Whoa this record is totally killer.
Intensely concentrated, but with a fresh spontaneity; super-charged with expressivity.
The singing is riveting, diva-esque; the mbalax rhythms are dazzling.
At every turn there are sensational, thrilling injections of Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound.
Hotly recommended; it’s a must.

Khadim is a stunning reconfiguration of the Ndagga Rhythm Force sound. The instrumentation is radically pared down. The guitar is gone; the concatenation of sabars; the drum-kit. Each of the four tracks hones in on just one or two drummers; otherwise the sole recorded element is the singing; everything else is programmed. Synths are dialogically locked into the drumming. Tellingly, Ernestus has reached for his beloved Prophet-5, a signature go-to since Basic Channel days, thirty years ago. Texturally, the sound is more dubwise; prickling with effects. There is a new spaciousness, announced at the start by the ambient sounds of Dakar street-life. At the microphone, Mbene Diatta Seck revels in this new openness: mbalax diva, she feelingly turns each of the four songs into a discrete dramatic episode, using different sets of rhetorical techniques. The music throughout is taut, grooving, complex, like before; but more volatile, intuitive and reaching, with turbulent emotional and spiritual expressivity.
Not that Khadim represents any kind of break. Its transformativeness is rooted in the hundreds upon hundreds of hours the Rhythm Force has played together. Nearly a decade has passed since Yermande, the unit’s previous album. Every year throughout that period — barring lockdowns — the group has toured extensively, in Europe, the US, and Japan. With improvisation at the core of its music-making, each performance has been evolutionary, as it turns out heading towards Khadim. “I didn’t want to simply continue with the same formula,” says Ernestus. “I preferred to wait for a new approach. Playing live so many times, I wanted to capture some of the energy and freedom of those performances.” Though several members of the touring ensemble sit out this recording — sabar drummers, kit-drummer, synth-player — their presence abides in the structure and swing of the music here…

‘Heady, raw, druggy songs of love, dread, hardship, and yearning, recorded in Athens between 1932 and 1936, when Markos was already a master of the bouzouki. His forceful, clean playing compliments his hoarse voice and his stunning rhythmic sensibility, the result of his years as a champion zebekiko dancer. Tracks build and spiral outward, his open-note drones and melodic lines drawing calls of ecstasy and encouragement from his fellow musicians. These recordings mark the height of rebetika, the brief period between the music’s emergence on the recording scene in the early 1930s and government censorship of all lyrics starting in 1936. During the Axis occupation there was no rebetika recording, and though Markos had some hits in the years after the war, he never again attained this level. These are the dizzying, entrancing, and heaviest works of one of the great artists of the 20th century.’

‘From the Czech Supraphon archives, this 1966–1970 selection focuses on her roughest songs, with plenty of fuzz guitars and funky beats, punchy horns and razor-sharp organs underlying her deep and soulful voice.’

The bullion-clad masterpiece of these pioneers of Nigerian Funk and Afrobeat at their deepest and heaviest — tearing, wailing, mid-70s funk, heady with spirituality. Superbad from start to finish, no let-up.

The two late-50s albums. The idea was to interweave African percussion, Latin American voicings, and the reeds and horns of US jazz. With Ray Barretto, Cecil Payne, Oscar Pettiford and co.

Bele is an African folk drumming and singing tradition running back to slavery days. Mondesir leads five singers, with two percussionists, on tambour and tibwa.

Marvellous Boy is the West African counterpart of the 1950s Soho scene of our series London Is The Place For Me. Calypso, highlife and jazz, brimming over with lust for life, topicality, and extravagant creativity.

A stupendous blend of scintillating highlife, smoking Fela and spaced-out, funkdafied Black Jazz, from 1975 — Mari Affiong Usuah from Oron town, by way of Calabar in southeastern Nigeria, fronting a knockout band led by Daniel ‘Satch’ Asuquo from the Atomic 8 (and formerly of Bobby Benson’s orchestra).
The Afrofunk cuts are especially killer — with James Brown just percolating through by the end — but it’s a stunning, magnificent album, through and through.
Beautifully sleeved, too, with excellent notes by Uchenna from Comb & Razor. ‘Gob, smacked,’ he recalls, of his first listen; ‘mind, blown’.

Expertly natural recordings of an intimate concert in 1980.

Tearaway soca from the studio of Darryl Braxton, mixing it up with ragga and rave vibes.

The Latin Jazz classic from 1969, huge on the Dingwalls scene back in the day for the sizzling dancer Tema De Alma Latina.

The ravanne is a large drum — a goatskin stretched over a wooden frame — played with the hands, emblematic of the Creole cultural heritage on this island in the Indian Ocean: the music here is fabulous.

A landmark field recording, exquisitely done, ambient and intimate, with beautiful music, and documentation by Colin Turnbull. A hit with Peter Brook, anyway.

It says ‘Volume 1’ on the cover, and this debut is full of promise, but it’s a one-off, from Nigeria, 1973: African styles grooving together with Latin and Caribbean, US soul and funk, and psych rock.

Chocolate Mena leading three lineups — featuring Joe Henderson, Jerome Richardson, Alfredo Armenteros, and co — through Lalo Schifrin and Duke Pearson arrangements of core Latin and Jazz classics.