227: Roots Rock Soca, by Black Stalin

Black Stalin (Trinidad & Tobago)
Roots Rock Soca (1991)
11 tracks, 59 minutes
iTunes

If nothing else, you have to at least admire the balls of someone who chooses their professional performing name as Black Stalin. I never worked out why he chose that name. And, okay, maybe the name contributed a little bit for me selecting him for this list. It was definitely a big part of what urged me to listen to his music in the first place. I mean, what sort of music does someone called Black Stalin even make?!

Well, as you can tell from the name of this compilation, it’s soca, that poppier, funkier version of the classic calypso style. But Black Stalin (still feels weird to call him that, but w/e) puts his own spin on things that makes it extra special. Roots Rock Soca isn’t available on streaming services, but as it’s essentially a ‘best of,’ you can get the same gist by falling into a YouTube hole. I’d suggest starting with this song, ‘Burn Dem’:

It’s my favourite of his, and I reckon it’s a good round-up of his sound. It’s soca that is unashamed of its roots in calypso, it’s got Cuban-style horns, it’s got a reggae feel, and even rhythms that bring to mind styles from across the Caribbean and South America – what else could you want from a song to get you up dancing? And that’s how the rest of his music goes too, with more or less accent on each of those styles, and sometimes bringing in other sounds such as New Orleans piano or a South African tinge in the bass.

Although a little less so than calypso, soca is still very much focussed on the lyricism of its singers, and in that, Black Stalin also has his own way of approaching things. Unlike most soca singers and calypsonians, he is a Rasta, which influences his use of lyrics. While he doesn’t often dwell on especially religious aspects (although he does shout-out Jah quite a bit), it does lead to his lyrics often emphasising deeper political themes of black liberation, pan-Caribbeanism and pan-Africanism

For such a well-regarded musician with nuanced political thoughts conveyed in a thoughtful but entertaining manner, how bizarre to go by a name invoking the legacy of one of history’s biggest bastards. But if you can get over that, Black Stalin’s music is an ideal party music – a wonderful (and only slightly cheesy) mix of the Caribbean’s most infectious grooves.

226: Dog House Music, by Seasick Steve

Seasick Steve (USA)
Dog House Music (2006)
13 tracks, 54 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

When I was a teenager, blues was my thing. I listened widely, but blues was always my go-to. I loved the electric stuff like Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker, and the older acoustic stuff of Robert Johnson, Lonnie Johnson and Blind Willie McTell. I was even into the early periods of blues revival – like Led Zeppelin’s early stuff that we heard yesterday. But anything after that left me cold. When I thought of blues from the 70s onwards, it was all blues-rock guitar wankers such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Bonamassa, Johnny Winter and the like. Extremely technically proficient all, but (for me) completely anodyne. It was really disappointing to me that all of the ‘good’ blues was gone, put out of my reach by time. And then, at the Big Chill Festival in 2006, that changed with Seasick Steve.

On a stage just about big enough for a chair, a couple of guitars, an amp and a stomp box, a man with a big beard, denim dungarees, tattoos and a farmer’s tan came on stage and played the blues. Not in a soulless, boring way like the blues-rock dudes, and not even copying the old masters. He had his own style, heavily influenced by players such as Mississippi Fred McDowell and Son House, but also with small elements from country music and even shades of punk. Everything was rough around the edges, from his homemade stomp box to his tattered trucker’s cap and especially his electric guitar, a cheap Japanese original in red, decorated in Sharpie and glitterpen and – crucially – with only three strings, tuned wrongly and in the wrong place and played with a slide. His songs and stories all told of a life hopping freight trains and living the hobo life across the great American continent. After a while, he abandoned the tiny stage altogether, taking his acoustic guitar and jumping into the modestly-sized crowd (I took that picture!). I was hooked.

It’s been a long time since I last listened to this album, and it’s still as great as it always was. Just like that first time I saw him live, Dog House Music is completely solo (well, almost) and incredibly intimate. It was recorded in his kitchen on an old four-track recorder, and it feels like you’re right there. You can hear the squeaking of his rocking-chair and the patting of his foot on the ground; he even addresses the listener with story fragments and quips, and it all adds to the real down-home atmosphere. And the songs are to die for. He covers a surprising range: he does right barn-stomping plugged-in pieces with his three-string trance wonder, such as ‘Dog House Boogie’, ‘Cut My Wings’ and even the second half of ‘Fallen Off a Rock’, where he’s even joined by his son on crashing drum kit, but he also has surprisingly poignant and touching moments, such as ‘The Dead Song’ and the beautiful ‘Salem Blues’.

