Gospel melts into Soul in this dazzling collection of sides originally released by the Chess subsidiary label Checker.
Devised by the same team supporting the likes of Muddy Waters and Etta James at Chess, the vintage of Checker Gospel celebrated here is distinguished by its expertly raw, rugged, live feel — thumping bass and pounding drums, bluesy guitar and horns — and its keen engagement with contemporary realities and politics, with an underlying, unwavering commitment to the Civil Rights movement. Not forgetting its sheer, startling, richly diverse soulfulness.
Key architects of the Chicago Sound and Motown are amongst the scores of contributors: Charles Stepney, Gene Barge, Eddie Kendricks, and Leonard Caston Jr. are in the house… Morris Jennings, drummer on Curtis’ Superfly and Terry Callier’s What Color Is Love… Louis Satterfield from The Pharaohs and Earth Wind & Fire… Ramsey Lewis’ guitarist Byron Gregory… Phil Upchurch… Laura Lee…
Producer Monk Higgins joined Checker in 1967, bringing his experience of R&B and Gospel hit-making for the labels One-derful and Satellite, together with a loyal cohort of musicians. A protege of Willie Dixon, engineer Malcolm Chisholm set up the Ter Mar studio as if preparing for a live gig, carefully teasing measures of bleed into the microphones. With Ralph Bass from King Records running A&R, they knew exactly what they were after. ‘I’m using horns and an R&B sound in gospel recordings,’ said Bass. ‘We have no charts. All the musicians are given the chord changes. I want the cats to think when we’re cutting. I want spontaneity, and that’s what we’re getting.’ And: ‘There is more to gospel than just finding solace in the church. This follows the same message of Martin King, who was fighting for a new way of life. Kids are tired of hearing Jesus Give Us Help. They want a positive message.’
Focussed on the late sixties and early seventies, the twenty-five recordings here are all killer no filler, but try these four, random entry points: the heavy funk ostinato of the Violinaires’ Groovin’ With Jesus, working itself up into a post-James-Brown brass frenzy, sure to knock your socks off; Cleo Jackson Randle’s title track, for those who like their Gospel straight-up and hard-core; Eddie Kendricks’ achingly timely choral call-to-arms, Stand Up America, Don’t Be Afraid; the East St Louis Gospelettes’ heart-stopping, fathoms-deep rendition of Bobby Bland’s I’ll Take Care Of You.
A beautiful gatefold sleeve; a full-colour booklet with excellent notes by Robert Marovich; top-notch sound. Another knockout selection by Greg Belson and David Hill.
A shoo-in for soul compilation of the year.

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These are AS Classic tees: ‘relaxed fit; heavyweight, 220 GSM, 100% combed cotton. Built to last with neck ribbing, side seams, shoulder-to-shoulder tape, and double needle hems, plus preshrunk fabric for minimal shrinkage.’

With the HJ logo in red & blue on the back.

With the HJ logo in red & blue on the back.

With the HJ logo in red & blue on the back.

‘Since the 16th century, the Ecuadorian province of Esmeraldas has been home to a unique Afro-Indigenous culture originating in the integration of the Indigenous Chachi and Nigua peoples with African Maroon communities. Juyungo documents significant Esmeraldan artists and bands playing the Afro-Ecuadorian folklore of the province, as well as including some older field recordings. Based mostly on the marimba, whose origins lie partly in the African balafon, partly in Indigenous percussion instruments, the music is laced with call and response chants, ambient insect and bird noise, the filigree finger-styles of the Andean guitar tradition and the panpipes of the mountains. This is resonant insider roots music at its headiest — the mystic revelation of Esmeraldas, gully deep and lustral.’ Francis Gooding, The Wire.

The fifth in our series of LPs compiling classic music from Ecuador. Customary Honest Jons runnings: a beautiful gatefold sleeve; superior pressing, with vivid, intimate sound; full-size, sixteen-page booklet, in colour throughout, with detailed, fascinating, bi-lingual notes, and stunning photographs.

The music is transfixing, magical; not like anything else. From start to finish, this album is continuously, profoundly immersive; a kind of journeying, trippy meditation about slavery and cultural resistance, identity and mix, places and spaces, futures and pasts. It’s inscrutable to net-surfing, algorithms, Shuffle. But for a taste try the insurgent marimba roller Agua Largo, jet-propelled by Rosa Huila’s rapturous blend of African spiritualist and Christian chant. ‘Healing music,’ Zakia called it on Gilles Peterson’s BBC show recently. And the ravishing pasillo Kasilla Shungulla — ‘calm your heart’ in the Quichua language — a duet between the Peruvian master-guitarist Raúl García Zárate and viola da gamba by Juan Luis Restrepo from Medellin, recorded in a baroque church in Buzbanza, Colombia.

