Classic early-eighties Nigerian disco, fronted by Ronnie Pearl from Aktion and Jake Sollo from the Funkees.

London crew formed in the late seventies by Gus Phillips from Sierra Leone and Dominican Sam Jones. Nurtured by Grove Music; same family tree as Aswad. Just around the corner from Honest Jon’s in Ladbroke Grove, guitarist Peter Harris went on to set up the Kickin label (which put out Shut Up And Dance, Aaron Carl and Blaze).

Heavy, heavy early-eighties roots, mixed by King Tubby.

His first album simply under his own name, from 2022. ‘In a quieter, more meditative space than the pulsing, driving material found in his other groups Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, Shabaka and The Ancestors.’

The recording debut of a collaboration between Jordan ‘Jordache’ Czamanski and Ilya Ziblat Shay. Three freestyling chunks of hallucinatory electronica and freaking jazz; plus a sublime remix by Parisian maestro I:Cube, with MT’s wild keyboard lines, distant bells and general insobriety threading a tactile, sunrise-friendly house groove. Tropical jazz-funk for the synthesizer generation. Call it Balearic and die.

‘Queered allusions to Lutheran hymnals, almost unbearably tense passages of frenzied repetition, and explosions of melodic ecstasy,’ performed by the twenty-piece strings, horns, reeds, and pianos of the Wild Up ensemble.
According to musicologist and composer Luciano Chessa, ‘if all of Eastman’s music but this one were to disappear, Gay Guerrilla would still be enough to guarantee him a firm place in the history of twentieth-century music.’

The Nigerian percussionist together with US soul singer OC Tolbert, in 1982.
A grippingly odd couple of sides: Happiness is slow-burning gospel; Nwanne is terrific, stampeding Afro-disco, with popping bass, echoing shout-outs and drums on fire.

Aka SJOB Movement, spun out of Sonny Okosuns’ set-up: Samuel ‘Spark’ Abiloye, Johnnie Woode Olimah, Ehima ‘Blackie’ Ottah and Prince Bolarinwa Agba.
Militant funk, deep and rootsy.