His guitar technique is exciting, his songs and stories are fun and hey – I’d finally found blues music in the 21st century that didn’t make me cringe. This was great! Of course, no-one would ever hear of him…so it was a (pleasant!) shock to see his rise to unexpected fame over the next few years. Future albums would peak at #4 on the UK album charts, he played the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, performed and recorded with everyone from KT Tunstall and Ruby Turner to Nick Cave, Dave Grohl, John Paul Jones and Jack White, and even appeared on Top Gear. So weird. And for me personally, he also opened up a whole world of not-shit modern day blues, from the old-style musicians like C.W. Stoneking to the punk of the White Stripes, Dogbreath and Bob Log III, and to whatever it is that Son of Dave does.

Yes, a lot of Seasick Steve is an act. Whether he ever hopped trains or not is probably impossible to know, but his 20 years living as a hobo is far exaggerated at best – instead he pursued a moderately successful musical career as a session musician and producer (he even played with Zakir Hussain and Aashish Khan in the shortlived project Shanti – look, there he is on bass!). Maybe those rocking-chair squeaks were added afterwards for effect, who knows. But while those revelations maybe took something away from his mystique, nothing takes away from his music. Because in the end, it doesn’t really matter that Seasick Steve is a character. He is lovable, has funny, interesting and gripping stories and, with Dog House Music, a truly superb album of blues.

225: Led Zeppelin, by Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin (United Kingdom)
Led Zeppelin (1969)
9 tracks, 45 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I never cease to be amazed at the fruitfulness of the 1960s. To think there was a time when the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Captain Beefheart, Dr John, the Stooges, Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin, Can, and, and, and… were all creating scene-defining music in their own fields all at the same time is just mind blowing. And that’s just in the vague field of rock, without mentioning all the jazz cats, the blues revivalists, the folkies on both sides of the Atlantic. And all of those intersected at important junctions too, of course. I’d hope that someday we’d look back on any era with the same awe in hindsight, but you have to admit that the line-up the 1960s had going on is kinda hard to beat.

I guess that’s a bit of a non-sequitur (can something start with a non-sequitur? Who knows), but considering the shape of popular music at the beginning of the decade, to end it with Led Zeppelin – the eponymous group’s debut album – it really shows what a transformative period this was. In this album are the inklings of what was soon to be heavy metal. In fact, when I listen to this album, I cannot help but hear it as the birth of the whole wide-ranging musical movement that metal became. Although every song has a heavy imprint of blues or British or American folk overlaid with all the trappings of 60s psychedelia, there’s something else in there. Whereas psychedelia usually revels in mellowness or trippiness, Led Zeppelin took it to a different place: in their hands, it was harder, heavier and more aggressive – and more exciting.

Even as a blues band, Led Zeppelin excel on this record. Their versions of ‘You Shook Me’ and ‘How Many More Times’ (the former made famous by Muddy Waters, the latter a development of Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘How Many More Years’) show a group that were capable of doing the blues rock thing without abandoning their own sound of burgeoning heavy metal to do it, making them stand out as more interesting and innovative than the other British blooze boom bands such as John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Fleetwood Mac and even the Rolling Stones.

Throughout this blog, you’ve probably noticed that I have a thing for in-between points in music, whether that’s music that highlights geographical-cultural-historical connections between different traditions or that marks the mid-stage of a musical evolution. Led Zeppelin is definitely one of those in-between stages, with psychedelic rock, blues and British folk as its ancestors, and all sorts of metal as its descendants. The 1960s had so many of those albums or musical moments that spun whole genres on their head, or conjured them from some genius realm, and nothing could be the same since. I wonder when the next such upheaval will happen, and what will come of it…