With our logo as shown, on the front of shirt; and blown up, centred, on the back.

Beautiful, insurgent, fabulously danceable jazz music from South Africa, flowing out of the penny-whistle kwela bands of the 1950s. (Kwela means ‘get moving’, in Xhosa.)
Bra Gwigwi played alto and clarinet alongside Hugh Masekela and Kippie Moeketsi in The Jazz Dazzlers; also in The Jazz Maniacs and The Harlem Swingsters. He came to the UK from Johannesburg as an actor and clarinettist in King Kong — a musical about a Zulu boxer — which opened in London in February 1961.
Recording in January 1967, at Dennis Duerden’s Transcription Centre, he is joined here by Dudu Pukwana, Chris McGregor, Laurie Allan, and Ronnie Beer, all from The Blue Notes. Ladbroke Grove legend, and mainstay of our London Is The Place For Me series, Coleridge Goode plays double bass.

No less than sixteen shots of jubilant, jump-up mbaqanga. Check the Ethiopian vibe of Mra (which became core repertoire of The Brotherhood of Breath). Listen to Nyusamkhaya, and try to get it out of your head. Impossible.
Lovely notes by Steve Beresford, too.

‘The South African folk music that makes people glad to be alive!’

In the great tradition of his time with Count Ossie, four new grounation furies — hypnotic, thunderous, urgent, mystical — with dubwise repeta, funde and bass drums embedding the Light Of Saba veteran’s gorgeous trombone classicism.
The opener is a rocking kumina rhythm, with ring-the-alarm metal percussion and exhortatory brass; Free The People swirls some apocalyptic reasoning into the foggy, thumping mix. Universe In Crisis is another emergency call, chuffing headlong down the grooves… before the beautiful, anthemic Chant takes a step back from the fire, closing with a sense of thankful, spiritual reconciliation, the expert drumming and lyrical bone-work in full effect.

Epic, grooving, extravagantly creative, perfectly attuned blends of complex mbalax drumming, field recordings, thumping kick-drum, and cosmic, bubbling, jamming synths and electronics.
The opening is suitably liminal, haunted by a diachronic sense of times past, present, and to come: ancestral ghosts, scratched playback, scraps of old recordings, voices strangulated or just out of range; puttering drums; futuristic, kosmische keys. Part II picks up the pace; III gives the drummers some, and heightens the atmosphere of enchantment. Jon Hassell’s Fourth World music courses through a kind of Dream Theory In Dakar.
Toco SOS, the second side, is a thumping, throbbing, mesmeric future-classic; perfect for fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n on the Autobahn… in a spacecraft. Expert hand percussion, call-and-response singing, bin-trembling foot-drum, spaceways keys. Sleekly funky as prime Popol Vuh.
Both sides range expansively by way of Berlin, where Lamin resided for a few years: you can hear something of T++’s brilliant, landmark HJ record on the A, and elements of Mark Ernestus’ crucial Ndagga project, on the B.
Half an hour of stunning music; in a beautiful sleeve, with mirror lettering, and an intricate spot-gloss rendition of salt crystals, laid over a photograph of the salt mines at Lac Rose, outside Dakar.

Four dazzling, extended engagements with mbalax master-drumming.
The contribution from Holy Tongue is chase-the-devil steppers — thumping, clangorous, reverberating — super-charged with energy and atmosphere. From the off, drummer Valentina Magaletti detonates a hard rain of small bombs, rounds of fire, ticking fuses. Musical co-ordinates are somewhere between classic On-U Sound crew like African Head Charge, The Mothmen, and Creation Rebel, and the experimental funk of the Pop Group and 23 Skidoo, at their funkiest. Thrillingly, the two dubs are increasingly deranged.
Adjusting the same wavelengths as her superb Workaround LP, Beatrice Dillon plays spaced-out, abstract synth-work against the bodily physicality of the ancient, shifting mbalax rhythms. The music is poised, mindful, tentative; but also limber, fleet, and magical.
Phantasmagorical and efflorescent, Lamin Fofana’s one-two is simply stunning. Both excursions are wide-open, beautiful, epic, and propulsive — the first mix is banging and headlong, the second more syncopated and serpentine — teeming with freshly sublime, funkdafied updates on Jon Hassell’s Fourth World possible musics.
The two parts of LABOUR’s Etu Keur Gui engage the same sequence of drum patterns (called bakks) from different perspectives. The duo performed portions of this piece at the opening ceremony of the Dakar Biennial in 2022, at the Grand National Theater, with thirty sabar players from the family of Doudou Ndiaye Rose. This Wolof phrase for the inside-yard of a home — a meeting-place, an architectural breather — doubles here as a metaphor for inner space on a metaphysical level; and Pan Sonic, Muslimgauze, Zoviet France, early Shackleton… all ghost across the threshold.

