279: Volume I, by Commodo Gantz Kahn

Commodo Gantz Kahn (United Kingdom/Turkey)
Volume I (2015)
6 tracks, 24 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The producers Commodo, Gantz and Kahn are three of dubstep’s biggest names of the past decade, and Volume I, their first three-way collaboration, was always going to be a release with expectation on its back – this was the biggest supergroup the scene could have hoped for.

Now, you see, I’ve just typed that last sentence, in the full knowledge that I have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s the vibe that I get from reading about the release, anyway, but I have to say I’m not as up on the comings and goings of dubstep as I’d like to be. And I would like to be. When I listen to good dubstep it hits me hard and makes me wish I’d been totally immersed in the scene since its late 90s inception. What I lack in the intimate knowledge and vocabulary of dubstep, I make up for in just thinking ‘oh my god this is so sick!’ at the top of my mind-voice when I hear it. I know what I like, and Volume I is exactly that.

This album is an amazing journey of sound and it doesn’t even clock in at half-an-hour. There’s no doubting the dubsteppedness here – the pulse is slow, the producers use of layered delays and reverb are enough to rival the classic Jamaican studios and the bass is suitably cavity-worrying – but there’s also a refreshing lack of cliché at work. For starters, they employ hardly any of that stereotypical dubstep wobble-bass. This isn’t party music, either. No happy-go-lucky, carefree dance party anyway. The music here is dark, intense and menacing. You’ll be dancing to it, but you’ll do it with a moody expression on your face.

What it does have is a very strong Middle Eastern feel. Although Istanbul native Gantz has the most obvious connection, each of the producers had worked sounds from across the region into their work before (he typed, in the full knowledge that he had no idea what he was talking about), but for this album, it forms the basis of each composition. Synths that echo the qanun zither or ney reed flute; samples of Turkish singing and sweeping Egyptian string orchestras warped and distorted into unsettlingly slow melodies and ominous drones; electronic and affected beats undergird rhythmic flourishes from darbuka (goblet drum) and riqq (tambourine); mountains of minor seconds, minor sevenths and major thirds that turn it all into an otherworldly hijaz – the Middle East is there in every element, and they fit so comfortably within the dubstep milieu that I’m astounded that there isn’t already a huge scene devoted to just this fusion.*

Volume I is the perfect soundtrack to watching a storm roll in from the horizon on a warm day, seeing the sheets of rain and feeling the peels of thunder in your belly. I know, because it was the album on the speakers while me and my mates hurriedly packed down our barbecue while casting worried glances at the churning sky in the distance getting closer and closer. Commodo, Gantz and Kahn’s beats and bass gave it all a suitably apocalyptic edge and definitely made us all feel a little like we were in a cool thriller film.

Even though I know so little about the dubstep scene, I’m glad that I have the wits to recognise a real musical event when I hear one, and this wonderful album certainly lives up to the reputations of its three big-name producers. It’s just a shame it’s so short. No Volume II seems to be out there yet, but I check diligently. Until then, turn off the lights, turn up the bass and fall into another world – for 24 minutes.


* If there is, why didn’t you tell me? I want to be invited to your parties!

278: Nevermind, by Nirvana

Nirvana (USA)
Nevermind (1991)
13 tracks, 42 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

What can I say about Nirvana’s Nevermind that you don’t already know, and probably know better than me anyway? It is the apex of grunge, a undisputed classic that has influenced so many artists of so many styles, all around the world.

Yes, it is perhaps a little polished for a mainstream audience compared to other artists – and even Nirvana’s other music. But there is only so much that you can polish grit, and Nevermind contains more than enough not only to still anchor it firmly in grunge, but for it to still be markedly heavier than any other mainstream hit that year. By making their sound a little more slick, Nirvana helped to introduce the grunge scene to the whole world, and in doing so, changed the direction of rock – and, to some degree, pop – for a long time to come.

In Nirvana’s sound you can hear a direct descendancy from the punk of the 1970s – both the British styles of the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Buzzcocks and those lot, and the American side of things with The Stooges and Dead Kennedys – as well as back to the music of the Doors and Jimi Hendrix. Unlike punk, which is very brash and sometimes shrill, there is a real meatier aspect to Nirvana’s sound, influenced by heavy metal. And at the same time, what gives this album (especially its most famous singles, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, ‘Lithium’ and ‘Come As You Are’) such a wide appeal is that it has all the elements of a great pop record. Memorable lyrics, devilishly catchy tunes and riffs, a charismatic (and very cute) frontman – and it’s really fun to sing along to.