224: center:level:roar, by Youngblood Brass Band

Youngblood Brass Band (USA)
center:level:roar (2003)
15 tracks, 68 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Considering that the Youngblood Brass Band hail from Madison, Wisconsin, they are most definitely in the storied tradition of the New Orleans brass bands, but they don’t play the same stuff as you would hear on those streets in the 1950s. Theirs reflects the tradition’s place as folk music – music that moves with the people. So as well as playing that signature Louisiana jazz, their music is suffused with the sounds of hip-hop, breakbeat and funk. They were one of the first generation of groups to fully embrace the idea of a ‘hip-hop brass band’ along with the Soul Rebels and the Hot 8 Brass Band, which later became an important sound even in the venerable old bands such as Rebirth Brass Band and Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

So that’s what they do: their line-up – for this most exciting of their albums – is a 10-strong jumble of trumpets, trombones, tenor sax, sousaphone, drums and percussion, all set up to march with the best of them, but with the beats and funky basslines of hip-hop integral to the sound. Snare drummer David Hinzie-Skogen is also the group’s rapper, and his style ranges from almost-spoken word poetry in the more subdued pieces to the rapid-fire scream-spitting of Rage Against the Machine in the full-on bouncing tracks.

Although the raps are rich in content and rhythm, I rather prefer their instrumental tracks here – or the ones closest to instrumental – such as ‘Round 1’, ‘Camouflage’ and ‘V.I.P.’. And then there’s ‘Brooklyn’. Another instrumental track, ‘Brooklyn’ is just an incredible recording. The composition is absolutely spot-on for one thing: it moves between themes quite quickly, but they don’t come out of nowhere; each make sense with the ones around them, and each are as head-banging and foot-stomping as the others, the layers of music split between the instruments all coming together as a great barrage of sound. And you’ve got amazing solos too, from trombone, tenor sax, sousaphone and percussion as they roll through old-school New Orleans brass, soul, R’n’B and hip-hop on their journey. It’s a wonderful piece that quite rightly became the Youngbloods’ signature, and was even adopted into the brass band canon around the US.

Nat McIntosh’s sousaphone deserves a special mention too. Although the instrument is basically a fancy, stretched out and looped tuba, the sounds that McIntosh gets out of it are astounding. I’d never heard anything like it before. All throughout center:level:roar, the pieces are punctuated by the scratching of turntablism, strange synth chords and a whole range of sound effects from sirens to horses…but it’s all the sousaphone. By playing the instrument more like a didgeridoo – where the voice, embouchure and shape of the mouth cavity and throat are all manipulated to change the quality of sound rather than the pitch – McIntosh brings a whole new layer of sound to the traditional brass band set-up.

As a bit of a ‘you might also like…’, if you dig center:level:roar and a bunch of other stuff I’ve covered on this blog before, check out the Brooklyn Qawwali Party. They were formed by a few members of the Youngblood Brass Band and made a mash-up between brass band music, jazz, rock and qawwali music, their repertoire consisting solely of pieces made famous by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The results weren’t always exactly on the money, but it really is a fascinating experiment that has its special moments…and I’ve just noticed that they released a second album that I never knew existed, a whole seven years after their first. So that’s my evening sorted…

223: Árnica Pura, by Davide Salvado

Davide Salvado (Spain)
Árnica Pura (2011)
12 tracks, 41 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

In preparing to head over to Santiago de Compostela for my first WOMEX as a member of the production team (rather than just as a delegate), I decided to delve into the music of Galicia, the region of Spain in which Santiago is the capital. Galician culture is rather different from other Spanish cultures, with its language having much more in common with Portuguese and many of its ancient traditions tracing back to the Celts. Of course, the music reflects this: there are no traditions quite like Galician music. The combinations of instruments in Galician folk music is very pleasing (to me, at least, and maybe you if you like somewhat harsh tones), with melodies played on a combination of gaita (bagpipes) and zanfona (hurdy-gurdy) and rhythms backed up by the large square frame drum, the pandeiro, and the pandeireta (tambourine).

But, like most folk music traditions, the jewel of Galician music is its song. And that was what I first found in my Galician music journey. Very specifically, it was this video by singer Davide Salvado*:

I watched that video and I was awe-stuck. My mouth was literally hanging open. Everything about it is so, so beautiful to me. The setting in a woods next to a mossy, ivy-covered rock, the delicate and intimate actions of washing someone’s feet, and the connection with ancient nature-based rituals with the use of flowers. There’s a subversion of the masculine in this act too, which is really lovely, helped by the fact that Davide is so good looking. And, of course, there is the song itself. ‘Meu Meniño’ is from his debut album Árnica Pura, but the rawness of the performance in this short video makes it extra special. Its melody is simply stunning; so gentle and fragile, but with a deep sadness to it too, and the way Davide’s voice flutters around the ornaments and leans into some of the more uncomfortable notes has the effect of tugging on the heart strings. Even in a few short verses, you can hear all sorts of musical connections too, with little bits of Spanish, Celtic and even Arabic working their way into the melody.