At its most open, shifting and expressive to date. For all the music’s complexity and deep coherence, freedom is the key. At times it grooves hard; at others it’s lush, romantic.
With Tikiman and Marc Muellbauer.

A handful of LPs signed by Moritz!

Precious, timely, moody reflections on migrating from Côte d’Ivoire to Moss, in Norway, over ruff breakbeat funk supplied by the nimble bass-playing of Maimouna’s old man (from Kambo Super Sound), and the expert conga and kit-drumming of Stliletti-Ana (from Jesse, in Helsinki). Even in their delirium, b-boys and girls will savour traces of the Incredible Bongo Band, in the chorus. Over the eight minutes, and going deeper on the flip, the mix lifts off into a cosmic steppers dub, featuring Gilb-r alongside Sotofett on keyboards, with no let up for the dancefloor in energy and vibes.

“It was in 2001 / I got the letter / A letter that said / I would travel to a cold world / Not knowing what would happen / I was full of loneliness / No country / Everyone was different / Not only skin colour / The way people spoke / The way people behaved / That’s the adventure / Obey / This is the story we’re told / The key to success / So we can do everything for our parents / Who need us / Desperate for a better life / That’s the adventure.”

Three knockout EPs, in hand-stamped, poly-lined sleeves.

Three murderous steppers dubs on a propulsive, rat-tat-tat rhythm, combining mystical spaciousness with detail and ferocity. Angry-lion bass and smears of brass, fusillades and explosions, scares and shocks, oriental pentatonics, clattering percussion and synthy transcendence… the business. The second mix is nastiest; the third is the wildest and most discombobulated (and our favourite).
Bim bim bim.

Hebi is tough, stomping, mesmerizing romany funk, riding Far East from the Baltic Sea on clopping hooves of uranium, with synths from spaceways further out still. Weakheart deejays will scatter, but Sotofett has road-tested this on dubplate for six months, tearing up parties and dancefloors.
Deeply meditative, desolately beautiful, Haru will stop you in your tracks. Osaruxo’s violin could be a rebab or a shamisen, a reed instrument or a voice. Ravishing music.

Tipped by the New York Times: ‘I have heard no more beautiful record this year… a righteous calm takes over the album like a spirit force.’

Sublimely convulsive Shangaan electro-gospel by a pastor from Giyani, Limpopo, recorded in 2008, brimming with aching, plaintive, mournful spirituality. However fractured, multi-faceted and fresh the music comes across — that signature whistle and sampled marimba, a little wonky high-life, rough, skittering drum patterns, no bass — the surging vocal lines and harmonies are unmistakably rooted in traditional South African music.

‘Terry Hall has returned with his best work in decades… a daring, thoughtful set’ (The Guardian); ‘***** the real message lies in the boldness of its musical vision… world music album of the year’ (The Times).
‘Recorded as Blair and Bush were conspiring to strike fear and loathing into the region responsible for these grooves, it’s every bit as topical as Ghost Town, as eerie as War Crimes’ (Time Out).

Nominally this is a collaboration between Terry Hall and Mushtaq, once of British-Asian pioneers Fun-Da-Mental — but ‘everybody we worked with had a story to tell,’ recalls Terry Hall, ‘and their stories became part of the record. We were blessed with the range of people we found.’ A Tunisian singer, a Syrian flautist, an Egyptian who had settled in Iraq, a twelve-year old Lebanese girl, a blind Algerian rapper from Paris, a choir of Polish gypsy refugees brought in from a social club in Leytonstone, the clarinettist who recorded the original Pink Panther theme; singers in Hebrew, English, Arabic, Romany. ‘Everybody had a sense of something in common in their minority and oppression and struggle. In the end, it felt more like we were editing a film than making a record.’
A year in development, the album is also a powerful reflection of the time in which it was made and the storm that was gathering: Bush and Blair were intent on Armageddon in Iraq; in the refugee camps on the West Bank, atrocities were being committed on a daily basis; closer to home, sections of the British media used the fear of terrorism to whip up a hate-fuelled campaign against asylum seekers and other minorities pushed to the margins of society.
‘What was going on as we were making the record seemed to make it more and more political. We had something to say, but we wanted to avoid being worthy or preaching and keep the words to a minimum.’