So with Nevermind, Nirvana created the album that turned grunge into pop. Probably the most impressive thing about it is that they did so without losing any of their own or their music’s integrity. No matter what music you’re into, you’ve probably heard of (and heard) Nevermind, and you’ve definitely heard music that it’s influenced – that is surely the dream of any artist in any niche musical scene.

277: Hamilton: An American Musical, Original Broadway Cast Recording

Original Broadway Cast Recording (USA/Puerto Rico)
Hamilton: An American Musical (2015)
46 tracks, 142 minutes (2CD)
Spotify ∙ iTunes

For those that have never heard of Hamilton, it’s a hard sell. A sung-through hip-hop musical based on the life of a US Founding Father – Alexander Hamilton. It sounds ridiculous, and even typing that sentence I can hear in my mind the sort of dross that it would make me expect. Lucky for me, then, that I actually heard a couple of tracks from the show before it was explained to me.

Because – if you didn’t know by now – Hamilton is a revelation in the world of music theatre. It has won buckets of Tony Awards and Olivier Awards (including Best Musical and Best Actor in both) and many other theatre awards, the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theatre Album (for today’s Good Album) and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s broken box office grossing records and tickets – on both Broadway and the West End – routinely go for silly money. Perhaps most impressive of all, it turned me, an avowed anti-musical-theatrist, not only into a huge fan of Hamilton itself, but has opened my ears to a world of art I had previously considered far removed from my own brainspace.

How did Miranda manage to turn such a corny premise into probably the hugest (small-m) musical phenomenon of the past decade? First off is the obvious quality of the music on offer. To hear the words ‘hip-hop musical’ is surely to cringe; a bunch of ‘theatre kids’ with their flamboyant overacting and cod New York Jewish accents, making semi-ironic and wholly-awful attempts at old school hip-hip-hippety-hop – argh, I get angry just thinking about it. But Lin-Manuel ain’t like that. He’s dyed in the wool, growing up immersed in the sounds of hip-hop of all styles, as well as musical theatre cast recordings, competing in ciphers as a kid and compulsively writing raps. Add that together with a genius brain for lyricism, drama and storytelling, and you get a musical based around hip-hop in an authentic and sympathetic way, with incredibly intelligent verses that convey huge amounts of narrative, emotion and personality in very limited space and absolutely dripping with witty wordplay and virtuosic rhetorical turn-arounds. The musical isn’t limited to hip-hop either, as listeners are taken on a journey through R’n’B, jazz, classical and standard showtune-type music as well.

Another thing that really helps the whole conceit is that the casting was made in a very conscious way – in the original Broadway cast that you hear on this album, all actors except one (the ridiculous figure of King George III, e.g. the oppressor) are played by people of colour. This allows the show to be approached in a different frame-of-mind than otherwise, bringing to the fore different themes and connections to the present day – and manages to disguise the fact that, at its core, it is a story about the entangled lives of a million mostly-rich white men, as history typically focuses on at the expense of basically anyone else. It also allows for the casting of actors with very different skill sets than might normally be found in a story such as this.

Even divorced from the play itself, this original cast recording stands up as a Good Album and a rewarding listen in and of itself. The cast is made up, as you can expect, of amazing performers, from Miranda himself as Alexander Hamilton, Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler and, for me the stand-out voice of the whole thing, Daveed Diggs as the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson. Diggs is a well-known alternative hip-hop artist in his own right, and he brings that to his roles with amazing results – his rapid-fire verse in the song ‘Guns and Ships’ is the fastest in Broadway history, averaging at 6.3 words a second, and each of them clear as a bell. Add in the fact that the whole album was produced by ?uestlove and Black Thought from The Roots, and the musical pedigree is outstanding. The story is just as affecting as on stage, too. The first time I listened through to this album, I was completely hooked in a way that, paradoxically, made me stop listening to it. I was so engaged in the story and enthralled by the music that at the end of the first act, I had to put it down – I wanted to make sure I could listen to the second half of the performance in a way that I could devote to it my full attention…and also, I didn’t want it to be over so soon. After I had finished that first listen through, on a sunny bumble around Brighton, with my heart having been wrenched several times by the multiple tragedies of the piece, I had to just sit down and reflect in silence. It was incredibly moving. Just how Miranda could read an epic-length and very dry biography of Hamilton and pull from that this intensely emotional, funny and downright badass hip-hop musical is simply astounding.