After I watched that video the first time, I was stunned for a few seconds, and then I watched it again. And then I had to show everyone. Although most liked the song, no-one seemed as enthusiastic as I’d hoped. My friend Robin even said something to the effect of “Jim, this looks suspiciously like hippy nonsense.” And yeah, he’s right, but come on. Even hippy nonsense can be achingly beautiful sometimes – here’s proof. So, although today’s entry is ostensibly about the album, I’m basically using it as an excuse to show more people the video of Davide’s ‘Meu Meniño’ in the hopes that one of you will be struck by it as much as I was. And if you’re not, at least you have a whole album of top-notch Galician folk song to enjoy either way.


* Mad coincidence: just found out that it’s apparently Davide’s birthday as I write this…on my own birthday! Happy birthday to us!

222: Tim Key. With a String Quartet. On a Boat, by Tim Key

Tim Key (United Kingdom)
Tim Key. With a String Quartet. On a Boat (2010)
30 tracks, 54 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I honestly think Tim Key is one of the very funniest people around at the moment. I first encountered his work as part of the short-lived (three-episode) TV sketch show Cowards, and have been hooked on his work ever since. He seems to approach comedy from a different tack than everyone else. There’s not that many comedians that, for all their acting, writing and TV appearances would still have a legitimate claim for the primary title of poet. But Tim Key’s not exactly normal. So of course one of his most successful solo projects would be a comedy album in the old fashioned way, one made specifically for the listener rather than just a recording of a live show.

The album is ostensibly one of Key performing a collection of his poems to the backing of a string quartet. And it very much is that – there are 29 poems here, all performed in his impeccable manner and of varying length (although most are only a few seconds long, showing a genius and depth of storytelling in their brevity). But it’s so much more than that – in fact, the majority of the album comes after each poem has finished. Key interacts with the listener, instructing them on the premise of the album and how to listen to it, chats with the string quartet and deals with the increasingly frustrated Tom Basden (a.k.a. Lord, and fellow Coward), his usual musical accompanist ousted for the album. Another stroke of genius means that the tracks as presented are not in the order that they ‘happened,’ meaning you can only piece together the drama of it all by listening to it from beginning to end and making a mental jigsaw. In the end, then, Tim Key. With a String Quartet. On a Boat is a deliciously meta sitcom: the situation being the making of the very album you’re listening to.

This album is a great showcase for Key and his double-act with Basden, as it neatly distils Key’s humour and the dynamics of the pair: somehow both dark and silly, light-hearted and ridiculous but occasionally cruel. Above all it’s all absurd, abstract, intelligent and completely deadpan. There’s even an unexpected moment from Basden right near the end of the album in the form of ‘Lord’s Moment’, an incredibly poignant song that comes out of nowhere, but is appreciated all the same.

When I first came to Tim Key’s solo material, I did spend a while pondering, was he was an actual poet, or just pretending to be a poet? Can his works be described as poems? But really, what’s the point in wondering about it? When the end result is that he writes, performs and publishes his takes on poetry professionally, there’s very little difference either way. And when he somehow manages to come out with a record that is at once a collection of performed poems and a spoof of someone performing a collection of poems, you know that that line is always going to be – very deliberately – blurred.

221: Split, by Groundhogs

Groundhogs (United Kingdom)
Split (1971)
8 tracks, 40 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

For me, this album is like a distillation of British hippy rock of the late 60s-early 70s. All the way through there are elements alike with artists such as Jethro Tull, Blodwyn Pig, Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart and a million psychedelic bands of the time, all refined into one sound. There’s an extravagant looseness to the music that skews it to a slightly odd angle and adds to its trippy atmosphere, but it’s saved from sounding sloppy by the tightness of the compositions – the eight songs on this album all have a direction that they are headed towards, and even if they take some detours here and there, there’s no rambling. It’s like if garage-band jamming had a very clear purpose in mind. That at-once looseness and tightness of atmosphere is also helped by the tightness of the group itself, with Tony McPhee on guitars and vocals (and very much the leading man of the band), Peter Cruikshank on bass and Ken Pustelnik on drums, there’s no extraneous sonic elements that need to be built into textures that simply work perfectly as a trio.

