Eleven exuberantly swinging, startlingly fresh jazz ragas by an ensemble combining hard-core Bombay jazz messengers, Bollywood royalty, and sitar master Ustad Rais Khan.
This is indo-jazz fusion direct from the source: an extremely rare glimpse of the same Bombay jazz scene that gave us Amancio D’Silva. Nothing kitsch here: by turns rollicking and lyrical, this is edgily committed and heartfelt music-making.
Never reissued since its 1968 release by EMI India, Raga Jazz Style is a collectors’ holy grail of Indian jazz; and this is a highly impressive inaugural salvo by Outernational Sounds, using original masters and beautifully rendered facsimile artwork, with 180g vinyl pressed at Pallas, in Germany.
Very warmly recommended.

His fine guitar-picking and upbeat, carefree songs brought George Sibanda from Bulawayo the fame throughout southern Africa — and he was versioned in the US — which drove him to drink and an early grave.

Kora and cello interplay.

Four members of Sonny Okosun’s band, edging things on in 1974: deep, spacey afro-funk.

‘SK Kakraba is a master of the gyil xylophone — fourteen wooden slats strung across calabash resonators. The silk walls of spiders’ egg sacs — ‘paapieye’ in the Lobi language — are stretched across holes in the gourds, giving each note a buzzy rattle. SK learned as a child from elders in his Lobi community in the far northwest reaches of Ghana.’
Beautiful, spare, mesmeric recordings — song cycles, dirges, improvisations based on traditional songs, original compositions — newly made.

Improvisatory solo piano from 1965 — a trans-Mediterranean crossover based on traditional Algerian song, with roots in Spanish Islamic culture.
Spare, pellucid, and meditative; testing out variations with madcap ivories tickler Johnny Bach at his shoulder.
Hotly recommended.

Superb, timber-shivering example of the city’s more elevated style of fado. Highly recommended.

Thirty-five stingers from an HMV run of more than four hundred 78s, recordings made in Uganda and Kenya from the mid-1930s till the mid-1950s.

The second half of the CD.