I’ve extolled Hamilton a lot here (can you tell I’ve been waiting a long time for this one to come up on this blog?), and I think it would be remiss to not at least mentions its faults. Some are understandable, such as a few fairly major historical inaccuracies that are bound to occur in the context of making a neat and compelling two-act story. Some are less so: the criticisms of slave-owning Founding Fathers are a little too subtle – or perhaps, too gentle; the construction of an ‘immigrant’ narrative around Hamilton as an analogue to today’s immigrant experience when he was actually just a white guy who moved from one British colony to another when he was a teenager; and the co-opting of an art-form of the oppressed to sing the songs of the oppressors are a little less excusable. It is important that we don’t allow the impressiveness and wokeness of some aspects of the show to blind us to some of its more problematic elements.

Nevertheless, I remain in awe of Hamilton. Since discovering this album, I’ve not only gone on to see the show at the West End twice (simply amazing, of course, see it asap!), but I’ve also been to see several others that I don’t think I would have if I hadn’t had my eyes and ears opened by this one. Yes, ‘a sung-through hip-hop musical based on the life of a US Founding Father – Alexander Hamilton’ sounds rubbish. But if you’re at all a fan of good music and you’ve not given it a go yet, at least take a listen to the opening song and let it blow away your expectations and keep you listening for the rest of the show.

276: Hologram İmparatorluğu, by Gaye Su Akyol

Gaye Su Akyol (Turkey)
Hologram İmparatorluğu (2016)
12 tracks, 43 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The past four or five years has seen an explosion in the retro-styled Turkish psychedelic scene. Sounds niche, right? But the number of artists in that niche – from Turkey and elsewhere – with booming international careers seems to keep rising: younger groups such as BaBa ZuLa, Altın Gün and Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek command hardy followings and undertake hardcore tour schedules, and stars from the original 1970s scene such as Selda Bağcan and Moğollar are getting used to a new-found worldwide audience due to a bunch of reissues and compilations. Even comedian Stewart Lee did a bit in his 2017 show Content Provider about the style, name-checking Moğollar, Selda, Erkin Koray and Toz Hasat along the way.

One of the most successful artists from this unexpected resurgence is Gaye Su Akyol. She’s often referred to as the sound of young Istanbul, but her sound owes a lot to those retro stars. Bağlama and oud and plucked alongside warped surf guitars, frame drum rhythms are bolstered by tight kit drumming, and Akyol’s throaty and thickly-vibratoed voice swoops over it, reminiscent of Turkish classical singers. There are also elements of film-score like string orchestras, Latin rhythms and dabs of electronica to mix things up too. While she uses many retro sounds in her music, there’s a powerful modernity to it.

Akyol’s style allows European and American listeners to approach Turkish music in the way that she herself approached rock. Her core influences are actually artists like Nirvana, Nick Cave and Jefferson Airplane, but in the way she first heard them – relating them in her mind to the older Turkish music she’d grown up with. It makes sense, too: Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ would fit alongside any Turkish psych compilation with ease. Now we get to hear those sounds parsed back through the same filter.

As her first international release, Hologram İmparatorluğu was a revelation and a powerful announcement of her arrival. The music was as striking as her on-stage presence and in the same manner – her fashion sense seems set at least 20 years in the future…or perhaps it’s a 1970s view of 2030s fashion. It’s all about looking back and looking far forward at the same time to make insightful – and not to mention insanely groovy – statements about the present.

What about the shared zeitgeist of the ultra-hip across Europe and Anatolia has led it to pick up on those intergalactic sounds of 1970s Turkey all the way over here in the 2010s? I won’t pretend I know any further explanation than ‘cos it sounds great’ and that’s good enough for me. And if it’s bringing around such cool artists as Gaye Su Akyol, we surely can’t have any complaints.

275: Careless Love, by Madeleine Peyroux

Madeleine Peyroux (USA)
Careless Love (2004)
12 tracks, 43 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Listening to Madeleine Peyroux creates a particularly calm sense of enjoyment. The songs on this album don’t get you up and dancing or get you pondering politics or your own mortality. The songs themselves are full of feeling, but don’t manipulate your emotions to uncomfortable extremes. This is the music of a particularly elegant, lowly lit but still friendly and welcoming cocktail bar – perfect for lounging with a slight buzz and letting your mind drift away through the music like lazy coils of smoke.

Careless Love is a set of covers of old jazz songs, country music and American folk (plus one original song), all conducted in a mellow, jazzy manner that suits Peyroux’s equally mellow voice. In fact, the pervading thought that I have when I listen to this album is that she sounds almost exactly like Billie Holiday. Her tones are warm and gentle, and her phrasing has enough of a swing to it to get your foot tapping without raising your heartbeat above a pleasant resting rate. The resemblance is at times uncanny, but aside from one or two Holiday favourites, the songs here usually help the album steer clear of feeling like a tribute act.

