Stunning piano improvisations — mostly solo, though peppered with tombak, violin, and scraps of poetry — using his own tuning system, recorded for Iranian national radio between 1956-1965.

Classic kwaito by Professor Rhythm and friends, from 2001. That defining Jo’burg blend of hip-hop and house, but enlivened by a distinctive grab bag of fresh influences, and notably quirky and quick on its feet.

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!’

This is terrific.
Brazilian post-punk, art rock and DIY from 1988, released here for the first time, by the duo Celso Alves and Kodiak Bachine (whose records with the band Agentss are desperately sought-after nowadays).
Dubwise and rhythmic, percussive and synthy, with tangy Brazilian roots, and a droll humour to its reflections on embalming, LSD and zombies, the music freewheels roughly and vividly from the truffling, chattering, tropical atmospherics of the opener, through to the machine-funk, Romeroesque terrors of the Greenhouse Massacres, to close. 
Sung in Portuguese and English, studded with Spanish, French and German, the lyrics are reproduced on an insert. Pressed at Pallas.
Ace. Check it out.

The king of acid-fuzz guitar presents a barbed bouquet of classic psych covers — The Stooges, Hendrix, Pink Floyd, MC5, Jefferson Airplane and co — with killer, piercing fuzz-wah guitar and bizarre software-generated vocals. ‘One of the finest acid-punk shredders to ever walk the planet, Munehiro Narita gives these time-honored psych rock classics a serious kick in the ass, in the most bizarre and Japanese of musical settings’ (Steve Krakow, Galactic Zoo). ‘Munehiro Narita (High Rise et al) bleeds all over a series of massively re-wired cover versions of classic psych while computer generated little girl vocals relocate the whole damn thing in another future altogether’ (David Keenan).

More from the archives of Tom Mkhize, re-imagining traditional South African music as Library Music in 1980s Johannesburg. Plenty of mbaqanga on this volume, running back to kwela, marabi and early South African jazz. The opener’s a knockout — thumb piano (heavy with delay), makhoyane gourd-resonated musical bow, sikhelekehle fiddle, steel drum and synthesizer.

Amazing, psychedelic, engagé afro-disco from the same milieu as William Onyeabor, with Gaspar Lawal on percussion. Very warmly recommended.

Beautifully direct Wassoulou songs by the twenty-year-old accompanied only by N’Gou Bagayoko on acoustic guitar.

Starkly intimate, utterly captivating early recordings by this wonderful Malian singer. Voice and acoustic guitar only; as if you were the only person in the room.
The sound has been brilliantly restored by Awesome Tapes, for its fiftieth release.
Achingly beautiful music; hotly recommended.

In the new Luminessence series of ECM’s vinyl-reissues: audiophile pressings in elegant, high-quality editions, with tip-on gatefold sleeves including new liner notes.

Deep, vibesing, rootical excursions in Brazilian percussion, especially berimbau; originally released by Saravah in 1973.
Newly remastered from the master tapes; gatefold sleeve.
Fabulous.

Music for a ballet telling the life of of a daughter of a black slave, recorded in 1974 by the likes of Nana Vasconcelos, Joao Donato, Paulinho Jobim, and members of Som Imaginario; and containing the definitive versions of some of MN’s most iconic songs, including Os Escravos De Jó and Maria Maria.
‘Sheer beauty’ (The Guardian). ‘You don’t need to understand a word to realise that this is awesome music’ (Time Out).

Two teenagers’ amapiano music from Gauteng province in South Africa, drawing on jazz, folk, afro, deep and tech house, kwaito, and dibacardi… but sounding like none of them.

‘From the trios of pianists Kyle Shepherd, Bokani Dyer and Yonela Mnana, to the genre-defying exploits of guitarists Vuma Levin and Reza Khota; and from artists inspired by age-old traditions, like Lwanda Gogwana and Mandisi Dyantyis, to the cosmic explorations of Siya Makuzeni, Benjamin Jephta, Thandi Ntuli, Zoë Modiga and Shane Cooper’s Mabuta’  — Johannesburg label Afrosynth rounds up some of SA’s most talented young composers and bandleaders, as well as a wider cast of supporting musicians.