Kaidi Tatham: The Only Way

The Belfast-based DJ and broken-beat pioneer Kaidi Tatham travels a parallel orbit to that of the London-based DJ Ash Walker. Both are loosely associated with Britain's alternative jazz scene. Both draw on a similar patchwork of influences, including hip hop, rap, techno, old school jazz-funk and modern Brazilian dance music. Both approach the recording studio as an instrument in itself and both make extensive use of digital sonics. Both focus on the dancefloor and the after-party chill-out room.

Tatham has played sessions and created remixes for artists as diverse as Mulatu Astatke, Marcos Valle, Amy Winehouse, Soul II Soul and Nubya Garcia, while Garcia guests on Walker's summer 2023 album Astronaught (Night Time Stories), which is reviewed here.

Tatham's The Only Way is a higher temperature and more up-tempo affair than Astronaught. Opening track "Reason We're Here" sounds like something Lonnie Liston Smith might have come up with had he been born fifty years later, but do not be fooled: the breakneck "Feels Like I'm On My Own" (check the YouTube below) is a more indicative track, kicking into rocket-speed Brazilian choro after a jazz-funk intro.

Its aesthetic shaped by streaming practice, where a galaxy of genres rub up against each other with an intimacy and immediacy not previously present in music culture, The Only Way is by no stretch of the imagination a jazz album, but it is one which benefits from infusions of jazz.