Likely recorded in Chicago around 1956; originally released on Saturn. Ra is co-composer of both sides; it could be him playing the harmonium.
‘I had two main vocal groups at the time,’ Ra once recalled. ‘One was called the Cosmic Echoes. And the Cosmic Rays, too. It was around the same time that John Gilmore joined the band. I saw the possibility that they could be really great so I began to coach them; they were connected with a barber shop, but I taught them other things.’ ‘We’d go down to the barber shops and rehearse some groups,’ added John Gilmore. ‘Sun Ra had them singin’ some beautiful stuff. I think he probably was saving them from themselves. He heard them, heard their potential, snatched them off the street, and started making them do something constructive.’

Earl Morgan and Barry Llewellyn joined by Naggo Morris in 1978, with the genius engineer Sylvan Morris and the mighty Niney the Observer at the controls, and a crack band featuring Sly Dunbar. Every Day Life and Mr. Do Over Man Song are crucial, tip-top Heptones.

This expert drummer spent long stints with Archie Shepp and Sam Rivers; and he’s played with scores of other jazz greats, like Mal Waldron, Charles Tolliver, Yusef Lateef, Billy Harper, David Murray, and so on. He toured Europe with Marion Brown in 1977 — recording La Placita live in Willisau — and the following year cut Wooley The Newt for the saxophonist’s Sweet Earth label. His son Makaya sampled it recently on We’re New Again, his Gil Scott-Heron rework.
Free, grooving, spiritual jazz. Check it out.

A classy, rock steady sextet — the rhythm section is Art Taylor and Paul Chambers — presenting four compositions by Mal Waldron.

Four thrilling rounds of rampage, school of Basic Channel.

The heaviest Cool Ruler of them all; the heaviest Joe Gibbs / Errol T dub. Murder, she wrote.

Brand new interpretations of their debut album, ten years on.
‘The Universe Smiles Upon You ii was recorded on January 4-6, 2025, in the same family barn of guitarist Mark Speer, across the same dates where TUSUY was first conceived ten years earlier. Though the conditions were the same — dirt floor, brutally cold, minimal sound isolation, all takes live — the songs aren’t. They’re re-approached, some changed more than others, harnessing the lightning-in-a-bottle energy of TUSUY while discovering what would be unique this time around, in this stage of the band’s life.
‘The result moves like ripples on the water across ten hypnotizing tracks, the barn creating a sense of spaciousness, serenity and creative freedom, nearby wildlife (listen out for the birds on August Twelve ii), rattles and creaks of the barn and all. It’s a tapestry of small movements in nuanced arrangements, slowly revealing the new life, stories and character of someone you’ve met again for the first time in ten years.’

‘Japanese classical music and dance, traditionally performed by families of musicians linked to the ancient Imperial court, and later passed down in Buddhist temple ceremonies and Shinto shrines, Gagaku is the oldest of the Japanese performing arts, with a history more than a thousand years old. Founder and director of the Reigakusha ensemble, Shiba Sukeyasu descends from the Koma clan, dating back to the end of the 10th century. The recordings partly reflect repertoires borrowed from Chinese music between the 5th and 9th centuries.
‘The eternal breath of the flutes (ryuteki and hichiriki) creates a sort of suspension of time, together with the hypnotic and hallucinatory atmosphere of the mouth organs (shō). The meditative tone of the string instruments (bika and koto) that punctuate the voids and silences is impressive, as is the enigmatic percussion section, with the tolling of the gong (shōko) and the calibrated beats of the drums (taiko and kakko).’

Black Ark magic. Al Campbell steps up with teacherly scorn, as clear as a bell.

‘Mariolina Zitta began working with natural sounds at the end of the 1980s, developing a passion for speleology. Her encounter with Walter Maioli was fundamental, guiding and influencing her definitive research into sound archaeology and the primitive sources of musical acoustic phenomena. In these recordings Mariolina conducts a magical ritual as a cave priestess, celebrating the icons par excellence of the mysteries of the night: bats. The specific frequencies of the calls of these fascinating creatures are recorded with special detectors used by ecologists, creating an organic synthesizer. The fusion with the sounds of natural objects (stones, stalactites, logs, bone whistles, Tibetan bells, mouth bows, trumpet shells) and the vocal modulations of harmonic singing allow us to travel into a still unexplored sound dimension, through an evocative experience of total sensory listening. It is an arcane landscape filled with pure vibrations, magnetic resonances and aquatic sounds; an ancestral enchantment on the border between consciousness and dreams, a symbolic liturgy of primordial reverberations, echoes and whistles.’
An edition of 200 copies.

‘Sangam means ‘meeting place’ in Sanskrit. Don obviously knew exactly what he wanted to do, and Latif immediately understood, his fingers fizzing across the tablas at frightening speed… It was Don who suggested that Latif overdub new tabla parts to enrich and add complexity to the first takes. We could reasonably have expected to spend the night doing this because this was the first time the percussionist had done this. It took him all of five minutes to get used to listening to the first tracks over the headphones before playing them without the slightest mistake. When we got to the timpani, which he was playing for the first time, his keen sense of pitch and tone once again did miracles. During one take, just for the fun of it Latif started to play a fairly slow, disconnected duple time, moving on to three and then four… all the way up to 19 by which time his fingers were whizzing invisibly across the skins, leaving us in awe and him looking as if he didn’t know what the fuss was all about. All this just made Don even keener to impress his musical companion for a day…
‘Of course, the subtleties of this album call for greater analysis, for example the meeting between the Malian doussou n’gouni and Indian tablas, the Hammond organ taking over from the tampura, 5 1/4 time as if it were the easiest thing in the world, the reinvented Indonesian gamelan… and the lyricism of the pocket cornet.’

This is fire. Ring the alarm.
The opener is MM’s first recording, aged seventeen; a 45 on Amha Records. The remainder revives his 1976 LP for Kaifa, produced by Ali Abdella Kaifa aka Ali Tango, and featuring such mainstays of the scene as trumpeter Shimèlis Bèyènè, Dawit Yifru on keys, and the great Tilayé Gèbrè on saxophone and flute. In the teeth of the burgeoning Red Terror of the Derg junta, this LP was the swansong of Swinging Addis, and arguably its absolute masterpiece.
Intense, roiling Ethiopian afrobeat. Utterly killer; hotly recommended.

Expert, breezy version of Grover Washington’s Loran’s Dance (as sampled by A Tribe Called Quest, on Push It Along). Lovely stuff.