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Continental Drift: Congo, Senegal & Cuba
by Chris May
Three outstanding albums, with recording dates spanning more than fifty years, shine a light on the symbiotic relationship between African and Cuban musics. Roots Of Rumba Rock collects forty tracks, recorded by Congolese dancehall musicians and locally released as 78 rpm singles from 1953-55. The compilation documents some of the earliest recorded impacts of Cuban rumba ...
Alcyona: Around The Sun
by Chris May
The young pianist and composer Alcyona, until recently known as Alcyona Mick, is emerging as an original new voice on the British jazz scene. She's still only 24 (or just turned 25) years old, but her band's performances during the past year or so have several times overturned their “support act" billings. An alumnus of Birmingham ...
Archie Shepp: Kwanza
by Chris May
Albert Ayler flamed like phosphorous for a few years, spoke like an Old Testament prophet, wore leather trousers and died young in mysterious circumstances. Archie Shepp burned just as bright, but has lived to a ripe age, growing to embrace the mainstream, and has had one foot in academe for much of his career. The two ...
The Microscopic Septet: Seven Men In Neckties
by Chris May
A nearly brassless little big band and a guitarless R&B group all at the same time, the Microscopic Septet was to the 1980s New York Downtown scene something of what the Art Ensemble of Chicago was to its own home town. Both bands were steeped in and respectful of the jazz tradition, but both deconstructed, recalibrated, ...
Gwigwi Mrwebi: Mbaqanga Songs
by Chris May
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. ...
Nigel Kennedy: Blue Note Sessions
by Chris May
I confess I wasn't expecting to enjoy this album. Here in his native Britain, violinist Nigel Kennedy is regarded by some as a figure of fun, a player who made much of his fortune with Vivaldi's evergreen Four Seasons, still a nice little earner, but one who has energetically promoted himself as the rebellious bad boy ...
Brian Lynch / Eddie Palmieri Project: Simpatico
by Chris May
In a world which seems increasingly to be defined by racial and cultural sectarianism, it's always heartening to come across an artist who chooses to express himself in a non-native context--particularly when he does so with the poise that trumpeter Brian Lynch brings to Simpatico. The album pairs Lynch with his frequent employer, Latin music piano ...
Papa Wemba: New Morning
by Chris May
Magic. Hip-swaying, smile-making, life-enhancing, butt-shaking, number one with a mango magic. Paris-based Papa Wemba, the King of Congolese Rhumba, has been off the recording scene for almost three years, following some moments difficiles, as he puts it in the liner notes. Wemba was jailed for smuggling “illegal immigrants (ie. clan members without visas looking for a ...
Joachim Kuhn: Europeana (Jazzphony No.1)
by Chris May
Owing little to the main stem US jazz tradition, composer Michael Gibbs' orchestral suite Europeana has more in common with the work of folk-influenced English composers like Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and Malcolm Arnold, and their particular varieties of English lyricism. It's a work of magnificence and beauty which was barely noticed on original release eleven ...
Bobby Hutcherson: Happenings
by Chris May
Recorded in 1966, and here with a 24-bit remaster by original engineer Rudy Van Gelder, Happenings heralded a new, less structurally adventurous approach from avant-garde standard-bearer and vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. As such it is, inevitably if rather unfairly--the individual performances are outstanding--less of a headline affair than the work which came before it. Happenings is the ...
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