This is lovely.
Brand new, rambunctious, rootsy, spiritual brass-band music from Lagos, with singing, drums and home-made percussion.
Obadikah is a group of old friends who play together in the Cherubim & Seraphim and Baptist churches of the Ikeja and Isale Eko districts. A couple of them were founder-members of the Eko Brass Band; they’ve played with pretty much all the key Nigerian reggae artists.
The tunes are mostly traditional Yoruban melodies, often sung at bed-time. The songs are mostly original, sung in Yoruba (though Jomido is an Egun song from the Badagry area of Lagos state).
Edna was a Honey Cone who sang with Holland-Dozier-Holland, and Ray Charles on Let’s Go Get Stoned. Her 1977 solo album is pure class — a luxuriant blend of ballads and dancers, supervised and brilliantly arranged by Greg Perry, her old man. De La Soul, Nas and Talib Kweli all drank from the fountain. Oops! itself is all-time rare-groove murder.
The second LP of the mainstay of modern Caribbean/Antilles music, released in 1975 on a small Parisian label, La Voix Du Globe. It maintains the pressure of his debut Cosmozouk Percussion, incorporating African, Latin and West Indies styles like Gwoka, Mazouk, Biguine, Bel-Air and Bomba, together with swirling cosmic synths and intense roots percussion. Bomb.
Their classic, influential, second Saravah, from 1974, joined by the great Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos. Leftist folk prog turned outernational psychedelic fusion. Try fourteen-minutes-long La Ville Pue.
Keyboardist with Heldon, Magma and co, joined on his debut LP by the likes of Richard Pinhas and Christian Vander — no less — together with Bernard Paganotti, François Auger, Didier Batard… An outstanding mixture of synthy electronics and jazz-rock. First vinyl issue.
Lovely, hypnotic, rocking peulh music from Dilly commune, Mali, near the border with Mauritania (and the same family grouping as the celebrated singer Inna Baba Coulibaly). Duelling ngonis, calabash, flute, dashes of electric guitar; newly recorded.
Outsider, casio versions of the Electric Prunes, Ramones and co, al fresco in early-eighties San Francisco.
The unlikely Hawaiian-influenced Xabagies music of 1930s Greece: surrealist guitar portraits blurring Athens and Honolulu, haunting tropical serenades, wild acoustic orchestras, and heartbreaking steel guitar duets. With a 28-page booklet.
A moody, ambitious, intriguing record, originally released by Audio Fidelity in 1964.
Just two side-long tracks — and an amazing lineup, with Walter Davis on piano, bassist George Tucker, and two drummers together, Edgar Bateman and the great Andrew Cyrille.
The sleeve-notes quote a Downbeat article from the same year, claiming that Dickerson was the most important vibraphonist since Milt Jackson: ‘instead of solos made up of one related note following another, Dickerson often builds areas of sound, placing them one on the other, creating a total effect.’
The title track is a pinnacle of funky soul jazz. No-nonsense chitlin manners, hard and tight, with none of the airs and graces of fusion. Sonny Phillips on electric piano, Ron Carter on bass. Jones nails it evilously. Ace drumming by Bud Kelly.
King Tubby meets the Roots Radics.
The second volume in Abdou’s unmissable Nuits trio of LPs, this time featuring his Casablanca home-girl, sahrawi diva Naima Samih.
Giddy psych, funk, jazz and electronica freak-outs from Casablanca. A combination of original compositions and folk tunes, crazily blending together Abdou’s wigging organ, rough beat boxes, wayward kit-drumming and crisp north African percussion, a little Hank Marvin and some sporting sing-a-long, and plenty of unfit-to-drive reverb and tape delay. A facsimile reissue of this collectors’ item, first out in 1976. Ace.
COH as in Jean Cohen (saxophones), EL as in Dominique Elbaz (piano) and MEC as in the brothers François and Jean-Louis Méchali (bass and drums) — joined by the American clarinettist and flautist Evan Chandlee for this debut album, originally released by Saravah in 1969.
“We wanted to avoid that kind of ‘free’ which is characterized by pounding drumming and a saxophonist freaking out in the high register, that type of music that kicks off suddenly then stops without us being able to sense the motivation. There is never any difference in intensity: nothing is destroyed, nothing is created, nothing is elaborated, nothing is questioned — when, even on the simple level of sound, there is so much that can be done.”
With French roots running back through the music of Jef Gilson, and pitched at the time somewhere between ESP and Actuel/BYG, with full-blooded nods to the likes of Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane and Walt Dickerson, this is expert, exuberant music-making, searching out its own way.
Ten tracks, even-handedly improvised and composed, beautifully played; intense and free-spirited but always engaging, attentive and communicative.
Top-notch sound; heavyweight gatefold sleeve with obi-strip; twelve-page booklet.