The fuzz of the guitars, the crunchiness of the vocals, the chugging rhythms and the clashing cymbals show Groundhogs’ place in the evolution of heavy metal, but the structure of the compositions and their slightly mystical and conceptual airs also foreshadow the prog rock of the latter part of the decade. But me being me, the track that always stands out as a highlight is the last one, ‘Groundhog’, the song from which the group took their name. Interestingly, it’s a song written by the artist featured yesterday, John Lee Hooker. It’s clearly his too: his trademark style is left intact, and the cover is a very faithful one, stripped back as it is from the rest of the album. It’s an almost-solo by McPhee (with just Pustelnik’s kick drum keeping beat), shredding up the electric slide guitar alongside his relaxed but weighty vocals. One of the things I like most about this track is its placement as the album closer. There are blues bits all the way through the album, but ‘Groundhog’ coming at the end is like a proper full stop, as if to say ‘that’s what we are and what we can be, but where we came from is just as important.’ After some strange directions in the rest of the album, the simple, raw Hooker groove brings it all back down to earth with as much grit as any other track.

Split is a great album to get your fix of psychedelic rock with a bluesy tinge without having to stray into acid trips and badly-played sitar territory – Groundhogs keep their feet on the ground even when their brains and voices and fingers maybe travelling a little outside our usual astral plane.

220: Live at Café au Go-Go, by John Lee Hooker

John Lee Hooker (USA)
Live at Café au Go-Go (1967)
8 tracks, 35 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Unlike Skip James, another blues artist who featured here a couple of weeks ago, there’s no shortage of recordings by John Lee Hooker, from any stage of his career as a musician. From cutting sides while working as a janitor in a Detroit steel mill in the 40s to recording with Carlos Santana, Miles Davis and Van Morrison in the 1990s, his career was as varied as his sound was unique.

But instead of going for some of his perhaps more recognisable albums – or even those that feature his most famous singles of ‘Boom Boom’ or ‘Boogie Chillun’, as good as they are – I’ve gone for this rather low-key live recording from 1966. I think it’s so easy to remember John Lee Hooker as the popstar bluesman that he became, with ultra-polished recordings, cheesy production and guests for days, but it’s what he did before that that sets him apart. There’s a grit inherent in his work – in his voice, in his lyrics, in the tone of his guitar and the way he played it. It all sounds like a dirt road in the middle of a desert.

For this album, it’s not even like his solo recordings that you could very easily imagine being played in some lonesome town somewhere in the middle of the American nowhere. He’s already a big deal by this point, and you can tell that just by looking at the credits: engineered by the legendary Rudy Van Gelder of Blue Note fame, accompanied by Otis Spann on piano, and also with Muddy Waters adding his guitar to John Lee’s now and then, entirely without fanfare. The important thing is that it sounds raw. This is the real deal: a group of musicians that learnt their trade in the Mississippi delta, who plugged in, moved to Chicago and took the blues to the future while never forgetting the roots.

Everything is so simple. The songs are either in a 12-bar-blues or just stay on one chord all the way through, the licks are short and modest and the timing is very loose, but it’s clear that every one of these musicians are experts in what they do, because every note is in exactly the right place. There’s nothing too much or too little, and it all allows John Lee’s rough but subtle voice to cast its spell over the whole thing. Just listen to ‘Heartaches and Misery’, a lesson on the meanings of the blues and a rumination of why he does what he does; everything lines up so perfectly that you will believe every single word he says and understand it to your core.

John Lee Hooker, for all his music is recognisable, went through many different phases in his recording career, but I think none are as potent as when he just relaxed, kept things on the down-low and didn’t just play Blues Music, but really played the blues. At the Café Au-Go-Go in 1966, John Lee Hooker and his band were definitely channelling the real blues.

