Jazz Articles

Soothsayers: Soothsayers Meets Victor Rice & Friends

by Chris May
June 25, 2022

Nobody does it better, so the song goes, though whether the innuendo resonates most strongly with the singer, Carly Simon, or the lyrics's supposed protagonist, James Bond, depends, as it were, on the direction in which the listener is pointing. But whatever. In the context of Soothsayers Meets Victor Rice & Friends, the song's hook becomes a strapline for the deep-strata musical blend of cultures and ethnicities which London seems to do more convincingly than any other city in the ...

The Red Earth Collective featuring Soothsayers Horns: Red Earth Dub

by Chris May
February 8, 2010

London's Red Earth Collective and the associated band, Soothsayers, have much in common with New York's Akoya Afrobeat Ensemble. Both aggregations mix Afrobeat, dub and jazz to create a modern urban style. Both have included veteran Jamaican musicians on their albums--Red Earth / Soothsayers featured singers Johnny Clarke and Linval Thompson on its previous disc, One More Reason (Red Earth, 2009), and Akoya featured the great tenor saxophonist Cedric Im Brooks on its most recent set, P.D.P. President Dey Pass ...

Soothsayers Meet The Red Earth Collective: One More Reason

by Chris May
April 22, 2009

It's been four years since the release of Soothsayers' last album, the masterpiece Tangled Roots (Red Earth, 2005), but it seems like yesterday. A turbulent mash-up of jazz, Afrobeat, dub and funk, the disc still blows through the speakers like a fresh gale, coursing out of the vibrant, multi-cultural, south London milieu, centered around Brixton, which is Soothsayers' stamping ground. Tangled Roots was the band's second album, following Lost City (Red Earth, 2001), another rough diamond, with a shared ambiance. ...

Soothsayers: Tangled Roots

by Chris May
March 10, 2006

In the years since Fela Anikulapo Kuti's death--and truth be told, for longer than that, because Kuti's music was increasingly overwhelmed by personal problems from the late-1980s on--it has seemed more and more unlikely that we would ever hear top-dollar, flowering-top, kick-the-door-in Afrobeat again.

The golden age of the music was roughly 1973-76, when Kuti recorded a whole string of iconic albums (Gentleman, Alagbon Close, Expensive Shit, Johnny Just Drop, Everything Scatter, Yellow Fever, Zombie, Kalakuta Show) which he never ...