Honest Jon's
278 Portobello Road
London
W10 5TE
England

Monday-Saturday 10 till 6; Sunday 11 till 5

Honest Jon's
Unit 115
Lower Stable Street
Coal Drops Yard
London
N1C 4DR

Monday-Saturday 11 till 6; Sunday 11 till 5

+44(0)208 969 9822 mail@honestjons.com

Established 1974.

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Nigeria Freedom Sounds!

Popular Music And The Birth Of Independent Nigeria 1960-63

Soul Jazz

Gnonnas Pedro

The Man Who Sings All African Languages: Retrospective 1967-1985

Nanga Boko

Outro Tempo

Electronic And Contemporary Music From Brazil, 1978-92

Music From Memory

Francis Bebey

African Electronic Music 1976-1982

Born Bad

Choctaw Ridge

New Fables of The American South 1968-1973

Ace

Venezuela 70

Cosmic Visions of A Latin American Earth Vol 2

Soul Jazz

African Head Charge

Voodoo Of The Godsent

ON U Sound

The 2011 album available on vinyl for the first time.
Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah meets Adrian Sherwood, with numerous guest spots including Jazzwad and Adamski.
Some of the hardest hitting AHC rhythms are here; more tailored to sound-system transmission than ever before.

African Head Charge

Vision Of A Psychedelic Africa

ON U Sound

The first vinyl release of this 2005 reunion of Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah and Adrian Sherwood.
Richly percussive African rhythms, bubbling with trippy effects; pounding bass.

One Night In Pelican

Afro Modern Dreams 1974-1977

Matsuli

Opening in 1973, tucked into a tangle of railway parts scattered across an industrial park at the western edge of Orlando East, Club Pelican was Soweto’s first night-club, and its premier live music venue throughout the seventies.
Pretty much everyone on the scene passed through its doors — to sing, or perform in the house band, or hang out. Schooled in standards, and fluent in the local musical vernacular, the music would take off in different directions at a moment’s notice — SA twists on jazz, funk, fusion, disco — spurred by the sounds coming in from Philadelphia, Detroit and New York City.
One Night In Pelican encapsulates these halcyon times, with a musical roll call of all the key groups and players, besides evocative, previously-unseen photographs, cover artwork by Zulu ‘Batsumi’ Bidi, and notes by Kwanele Sosibo, lit up by a gallery of first-person testimony.

Robert Glasper

Canvas

Blue Note

Biluka Y Los Canibales

Leaf-Playing In Quito, 1960-1965

Honest Jon's Records

The out-of-this-world recordings of Dilson de Souza, leading a kind of tropical chamber jazz on leaves from a ficus tree.
Dilson was from Barra do Pirai, in the Brazilian countryside; moving to Rio as a young man, where he worked in construction. He recorded his first record in 1954, for RCA Victor. He travelled to Quito around 1957, soon hooking up with Benitez & Valencia, who introduced him to the CAIFE label.
Dilson played the leaf open, resting on his tongue, hands free, with his mouth as the resonator. Though a leaf can also be played rolled or folded in half, this method allowed for more precision, a tethered brilliance. A picked ficus leaf stays fresh, crisp and clean-toned for around ten hours. He could play eight compositions, four at each end, before it was spent.
Biluka plays trills and vibratos effortlessly, with utterly pure pitch, acrobatically sliding into notes and changing tone on the fly. In Manuco, he leads Los Caníbales into a mysterious landscape on a rope pulled from an Andean spaghetti western, and corrals and teases them into a dialogue. A leaf, a harp, a xylophone, and a rondador — joined in Bailando Me Despido (Dancing As I Say Goodbye) by a saucy organ, doing sloshed call-and-response. In Anacu de Mi Guambra,  Biluka shows his full range of antics, hiccuping melodically over a set of magic tricks. His expressiveness was boundless.
The eucalyptus leaf is popular among Aboriginal Australians. In China, they’ve played leaves for 10,000 years. In Cambodia, people play the slek, a leaf plucked from either the sakrom or the khnoung tree. But ain’t nobody like Biluka, ever.
Astounding music.

Can

Tago-Mago

Spoon Records

Sarah Davachi

Cantus, Descant

Late Music

Greg Belson's Divine Funk

Rare American Gospel Funk & Soul

Cultures Of Soul

A Todas Las Imagenes Del Mundo

Antologia Del Canto A Lo Divino

Mississippi

‘The sacred music of peasants in Chile’s remote Central Valley: a communal form of worship and reflection, played in packed rooms throughout the night when work is done. The Canto has persisted for centuries in the voices of hundreds of men and women who conjure vivid visions of apocalypse, the divine, and angelitos (very young children who have died). But the verses are also rooted in the daily life in the valley — labour and drought, family, animals, and the life cycles of plants. To hypnotic accompaniment by guitar and the celestial, 25-string guitarron, countless entonaciones or melodies range across the 10-line rhyming decimas, in an ancient song form originating in Spain and found from South America to the Mississippi Delta. The combination is entrancing and transporting, cosmic and earthly at once.

‘The handsome gatefold jacket presents the visionary, apocalyptic art of Frederico Lohse, a baker from the village of Los Vilos, who painted on old flour sacks; with an eight-page booklet containing lyrics, photos, and extensive notes about the Canto tradition.’

As-Shams Archive

Volume 1: South African Jazz, Funk & Soul, 1975-1982

As-Shams

Hotly recommended by our friends Rush Hour in Amsterdam: ‘Starting off with the positively upbeat Umgababa by Kippie Moketsi and the infectious soul jazz of Pat Matshikiza’ s Dreams Are Wonderful (also featuring Kippie Moketsi) proceedings mellow out on side B, only to get extra heavy on the C-side with the sample-ready fusion groover Night Express off their crazy rare 1976 album of the same name and the irresistibly funky Blues for Yusef by Lionel Pillay, two of the many highlights on this action-packed thriller.’

Boards Of Canada

The Campfire Headphase

Warp

Can

Live In Keele 1977

Spoon Records

Jennifer Lucy Allan: ‘The heads know — forums and published books alike agree — that 76-77 is the best of the Can live years (Keele included). A couple of the tracks from this show have been included on fan-made ‘best of’ live bootlegs over the years. And wow, are they right.’
Peter Margasak, describing this album in The Wire: ‘The meticulous environments and rhythmic trenches Can had been building from the very start always cast a hypnotic spell, but when they had the freedom to inhabit the material without limitations they achieved the sort of transcendental brilliance that the greatest improvisations can deliver. We may recognise fleeting glimpses of studio tracks here and there, but they’re merely stepping off points for extended trips that convey much greater profundity, propulsion and ecstasy.’

Cosmic American Music

Motel California

Numero

Charles Mingus

Mingus At Monterey

Candid

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