Jazz Articles
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Kokoroko: Tuff Times Never Last
by Frank Housh
Kokoroko's sophomore album is cool. Cool as the other side of the pillow, cool like floating on top of the deep blue ocean, cool like the Fonz. Kokoroko may be properly classified within the “Afrobeat" jazz subgenre which mixes West African rhythms with jazz harmony. Its sound also includes a heavy dose of “highlife," traditional Ghanaian music that adopted instruments from colonial military bands. It was brought to America by jazz great Randy Weston in his 1963 album ...
Continue ReadingMarysia Osu: Harp, Beats & Dreams
by Chris May
Who knows how the jazz harp paradigm might have evolved had the instrument's most adventurous twentieth-century player, Detroit-born Dorothy Ashby, lived beyond her premature passing in 1986. Since then, most American jazz harpists have stuck pretty closely to the neo-classical glissandos and block chords-based style established by Alice Coltrane. New York's Brandee Younger is among the few who have shown a more than passing interest in Ashby's work and its emphasis on horn-like single-notes runs. In Britain, ...
Continue ReadingIzangoMa: Ngo Ma
by Chris May
The first thing that needs to be said is: this is not a jazz album. Jazz is only one of many musical traditions, most of them South African, that coalesce to form IzangoMa's debut. The percussion-rich, horn-embellished, multi-layered blend weaves together kwaito, mbaqanga, township jazz, marabi, pantsula, mbube, Jamaican nyabhingi drumming, electronica and a whole lot more. But jazz is an honoured tradition in the mix. The penultimate track, “Tribute To Johnny Dyani" (check the YouTube below), is a salute ...
Continue ReadingBokani Dyer: Radio Sechaba
by Dan Bilawsky
Bokani Dyer has already established himself as one of the leading musical voices of his generation in South Africa. But with Radio Sechaba--the heralded multi-hyphenate's first release on aural arbiter Gilles Peterson's Brownswood imprint--he expands his voice, reach and notability. Synthesizing a set of broad influences and building sounds of possibility surrounding his homeland and a global community, Dyer delivers an irresistible amalgam for our times and future. Born in exile in Botswana in 1986 and returning ...
Continue ReadingKokoroko: Could We Be More
by Chris May
One of the features of the 2022 alternative London jazz scene is the incorporation of musical styles originating in Africa and the Caribbean, from whence a high proportion of prominent musicians on that scene trace their heritage. Not every band shares this African and/or Caribbean dimension but the majority do and it is one of the factors behind the broadening of the audience base for jazz in Britain that has developed since around 2016. For the musicians, ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Indaba Is
by Chris May
There are probably several reasons why American jazz made the deep and lasting impact it did on South Africa in the 1950s. One may be that the colonial regime which was imposed on the country during Europe's pan-African nineteenth-century landgrab was among the most vicious of them all, and persisted the longest through the apartheid system which was in existence until the early 1990s. American jazz was born as protest and cultural-survival music in similar circumstances, and that vibe must ...
Continue ReadingZara McFarlane: Songs Of An Unknown Tongue
by Chris May
It takes courage for a musician to depart from a successful recipe to the extent that the British singer and songwriter Zara McFarlane does on Songs of An Unknown Tongue. The disc is not a complete shift from the paradigm of her three previous albums, but it is a radical spin on it. First, what has changed. McFarlane's last album, Arise (Brownswood, 2017) was, like its predecessors, an acoustic set played by a band drawn from McFarlane's ...
Continue ReadingJoe Armon-Jones: Turn To Clear View
by Chris May
A cornerstone of London's underground jazz scene—as well as leading his own band he plays in Ezra Collective and groups led by the tenor saxophonists Binker Golding and Nubya Garcia—the keyboard player Joe Armon-Jones released his first own-name album, Starting Today (Brownswood), in spring 2018. A jewel of nu-fusion which owes almost as much to the Los Angeles R&B and funk scene as it does to British woke jazz, the album features Armon-Jones leading a lineup of fellow London luminaries ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Sunny Side Up
by Chris May
London DJ Gilles Peterson's worldwide touring produces some singular jazz and near-jazz experiences, the best of which he documents on his Brownswood Recordings label. Modern Cuban music figures prominently in the catalogue, and there have been several Japanese jazz albums, most memorably the Toshio Matsuura Group's Loveplaydance: 8 Scenes From The Floor (Brownswood, 2018). The label has released another left-field contender with Sunny Side Up, which showcases near-jazz bands from Melbourne, Australia, where there is, we learn, a thriving underground ...
Continue ReadingKokoroko: Kokoroko
by Chris May
If you ask an Afrobeat fan to name their favourite bands--excluding lineups led by Fela Kuti during his lifetime--the probability is that their top five choices will include Seun Kuti's Egypt 80 and Femi Kuti's Positive Force, both based in Lagos, along with Dele Sosimi's Afrobeat Orchestra, based in London. Other credible outfits have emerged, but none which has so far seriously challenged that tripartite ascendancy. London trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey's Kokoroko is an outfit to watch, however, combining, as it ...
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