The ‘little devil’ was born in Tunis in 1884 to a Libyan mother and Moroccan dad. The first half of the twentieth century was a golden era in Tunisian music; Cheikh El Afrite its most celebrated artist. As a youngster he became fluent in its mix of classical Arab-Andalous and Ottoman traditions with folk idioms like bedouin and other African melodies, fondo and fezzani, and the festive tripolitain music of Libya. Turning professional at eighteen, he was soon singing for the bey every Tuesday night, at his seaside palace in Hammam Lif. Later, his recordings made him star throughout the Maghreb.

Captivatingly austere, minimal, deconstructed, but deft and in a way intimate.

His 1966 debut for Vanguard, evocatively fusing psych-folk and raga way ahead of its time; also featuring flautist Jeremy Steig and long-time Dylan cohort Bruce Langhorn.
Vinyl from Harte.

The peerless deejay rocking two turntables and two reel-to-reel tape-recorders.
‘Released in spring 1996, Liquid Room was a mix of such molten intensity that it warped the idea of what DJing could be. The received wisdom of how to construct a club set—one song after another; build-up, breakdown—was obliterated by this lean, striking man mixing like a Spirograph, executing a blur of hip-hop battle techniques over waves of crushing pressure. Records were piped in hot with phased doubles, scratches, stabs, rewinds, inverted frequencies, and hard stops, then torn from the platter without warning and discarded onto the floor, until you couldn’t be certain if this was dance music or a new frontier in free jazz’ (Pitchfork).

Top-notch, funky, eclectic jazz singing.