Inspired, free, luminous music-making. An outernational holy grail and a stiff tonic for all citizens of nowhere.
Already the great French jazz saxophonist had made monumental records alongside all-time legends like Monk, Blakey, Bud Powell and Miles — that’s Wilen on Lift To The Scaffold — before cutting loose at the end of the sixties on a two-year journey through Morocco, Algeria, Niger, Mali, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and Senegal, with a team of film-makers, technicians and musicians. 
Moshi means trance utterance — the moshi is a demon invoked by the Fulani Borogi of Niger, to chase away angst and depression — and this is a shamanistic bricolage of smoky musical spells and scraps of intimate, outdoors ambience, full of love, good vibes and gritty musical wonder, drawn from more than fifty tape reels recorded en route: desert blues, space-jazz, street-funk, acid rock, polyphonic rhythms and new-thing influences like Shepp and Sanders; buzzing, extended ensemble sessions, like alternative Bitches Brews, crossed with diverse snippets of magic grabbed on the wing, like Algerian gnawa, or solo mbira, or just people laughing together, or a Bamako griot… 
Beautifully presented, with a twenty-page booklet, and the DVD of Caroline de Bendern’s vivid, freewheeling film A L’Intention De Mlle Issoufou A Bilma, about the trip.
Fervently recommended.

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The first volume was a must, and on we go, from Hayes’ final 45 of 1972 through to 1976 — by which time Stax was defunct, and he was on his own Hot Buttered Soul label via ABC Records.
Including eight US R&B chart hits including the much-sampled Hung Up On My Baby and Chocolate Chip, Hayes’ biggest hit of this period Joy, and the ever-popular 1976 instrumental Disco Connection, which finally gave Hayes’ his second UK Top 20 hit after Shaft.

Reading from his novels Robinson, The Hard Shoulder and The Passenger, and The Museum of Loneliness, with field recordings and bits from the soundtracks of Asylum and Content. Assembled by Mordant Music.

The Imperial Bodyguard Band singer, who tuned his guitar like an oud. Oromo reasoning about love, existence and resistance, with a tasty Arab twang. Mississippi presented him on vinyl recently.

With a Regis remix.

Terrific collection of spiritual and gospel songs performed in informal non-church settings between 1965-1973 — mostly guitar-accompanied and performed by active or former blues artists.

Sid Bucknor supervising a mix of master musicians from the London scene and JA visitors — Rico, Tan Tan, Lester Sterling, Winston Wright and co. Ace versions of Rebel Woman and the Lumumbo rhythm for starters.

A Bullwackies masterpiece — spooked, reeling roots, saturated in hurt, confusion and resistance, with a knockout Baba Leslie-led dub.