Jazz cornettist Olu Dara has featured on a heap of killer records. David Murray’s Flowers For Albert, Roy Brooks’ Ethnic Expressions, Doug Carn’s Revelation, Are You Glad To Be In America?, peak Cassandra Wilson, Illmatic… and on and on.

From 1988, his solo debut is something else, and a blast.
‘Mixing up sly humor and evocative description, Dara’s singing slips and slides around the steady guitar rhythms, which borrow equally from Delta blues, Caribbean calypso and West African high-life’ (Washington Post).
‘Performing songs about daily life in the ‘hood back in the day of okra-selling street peddlers, intoning blues that refuse to separate desire from its cultural context, and collaborating with his rap star son Nas, Dara manifests an aesthetic co-inhabited by Robert Johnson, Tampa Red, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie and Arrested Development’s Speech as if they were all members of the same band’ (SFGate).
‘As warm and as gentle as a summer day in Mississippi… a perfect blend of Southern blues, New York jazz and African rhythms… pure enchantment’ (CMJ New Music Report).

‘After keyboardist/composer Bayeté aka Todd Cochran established his musical presence on the San Francisco scene playing in Bobby Hutcherson’s band, and before becoming a key member of the innovative band Automatic Man, which he co-founded with Santana drummer Michael Shrieve, he recorded a couple of solo albums for the Prestige label that feature some of the most far-out, futuristic music the legendary jazz imprint ever released… Early ‘70s electric Miles is a clear point on the compass, but so are Parliament-Funkadelic and Lonnie Liston Smith, if he were playing a fuzzed-out clavinet instead of a Fender Rhodes.’

“While I’ve held space for the blues aesthetic and jazz in everything I’ve done, I was leaving one world and entering another, unmooring the ship and heading into a sea of unknowns, so to speak.”