And the song choices are inspired. They bring a new slant onto classic songs but retain enough of the originals’ edge as to stop it descending into ‘a bunch of songs covered in a wacky, unusual way’ territory. Peyroux’s versions of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go’ are both given different atmospheres but allow the lyrics their original weight, whereas ‘Lonesome Road’, ‘Careless Love’, and ‘No More’ capture the charm of the originals while updating their sound. Most impressive for me is ‘Weary Blues’, a cover of Hank Williams’ ‘Weary Blues From Waitin’’. The song is a heartbroken call into the empty night from an abandoned lover. Peyroux’s rendition is a slow and mournful blues, and the pain in her voice gives you the idea that this is a song of bereavement. So you go to listen to Williams’ 1951 original to hear how it sounded in its fully countrified manner…and in comparison, it sounds as if he got the complete wrong end of the stick – and he wrote it! The original seems bizarrely frivolous, as if he’s having too much fun for the upsetting lyrics. It’s fairly quick, it’s in a major key…it even has yodelling in it! Somehow, it feels that Peyroux did the song much more justice on this album than Williams did in the first place.

As much as I dislike the term, Careless Love is a great ‘easy listening’ album. It’s one that you can stick on and enjoy in the simplest way – these are sweet sounds that can balm the ears. And if you want to extend your listening experience, her previous album, 1996’s Dreamland, is also a very nice recommendation: listen out especially for similarly chilled versions of ‘Walking After Midnight’ and ‘La Vie En Rose’.

274: Se Nou Ki La!, by Chouk Bwa Libète

Chouk Bwa Libète (Haiti)
Se Nou Ki La! (2015)
15 tracks, 59 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Voodoo gets a bad rap. In the Euro-American sphere, we mostly think of it as a shady and sinister folk belief based on the esoteric magic and the occult, with the most common symbolism being voodoo dolls and zombies. If you know even a little bit about world history, it probably won’t be too surprising that these preconceptions are not only false, but are the result of racism and colonialism in action. In fact, a lot of it was the direct result of American anti-Haitian propaganda beginning at the time of the Haitian slave revolt and eventual independence; the USA was eager to paint the victory as mysterious, evil and, above all, Satanic to deter similar actions in their own country. Just one more way white people made the world a little worse.

In reality, Vodou (as the Haitian variant is correctly called; Voodoo is from Louisiana) is a religion just like many others. It is a syncretic religion that draws mostly on West African beliefs such as the Vodun of the Fon and Ewe people and the Ifé of the Yoruba as well as drawing from aspects of the native religions of the Caribbean and adopting a veneer of Roman Catholicism (such as the equating of various spirit-gods with Catholic saints). In this way, it is very similar to other Afro-American religions, especially Santería in Cuba and Candomblé in Brazil – the religions share many deities between them.

As with most religions, Vodou has its own associated musical culture, and that’s where Chouk Bwa Libetè come in. They play the traditional form of mizik rasin - literally ‘roots music’ – that draws heavily on their religious beliefs. For this album, the group are 12 strong and their music is made solely from percussion and vocals (as well as a single horn that blasts a heralding bass call every so often). This isn’t the war drumming and chants of the early Hollywood portrayal of voodoo though; this music is intricate and complex and filled with beautiful harmonies. The songs, which sing of olicha (spirit-gods) and ache (soul and spirit), range from sad and mournful to sweet and joyous, but always in the gentlest, warmest tones and sung with a real camaraderie. Just listen to the songs ‘Olicha Legba’ and ‘Nèg Ayisyen’ – the way the voices join and entwine feels like a loving group hug for the ears.

There is an undeniable Africanness to Chouk Bwa’s music, in their overlapping rhythms, asymmetrical tapped-out timeline patterns and call-and-response vocals that are an obvious link to Haitian’s and Vodou’s shared histories, but there are also connections to many American styles. Their music bears an understandable resemblance to other Afro-American percussion-and-voice religious music such as Santería’s bembe and Candomblé’s batuque, even Rastafari’s nyabinghi, and it goes further: there are slight but definite strains of everything from calypso to gospel to blues in here. It isn’t even a question of ‘who influenced who’ – these musics all arose from common ancestry, so it makes sense that they would share characteristics.

Vodou is such a crucial element in Haitian culture and history, and its music such a window to the history of African people in the Americas. For religions and cultures as important and wide-ranging as Vodou to be misrepresented for so long as a malevolent force – so much so that the very idea of it has become a shorthand for creepiness and evil – is such an infuriating wrong. The beautiful, deeply religious sounds of Chouk Bwa Libète are a wonderful antidote to this injustice in more ways than one.

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.