219: Journey, by Austin Wintory

Austin Wintory (USA)
Journey (2012)
18 tracks, 58 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

It’s been a little while since I had a video game soundtrack to nerd out over, so it’s great to get to bang on about Journey today. Journey is an achingly beautiful game; it’s one of those that are brought up in conversations about ‘video games as art.’ As the title suggests, it is the story of a journey, that of a faceless, cloaked figure controlled by the player. There is no language used in the game at all – the objectives are discovered in the exploration, the internal lore and mythology are all told through vague and ancient-looking pictograms. You meet other players along the way and you guide each other and keep each other company – all wordlessly. Above all, it is entirely graceful. Every movement is like that of a silk scarf on a gentle breeze, and even when the action becomes agonising or scary, it is all with the utmost beauty and elegance.

While I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to play the video game before you approach this soundtrack as an album – I wouldn’t be recommending it as a Good Album otherwise – the two work so much in tandem that they show the best of themselves as one symbiotic piece of art. That’s because the music of Journey doesn’t play out like the OST of a film, or even like the soundtracks of earlier games. It’s not linear in the same sense that the cues are heard from beginning to end before the next one starts; instead, the soundtrack is dynamic. This means the music itself adapts and changes subtly depending on the actions or movements of the player – themes will come and go, textures swell and decay and even rhythmic aspects become more pronounced or become absent entirely, all based on how you are playing in any given moment. This not only means that the music always fits the actions and emotions of the gameplay perfectly in real-time, but also that for every player and every playthrough, the soundtrack is an entirely unique and distinct work. How to capture this in the still-linear format of an album? Well in this instance, the composer Austin Wintory also takes the role of curator, selecting the pieces and themes to highlight and balancing them in a way that reflects the emotional tones of the game without the interactive element that would otherwise ‘create’ the soundtrack.

And all of that said, what is it like? Well, as you’d expect, it’s just as elegant and graceful as the game it is part of. Its lush sound is provided by a full orchestra, with soloists featuring on cello, flute and bass flute, harp, viola and serpent (an early wind instrument made of wood and shaped like a snake, roughly analogous to a modern tuba). Wintory has stated that he tried to write the music in a way that made it sound beyond any specific culture, but instead I hear a set that has worldwide influences, amalgamated respectfully but in a way that creates something new. It’s impressive that sounds that bring to mind Indian tambura, Indonesian gamelan, Irish fiddle music, Chinese strings, Japanese taiko and West African kora can all sit so easily within swelling orchestral music and enhanced with abstract or avant-garde sounds without any of it sounding forced or out-of-place.

Like the game itself, the soundtrack to Journey is a masterclass of subtlety. It sounds like discovery and learning, and it is exciting because the next thing is always to some degree unexpected. The perfect way to approach this soundtrack is to experience it, rather than just listen to it, to create your very own version of the soundtrack and to let it touch your emotions so much more deeply for it. Listen to this album by all means, but play Journey if you can.

218: The Epic, by Kamasi Washington

Kamasi Washington (USA)
The Epic (2015)
17 tracks, 173 minutes (3 CDs)
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

More than half a century after Ornette Coleman released The Shape of Jazz to Come, the genre is still exciting, still evolving and still looking on into the future. Possibly the biggest star in jazz at the moment is Kamasi Washington, and his 2015 album The Epic is a musical statement as world-shaking as Ornette’s was – and hopefully as prescient.

And ‘Epic’ is correct: this is a rarely-seen triple album of almost three hours of music. It’s not just epic in its length either, this is a big album in every sense. The core band is already larger than most – trombone, trumpets, two keys players, two bassists, two drummers, a percussionist and Washington on the monolithic tenor sax. Then there’s guest vocalists and instrumentalists dotted around…and a 32-piece orchestra and a 20-piece choir. The themes – narratively, musically, politically – are similarly huge. There’s certainly a lot of listening in this one, but it’s definitely worth the time and effort dedicated to a close and concerted listen, even if it’s not always necessarily the easiest or most comfortable experience.

This album is a manifesto not only for Washington’s work, but for the whole of the new era of jazz. The very first track is ‘The Changing of the Guard’, the title of which is a self-assured statement of musical and artistic significance with only the slightest (and well-earned) arrogance that rivals that of Ornette’s 1959 album. And by the time the 12 minutes of that track are over, you’ll surely agree that the title is entirely warranted.

