‘Charles Lloyd pays homage to his dear friend and longtime collaborator, master-tablaist Zakir Hussain, alongside drummer Eric Harland. The album is built around studio recordings made in Mumbai in 2009 for an interrupted project featuring an expanded ensemble with Carnatic singer Vijay Prakash, Rakesh Chaurasia on bansuri, Sabir Khan on sarangi, Ranjit Barot on keyboard, and Niladri Kumar on sitar.’

Everyone got this?
The horns cut; an Upsetters masterpiece.
Pure fire.

This 1954 vocal LP was the trumpeter’s idea. Pretty much everyone in the studio was sceptical, but Baker stuck to his guns during the numerous takes required to iron out his tuning. ‘I thought it was bullshit,’ recalled his close collaborator, pianist Russ Freeman. ‘Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden sang like jazz singers. This was ballads. Totally meaningless.’ Metronome magazine pilloried Baker’s ‘abysmal vocal deficiencies’, like ‘a four-month-old baby’s lack of coordination because he can’t walk.’
Punters loved it. The same year, audience polls in Down Beat magazine made him best trumpeter and best vocalist, above Miles Davis and Nat King Cole. This LP became his best-seller, over the decades. Its version of My Funny Valentine is arguably definitive.

The sexual and racial politics of its reception run fascinatingly deep. Baker’s singing style coolly declined a throw-down with machismo. (Bob Dorough and Mose Allison are fellow travellers.) Pacific Jazz producer Dick Bock conducted a marketing survey in 1955 which found that most of Baker’s fans were women who wanted to hear him sing. ‘A lot of people thought — foolishly so — that because of the way I sang, I, y’know, liked fellas or something, Baker remembered, nervously.’ According to his biographer James Gavin, the album made him the first jazz musician with a ‘strong homosexual following’. It was a massive hit in Brazil, too, coursing into the bossa nova movement via admirers like Joao Gilberto and Nara Leao.

‘When Salsoul boss Ken Cayre handed over the multi-track tapes of Hit and Run to Walter Gibbons in 1976, the burgeoning art-form of the disco edit was liberated from its previous cut & paste routine. Following on from the likes of Grasso, Burgess, Levan, Scott, and Siano, Gibbons had become a lethal beat mixer, with an ‘uncanny sense of mixing that was so accurate it was unbelievable’, according to Francois Kevorkian. After early edit work with Salsoul releases Nice ’N’ Naasty and Salsoul 2001, Gibbons had established himself as a meticulous artist, able to completely rework existing tracks into new extended amalgams of rhythm and sound. Cayre’s multi-tracks conferred the ability to thoroughly deconstruct each of the songs elements, and Gibbons transformed the cut into an eleven minute opus which fellow tape pioneer Tom Moulton would distinguish as being ‘so different from the original that it must be classified as a new record.’ The resulting 12” would go on to sell 300,000 copies; DJs and the dance-floor would now dictate runnings as never before. 

‘Whilst Gibbons transformed the original by banishing the strings and brass, Joe Claussell sets out for a different horizon entirely. The lead guitar is exchanged for a clean, chopped chucking; the vocals are promoted to a new spaciousness. The horns presage a rethinking of the rhythm, and by the time the familiar fuzz guitars are welcomed back, the coalescing orchestra has been sustained and revitalized in a complete surrender to time and pulse. As Holloway’s vocals are pulled into non-semantic expression, the track’s foundation is given a final rinse and farewell, before evaporating in delay. This is an iteration every bit inspired and fresh as Gibbons’ landmark mix.’

Their masterful sixth LP, from 1975, produced and arranged by Charles Stepney.
This is sheer class all the way but highlights include the perfectly tooled funk of Shining Star, the ravishing mid-tempo title-track, Philip Bailey in full-flight on the killer ballad Reasons, the Janus-faced Africano shunting Chicagoan antecedents like Phil Cohran into hot jazz-funk…
Start here if you don’t own any Earth Wind & Fire.

Dark, menacing and pained; wonderful Upsetters, always timely.

‘At 36 years old, in exuberant form, revisiting songs of his which hit for other artists, like Bastidores (which revived Cauby Peixoto’s career) and Morena de Angola (a smash for Clara Nunes). Released in December 1980, when Brazil was rehearsing its redemocratization even in the throes of continuing political violence, Vida dicloses an artist emerging from censorship. In the irresistible dancehall samba Deixa a Menina, he relishes a feminist response to Geraldo Pereira’s syncopated classic Sem Compromisso: ‘Behind a sad man, there’s always a happy woman / And behind that woman, a thousand men, always so kind.’ The Cubano title track spotlights a character near death, looking back with bittersweet ambivalence, and tightly holding on. ‘Light, I want light,’ sings Chico, threading Goethe’s famous last words into the sublime orchestration of Francis Hime, who creates the masterful arrangements on ten of the twelve songs, elucidating the delicacy of classics like Mar e Lua and Qualquer Canção, and lending the appropriate grandeur to Fantasia. Tom Jobim contributes the arrangement and piano of the masterpiece Eu Te Amo, co-written with Buarque. Another triumph is the bolero-style Bye Bye, Brasil, co-written with Roberto Menescal, humorously reviewing the profound transformation of Brazil during the previous decade.’

A bonafide MPB classic.

Proper socialist to the bone. Great novelist, too.

A stupendous haul of music by farmers turned musicians working out of DIY rural studios; drawn from the past decade by Sahel Sounds for its new imprint.
The top artists of the scene — Dickson Gawani, Bala Zaaku, Yaa Naara and others — ranging across styles and subjects, from political commentary to warrior clan rhythms.
Extensive liner notes, with artist interviews, cultural history, and song translations.
Hyper-electronic and densely percussive, moody and transgressive, pulsating and bleeping, body-rocking… this is terrific. Don’t miss it.