Herman Sang (from the Jiving Juniors) was at Brentford Road from the start, in the late-1950s.
This is wistful organ-combo r&b — pre-ska — with some sweet calypso jazz on the flip.

‘Amazing record,’ attests Floating Points. ‘One of my top five.’
JM’s mournful, melancholic singing creates a dark, brooding, atmosphere in stark contrast with the prevailing joyfulness and high-spirited rhythms of Brazilian pop at this time. The mood is foreboding but ecstatically hypnotic; the music complexly staggering. A lost masterpiece.
Secret weapon of Madlib, too.

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.