‘In an age when any old modal groove with a tambura drone pasted on is marketed as spiritual jazz, Kingsport, Tennessee born Zoh Amba is the real deal…
‘Opening track Fruit Gathering is a brief aubade to the Holy Spirit, weeping with a tremulous vulnerability recalling Ayler at his most tender and melodic… On the album’s more expansive tunes, her quartet plugs into the tumultuous swells and raging energy of late 1960s US free jazz exemplified by players such as Frank Wright and Noah Howard, which built on the intensity of John Coltrane’s later, spiritually driven exhortations. Here, Amba pushes past low, guttural blasts to altissimo shrieks and the screaming multiphonics pioneered by Pharaoh Sanders during his tenure with Coltrane.
‘On Champa Flower, Amba connects with her Tennessee roots, picking and strumming at an acoustic guitar while cymbals shimmer and bass throbs. Joining the dots between folk, American primitive, pastoral psychedelia and 2000s free folk, she proposes an alternative living continuum of American devotional music. Most affecting, though, are the three solo meditations on which she plays piano with her right hand and sax with her left. Captured in lo-fi on a Zoom recorder, and ending abruptly as though suddenly out of batteries, they’re intimate glimpses of a soul in motion’ (Daniel Spicer, The Wire).

The African Brothers in full effect. Barry Brown does anthemic justice to this killer song, written by Tony Tuff; produced by Sugar Minott. The reasoning is bang on the money, over a lovely rhythm. The deadly dub is by Scientist, at Tubby’s. It’s a must.

Murder.
Gritty T++ action — twitching and itching, propulsive and dread — with Gavsborg from Equiknoxx at the mic, sounding sexually fucked.
Ace dub, too.

Rare Jammys singles plus a trailer load of previously unreleased cuts, including do-overs of Police & Thieves and Cool Out Son.

‘A wobbly loop of found sound. Almost inaudible speech from an unidentified documentary. Lapping waves of folk guitar created at the edges of the player’s ability. A haunted melodica. Mumbled vocals that reinvent the singer’s uncertainties as a deliciously glum pose. Layer these up in the recording software of your choice. Labour in a back bedroom overlooking the railway line to summon ghosts.
‘Spirits arrive from West Yorkshire, from Glasgow and Dunedin, from the suburban Midwest. Rising from squats and university accommodation past, from damp rooms filled with old paperbacks, stale hash smoke and abandoned mugs of tea.
‘Even as you listen to this collection of home recordings, made over the last few years by South London duo Jemima, these ghosts crowd around. Born in the Seventies to chase the tape experiments and gentle strumming of the Sixties they crane their necks and edge closer to the laptop. When something this perfect comes along, even the most tranquillised must stir their stumps.
‘It’s lonely music created around a wine bottle with a candle in it, made too late to appear via Xpressway or Cordelia. Don’t imagine though, that it has no home in the now. These spectres remain close because they know they are still wanted. We need them as much as they need us.
‘This spell-binding LP is a window onto a half-lit world on a deeper plane of consciousness.’

A beguiling, one-of-a-kind blend of country, township jazz, and pop, from the heart of Zambia’s freedom movement, by ‘the first African voice on the radio for many Central Africans and the first kind of pop star for many Central Africans.’
Vocalist, guitarist, and bandleader Alick Nkhata moved effortlessly between lonesome country slide, big band pop, and air-tight vocal harmonies, all with roots in Bemba and other African traditional songs and rhythms. It’s a dizzying, inclusive, expansive blend from an artist and music archivist who became the voice of his nation’s fight for freedom. The lyrics and music represent the times — lonesome country laments like Nafwaya Fwaya and Fosta Kayi drift along the railways to urban centers and copper mines. Nalikwebele Sonka (I Told You Sonka) pairs honey-soaked yodels with a warning about the downward spiral of unemployment in townships, while Mayo Na Bwalya (Mother of Bwalya) is a mother’s plea to a traditional songbird for guidance of her wayward son. Songs like Shalapo, Kalindawalo Na Mfumwa, and his biggest hit, Imbote, infuse piano, big band horns, and even early electronic instruments into stunning syncretic pop masterpieces.’

‘It’s great that Zamrock is so well known for its incredible story and music, but that intense focus has a way of flattening the diversity of Zambian music and its history. So maybe we can’t necessarily say that Alick Nkhata led to Zamrock, but that rich history of mixing influences and creating new sounds in the copper belt started with Alick in lots of ways. All of that stuff is what people appreciate about Zamrock — that it was mixing sounds and that it was political in its own way. There’s a long history of that approach in the region, and it starts with Alick.’

Super-rare Chicago sweet soul LP, originally out on Arrow Brown’s Bandit label. ‘A string-laden fantasia straddling the street corner doo-wop of the ‘50s and the Me Decade’s studio excess. Backed by the Chosen Few and the Scott Brothers, arranged by Benjamin Wright, sung by Brown’s 17-year-old daughter Tridia and Moroccos falsetto Larry Brown.’ Lovey artwork by label-mate Eugene Phillips clinches the DIY, outsider appeal.

‘Classic Vinyl Series.’

‘Classic Vinyl Series.’

A mix of overlooked gems and local boomshots from the cassette tape scene in Libya, during the late 80s to early 2000, when independent artists relied on makeshift home studios or travelled abroad to record in Tunisia and Egypt. A judicious mash-up of boundary-pushing sounds which reflects this precariousness and nascency; also the political and cultural crossroads at which Libya found itself. North African rhythms meet Arab melodies and deep African roots. Disco and house run into gritty pop. Reggae courses through, with an unmistakable Libyan twist — not just musically, in the slowed-down cadence of traditional shaabi beats, but also culturally, taking to heart its outernational message of proud, defiant self-awareness.

Assembled by Habibi Funk with personality and love, as per; with a 32-page booklet. Another winner.

Twenty-three Errol T dubs of Joe Gibbs hits released between 1980 and 82, at the start of the dancehall era.

On vinyl at last, this was originally issued in 2006 in two volumes, as a CDr and a CD respectively, in tiny, numbered runs; now impossible to find, and the stuff of legend.
Kool Keith at his most rawly unhinged, vivid, and strange.