The notions of what jazz has to be make no constraints here. Even within the jazz realm Washington sees no boundaries. It’s why it’s so hard to describe The Epic in simple terms. It’s not bop, or hard-bop or post-bop, but it includes those things. It’s not big band, but that’s there’s too. Free jazz, spiritual jazz, jazz fusion, funk, soul, gospel, hip-hop, Afrofuturism, full-blown orchestral music á la Sketches of Spain – it’s none of these things because it is all of them. For me, the obvious comparisons in terms of composition are to Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra’s Arkestra, but (for me!) more defined than the former, and more refined than the latter. In terms of his playing, he has all of the greats inside him – Coltrane, Coleman, Sanders, Ayler, Parker even, to go back that far – but there’s also the energetic, powerful spark that all those musicians had that gave them something else, and Washington has it too.

And you know what’s incredible and exciting and a little terrifying? Aside from a couple of limited-run self-releases, this is Kamasi Washington’s debut. He spent a long time learning and earning his stripes, and obviously putting years of thought into his craft…and then marks his arrival as a bandleader with an explosion. Nothing is a half-measure; he knew his statement would take three hours to recite and so he took those three hours and it’s a marvel. There’s no point talking about every aspect of this album because it would take too long and he already says all he needs to say on the record. With this one album, Kamasi Washington has surely made sure his name is carved in marble among the pantheon of jazz greats, and he still has an entire career ahead of him. The Epic is an odyssey, and it’s only the start of this journey.

217: Tender Prey, by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Australia)
Tender Prey (1988)
11 tracks, 54 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I don’t know why, but this album always makes me think of the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers. I reckoned it was because it may have been used as part of the soundtrack, but I looked it up and nope, no Nick Cave there at all. I think it must be because they both share a similar vibe, or maybe aesthetic. The most memorable and exciting moments of each are made up of an unsettlingly entertaining combination of ultra-violence and bleakness with a twinkle-eyed but pitch-black humour and a haunting beauty. Tender Prey’s songs are catchy like pop songs, but you won’t want to catch yourself idly singing these lyrics in public.

I really like the subversion of styles that Cave uses here, and things are never usually as they sound. ‘Deanna’ is an up-tempo gospel song that tells a gruesome story with a bug-eyed and manic delivery from all musicians involved; ‘Up Jumped the Devil’ is a work song suitable for mining brimstone in hell. The album is also relentless. There is a darkness to every single track in some way, whether it be subject matter, musically or just in the slightly weird and disturbing production. It’s also in the tracks themselves: both ‘The Mercy Seat’ and ‘Up Jumped the Devil’ end up in just a rolling and roiling jumble of sounds, repeated and overlapping phrases that get more and more demented the longer they tumble along together. As an exercise in atmosphere curation, Tender Prey is a masterwork.

And for all that, Cave doesn’t enjoy it at all. He’s been quoted as saying he doesn’t particularly like the songs, or the performances, or the production. His later disappointment (even revulsion?) in the result is a little understandable from a personal level – the album was made at a dark point in his life, at the height of his heroin abuse, living in a foreign country with a band wracked with disagreements and divisions. I reckon it’s natural to resent anything that comes from those origins. But those pressures somehow resulted in – from a neutral standpoint – an amazing album that reflects the darkness of its birth without seemingly any effect on its quality as a piece of art. This is not an album I could listen to every day. In fact, I’ve not listened to it for years. But when I do break it out, I revel in it all over again in disconcerted joy. Back into the CD rack for another few years, then.

216: Engurland (City Shanties), by Dizraeli

Dizraeli (United Kingdom)
Engurland (City Shanties) (2009)
12 tracks, 42 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Engurland (City Shanties) was the album that poet-rapper Dizraeli made shortly before he formed The Small Gods, whose album Moving in the Dark we’ve already discussed.

After a long time fronting the Brighton-based funky-dubby D’n’B hip-hop band Bad Science, this was the first time he struck out under his own (stage) name, and took a bit of a different direction with it. All the way through this album, although there are many different factors and influences, the most frequent and obvious is the blend of hip-hop with British folk. It’s not as simple as Dizraeli just rapping over some twee English tunes with a beat to them, though. Instead, it’s more that he’s taken the way stories are told in traditional folk songs and applied that same technique to his own lyricism, whether in his raps, poems or songs. The melding of folk music and hip-hop instrumentals (as well as jazz, bits of classical and the like) is definitely still present here, but it’s done – like all of Dizraeli’s work – with the utmost intelligence and ingenuity that there’s not a shred of contrivance in the whole thing.