A top-quality, hard-enamel lapel pin (with back post and gold-metal clutch); the size of a 2p coin.
New colours.

A top-quality, hard-enamel lapel pin (with back post and gold metal clutch); the size of a 2p coin.
New colours.

Killer EP. Next-level Shackleton.
Taking off from Beaugars Seck’s foundational sabar drum rhythms — recorded by Sam in Dakar in February 2020 — Shackleton has constructed a trio of intricately layered, luminous, enchanted, epic excursions. The second is more dazzled and meandering, with jellied bass, insectile detail, and discombobulated jabbering; the third is more liquid, fleet of foot, and psychedelic, with a grooving b-line and funky keyboard stabs, scrambled eastern strings and hypnotic vocalese.
The harmonium in The Overwhelming Yes sounds like Nico blowing in chillily from up the desert shore.
The overall mood is wondrous, twinkling with light, onwards-and-upwards; an uncanny, dubwise mix of the ancient and the futuristic.
Mark Ernestus’ Version is stripped, trepidatious, mystical, and stranger still, with just a snatch of the original melody, extra distortion and delay, and crystal-clear drum sound.

So… Twenty minutes of startlingly original music, with Shackleton the maestro at the top of his game, and a characteristically evilous dub by Mark Ernestus. Mastered by Rashad Becker; handsomely sleeved.
Sick to the nth. Love 4 Ever.

The out-of-this-world recordings of Dilson de Souza, leading a kind of tropical chamber jazz on leaves from a ficus tree.
Dilson was from Barra do Pirai, in the Brazilian countryside; moving to Rio as a young man, where he worked in construction. He recorded his first record in 1954, for RCA Victor. He travelled to Quito around 1957, soon hooking up with Benitez & Valencia, who introduced him to the CAIFE label.
Dilson played the leaf open, resting on his tongue, hands free, with his mouth as the resonator. Though a leaf can also be played rolled or folded in half, this method allowed for more precision, a tethered brilliance. A picked ficus leaf stays fresh, crisp and clean-toned for around ten hours. He could play eight compositions, four at each end, before it was spent.
Biluka plays trills and vibratos effortlessly, with utterly pure pitch, acrobatically sliding into notes and changing tone on the fly. In Manuco, he leads Los Caníbales into a mysterious landscape on a rope pulled from an Andean spaghetti western, and corrals and teases them into a dialogue. A leaf, a harp, a xylophone, and a rondador — joined in Bailando Me Despido (Dancing As I Say Goodbye) by a saucy organ, doing sloshed call-and-response. In Anacu de Mi Guambra,  Biluka shows his full range of antics, hiccuping melodically over a set of magic tricks. His expressiveness was boundless.
The eucalyptus leaf is popular among Aboriginal Australians. In China, they’ve played leaves for 10,000 years. In Cambodia, people play the slek, a leaf plucked from either the sakrom or the khnoung tree. But ain’t nobody like Biluka, ever.
Astounding music.

Magnificent Wolof drum music, performed by an extended griot family in the mystical setting of Lac Rose, outside Dakar.
Doudou Ndiaye Rose — who died in 2015 —  is a key drummer in the musical history of the world. He developed a system of five hundred original drumming patterns, ancient and new. Amongst the modern rhythms here is Bench Mi — ‘under the Baobab tree,’ a spot where where problems get solved.  Also Hibar Yi — ‘passing on information’ — the theme-tune of Senegalese TV national news for decades — and Les Rosettes, the signature rhythm of Senegal’s first ever all-female percussion group, convened by Doudou, and named after his grandmother.
These original compositions sit alongside important traditional rhythms, familiar to every Sabar player, such as Farwu Jar ( a courtship game sometimes resulting in a wedding), Ceebu Jin (also the name of the national dish of fish and rice), and Gumbé, often played after a successful harvest.
Recorded in joyful single takes, over seven consecutive days in February 2020, with no overdubs, mastered by Rashad Becker, the music is deep and thrilling, polyrhythmic to the bone, with a complex, pointillistic intensity at times evoking Jeff Mills in full flight.

A bobbing, minimal groover from the Berlin corner, dug-in and funked-up over ten minutes; and icily original, top-dog work from Pev, tethered between a kind of arrested Highlife and a Detroit breakout.

Moritz from Basic Channel and Rhythm And Sound, alongside Vladislav Delay (Chain Reaction) and Max Loderbauer (Sahko): a dream crossing of classic Berlin techno, On-The-Corner Miles, Larry Heard, and Can.