Jazz Articles

Derek Bailey & Jamie Muir: Dart Drug

by Chris May
June 30, 2018

For decades as rare as hens's teeth--or should that be larks's tongues in aspic?--Dart Drug was originally released on the Incus label in 1981, and reissued on CD in 1994. In 2018 it has been remastered and rereleased on vinyl by Honest Jons. The bracing yet strangely beautiful album is one of the few recordings made by the percussionist Jamie Muir after he retired from professional music-making in 1973, first to study Buddhism in Scottish and ...

Gwigwi Mrwebi: Mbaqanga Songs

by Chris May
November 6, 2006

Recorded in 1967, during the bloody heyday of apartheid South Africa, the joyful, defiant, easy-swinging jazz-jive heard on Mbaqanga Songs was then the recreational soundtrack of the country's black and coloured urban poor. After almost forty years off the shelves--and with impeccable synchronicity--the album was reissued late last month, just days before the death of P.W. Botha, the last hardline racist president of the country.

Made in London by a sextet which included four of the leading South African musicians ...

Various Artists: London Is The Place For Me 4: African Dreams & The Piccadilly High Life

by Chris May
August 12, 2006

Honest Jons' exemplary archival collection of London-recorded Caribbean and African music from the '50s and '60s continues with this fourth, irresistible volume. After the third album's single-artist focus on the seminal Nigerian-expat bandleader Ambrose Adekoya Campbell, the series returns, for the moment anyway, to the broader spectrum of the first two volumes--taking in Trinidadian calypso, South African kwela, West African highlife, Latin music and jazz.

London Is The Place For Me chronicles an era when--soul and R&B aside--British black music ...

Tony Allen: Lagos No Shaking

by Chris May
February 20, 2006

More than any other member of Fela Anikulapo Kuti's early bands, drummer Tony Allen can be said to have co-invented Afrobeat. Kuti provided the funk/jazz/Yoruba folk music themes and arrangements--plus the trademark insurrectionary lyrics and, crucially in the face of vicious and ongoing state attempts to silence the band, the leadership. (The buck sure enough stopped with Kuti, a man of extraordinary integrity and courage.) Allen provided that unique Afrobeat rhythm--a majestic, straight to your feet, loose-limbed but heavy shuffle. ...

Ambrose Adekoya Campbell: London Is The Place For Me 3

by Chris May
February 5, 2006

History, they say, is written by the victors. Without a doubt, it's written by the governing majority, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the near invisibility, until very recently, of black and African people in chronicles of British life and culture.

Honest Jons provides a vibrant antidote to this Eurocentric bias with the London Is The Place For Me compilation series (not to mention, of course, restoring some important early black British music to the racks). ...

Moondog: The Viking Of Sixth Avenue

by Chris May
October 18, 2005

While many modern music fans have heard of Moondog--his counterculture reputation and musical achievements have been celebrated by hipster and conservatoire musicians alike for over fifty years--relatively few have actually heard his music. Acquainted with and endorsed by Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Igor Stravinsky, and Artur Rodzinski in New York in the late '40s and '50s, and by Janis Joplin, Frank Zappa, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass in the '60s and '70s, his most recent high-profile champion has been Elvis ...

Various Artists: Lagos Chop Up

by Chris May
September 1, 2005

An inspired trawl through the treasure trove that is urban Nigerian social music of the late '60s through mid '80s--a laid-back, all-night, intertribal dance party featuring classic highlife, Afrobeat, juju, and fuji hits of the era in all their four-track, one-take, original glory.

The '70s, give or take, were arguably the Golden Age of indigenous West African dance music: the decade before it forged wholesale fusions with Western pop and became global rather than local in genesis and ...

Candi Staton: Candi Staton

by Chris May
August 11, 2005

These are some of the finest soul recordings ever made, by an artist who stands head high with the great Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. If you love jazz, chances are you'll love this too.

Recorded from '69 to '73 for FAME Records in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, these are tough, funky, dirty, raw, proud, deep-groove, southern soul classics... twenty-six 2:40 masterpieces of the genre. The songs are mostly about love--found and lost--sung by a singer who lived every ...

Cedric Im Brooks & The Light Of Saba: Cedric Im Brooks & The Light Of Saba

by Chris May
August 7, 2005

Another treasure trove of near-lost, jazz-infused, Caribbean-based masterpieces from the label which is bringing us the London Is The Place For Me series. This time the focus is Jamaica during the '70s and the sublime blackism melange that was Cedric Im Brooks' Light Of Saba band. Ska, hard bop, mento, Afrobeat, highlife, dub, roots reggae, and Rasta grounation music are fused together in an utterly unique, easy-skanking fashion that makes you want to shout for the joy of being alive.

Various Artists: London Is The Place For Me 2

by Chris May
July 24, 2005

Vibrant and beautiful almost beyond words, the fifty year old recordings being collected on Honest Jons' London Is The Place For Me series are giant and precious treasures of early black British music. Exquisite artistic achievements in their own right, they also throw light on the early development of post bop jazz in the UK.

Volume one in the series, released in '02 and subtitled Trinidadian Calypso In London, 1950-1956, features all-but-forgotten masterpieces of reportage, social commentary and ...