Really, there’s so much to love on this album, whatever your preferred direction is. The title track ‘Engurland’ is the most recognisable track on the album and probably the one that got the most attention – it’s a clever use of Fat Les’s ‘Vindaloo’ that takes a rather bleak overview of the grottier side of modern Englishness with a wicked chorus – but there’s so much else here. From a hip-hop angle, there’s some of the most addictive rap flows I’ve ever heard in ‘To the Garden’ and ‘Good God’; there’s beautiful, sad songs in ‘Take Me Dancing’, ‘Reach Out’ and ‘It Won’t Be Long’; there’s the absurdist poem ‘Bomb Tesco’ and the heart-breaking spoken-word story of ‘Maria’; there’s even some delicious folk-baroque instrumentals in ‘Pen Tangle’ (geddit?) and ‘Reach In’.

Engurland (City Shanties) has an (obviously, unavoidably) more youthful sound than his later work – ever so slightly more naïve, perhaps a tiny bit performative in some of its edginess – but it’s not actually any the worse for that. This is an album of outstanding craft, full of incredible rhetorical acrobatics, laugh-out-loud moments and genuinely spine-tingling moments (I’ll never forget his performance of ‘Maria’ to a packed Jazz Café: unaccompanied spoken word and the crowd was silent, hanging off every syllable until the chorus, when every voice in unison and entirely unbidden, began to sing as one. Tear-inducing.)

I said a similar thing last time, but I honestly do believe that Dizraeli – as a wordsmith, as a thinker and as a musician – should be legitimately regarded as a genius. It was obvious ten years ago when this album came out and it’s only been shown to be the real deal with everything he has done since. If you don’t follow the work of Dizraeli, I urge you to delve deep – there’s an ocean in his work.

[If you want to know more about Dizraeli, I highly recommend the thorough and well-written article on UKHH by Emilia Cox, entitled ‘Dizraeli: The Story So Far’]

215: Soku Fola, by Zoumana Tereta

Zoumana Tereta (Mali)
Soku Fola (2009)
8 tracks, 49 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Another one-stringed fiddle! That’s two days in a row now. Yesterday’s was the Juldeh Camara’s Fula nyanyero from Gambia, today we hear the Zoumana Tereta’s soku from Mali. The instruments are very similar, in shape and sound, but the musical traditions are noticeably different.

Zoumana is Bozo, but his music is mostly in the Bamana style of the Ségou region of central Mali, the same bluesy pentatonics that will be familiar to those who know the music of Bassekou Kouyaté. Soku Fola has a delightful stripped-back and all-acoustic sound, just acoustic guitar, ngoni lute, a calabash for percussion and Zoumana’s soku and rich, raspy voice. It all allows the fiddle’s unique sound of horsehair-on-horsehair to come across, its scratchy sounds amplifying its complex harmonics. Sometimes they even take it right down to the bare essentials – ‘Beni a Jarabi’ is just soku, voice and calabash, and all the more wonderful for that.

Zoumana is not as well known in Europe as many of his compatriot musicians, but if you’ve listened to Malian music with any interest, it’s very likely you’ve heard him before. He was in high demand, featuring on recordings by Bassekou Kouyaté, Oumou Sangaré, Toumani Diabaté, Sali Sidibé, Amadou & Mariam, Issa Bagayogo, Sidi Touré…the list goes on. He didn’t just appear with Malian artists, either, with Tiken Jah Fakoly, Béla Fleck, St Germain and Dirtmusic all requiring his services at one point or another. That demand came for a reason, and not just because of his exceptional musical talents alone: for a long time it looked as if Zoumana would be the last great soku player – the young people of Mali just weren’t interested in the instrument or its repertoire at all. Luckily a few did pick it up in recent years and there seems to be, if not quite a revival, at least a resuscitation of the instrument. It was a close one, too – Zoumana passed away in 2017, at only 54 years old.

For all his renown in Mali and his near-ubiquity as a guest on albums by other Malian artists, Zoumana Tereta never really made the leap to a solo artist. He released just a small handful of albums as a bandleader, but they still give a great insight into this wonderful performer and a different side to Malian music that isn’t heard nearly as often as it should be.

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.