass bell. Above all, it’s very, very beautiful.

When I was making notes listening to this album, I ended up pinpointing almost every track as especially beautiful, but of course they all are, for so many reasons. In ‘Hobusemäng’, the second track on the album, after one-and-a-half pieces all in the standard fiddle range, she suddenly brings in an octave peddle, lurching one of her loops down to the pitch of a double bass, it’s so unexpected and exciting; ‘Ödangule’ is a fully a cappella piece based on several stunning vocal loops; ‘Siidisulis Linnukene’ has echoes of Scottish fiddle, ‘Kiik Tahab Kindaid’ echoes of Albanian and maybe North Indian music… A long and beautiful poem could be written about each piece on this album. There is also quite a naivety to a lot of Nuut’s songs, some of which sound quite like nursery rhymes (although they usually descend into something vaguely unsettling). With so much drawn from Estonian folk traditions, I wonder how much inspiration comes directly from children’s songs, or whether I only think that because of some coincidental (or extremely ancient) similarity to British children’s songs.

It was hard to choose between this album and Nuut’s first, Soolo from 2013 (which I very much urge you to check out too). I think that’s a tough decision for me because whenever I’m in the mood for it, I usually just play them back-to-back. That’s intentional, too: while this one feel a little less ‘traditional’ than the first, Nuut’s own description notes that the material on this album ‘directly builds off of motifs from her previous album.’

I feel like I could wax lyrical and muse poetical about Maarja Nuut’s work for days. This is music that is really intriguing to listen deeply and with much thought, but it’s perhaps even more satisfying to listen to with no thought at all, with a blank mind ready to be filled with the mysterious waves of Nuut’s hundred fiddles and thousand voices, and taken to an alternate plane of Estonian mythology and mysticism.