Jazz / Soul / Funk
1065 products
Riddim Chango Records is proud to present the first LP release, "KINTSUGI SOUL STEPPERS", a unique sonic patchwork from the Filipino Canadian collective seekersinternational and their fellow beat- maker juwanstockton. This album heralds a cultural fusion, connecting the heritage sounds of
Jamaican dub and the essence of American soul with the nostalgic ambience of 1980s Japan.
"KINTSUGI SOUL STEPPERS” embodies the spirit and art of Kintsugi — celebrating the beauty of piecing diverse fragments together and transforming them into a harmonious new whole.
With seekersinternational and juwanstockton at the helm, the LP celebrates the fusion of different sounds, cultures and identities to create new forms within contemporary music.
On February 26, 2020, 10 years after the death of musician Nujabes, a video commemorating him was projected on all the screens at the Shibuya scramble crossing. A video commemorating Nujabes was projected on all the screens at the Shibuya scramble crossing, and his music, including "Reflection Eternal," rang out. The video was the music video for "Lamp," which he co-wrote with haruka nakamura.
The year is 2021. Even though a long time has passed, the number of listeners from all over the world who seek the music of Nujabes continues to increase. In the midst of this turbulent time, Nujabes' label, Hydeout Productions, asked haruka nakamura to create a tribute album to mark the 10th anniversary of his death, saying, "I want you to carry forward the 10 years that time has stood still. The music video for "Reflection Eternal" and a 7-inch record were released in the summer and received a great response.
The culmination of this project is the release of the album "Nujabes PRAY Reflections".
The beautiful melodies spun by Nujabes are interpreted in a new way by haruka nakamura on piano and guitar. The album features a variety of new music from Nujabes, including Final View, Horizon, flowers, and Another Reflection, as well as a waltz version of Reflection Eternal and a piano solo based on the motif of "let go". The album also features a waltz version of Reflection Eternal, a piano solo based on the motif of "let go," and other songs that listeners can only hear on this album and that will be a moving experience for them. Guest musicians include Gen Tanabe (orbe), who plays the flute and electric guitar left behind by Nujabes, and maika (baobab), who deepens the album's worldview by providing a folkloric sound with his fiddle and singing.
The cover for the new album was commissioned from Cheryl D. McClure, the artist responsible for Hydeout Productions' "2nd collection," and it features a striking binding that resembles the coastline of Kamakura, Nujabes' favorite city. Also included is a rare case liner notes booklet with production notes by Nakamura himself, explaining all the songs. Photographs are by TKC, the photographer who also shot the music video, and the design is by Suzuki Takahisa, an up-and-coming designer. The book is a careful homage to the style of Nujabes' past works, and the binding has been completed.
The music travels through time, the beautiful melodies spun by Nujabes.
Following the melody, haruka nakamura's piano, which resembles a prayer, plays a continuation of the story.
This is not a so-called "cover album," but rather new music by haruka nakamura inspired by Nujabes' melodies.
Reflecting on the mental landscape. There flows a prayer that transcends the present time.
We can confirm his presence in the beautiful things that will always be there.
You are the flower, you are the river, you are the rainbow.
Winter/Summer
THE NORTH FACE Sphere, an ambitious new store building to be opened in Harajuku, Tokyo in 2022.
In response to a request for "one album for each of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, and winter," haruka nakamura created "Light years" as the soundtrack for the new building, which became a project to produce four albums over one year.
The LP is divided into "Spring and Autumn" and "Winter and Summer" based on the world view of the production timeline, and is the best of the four original albums.
The "Winter/Summer" album is the best of the first album "Light years" and the third album "from dusk to the sun".
(The "Spring and Autumn" version will be released at the same time.)
In March of 2023 composer, arranger & alto saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi premiered a commissioned suite of music in front of a sold out crowd at London’s Southbank Centre. She wrote the piece – gratitude – for her flagship large ensemble seed., in a special augmented formation that also featured turntablist NikNak and the London Contemporary Orchestra (LCO).
Followers of UK Jazz know Kinoshi from her previous work with seed. (including the Mercury Prize-nominated album Driftglass, released by jazz re:freshed in 2019), or as a former member of Kokoroko. But her compositional résumé also extends deeply into orchestral work for concert hall, contemporary dance, film, visual art, and theatre, with high profile collaborators including London Sinfonietta, Philharmonia Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra. That depth of experience is on full display on gratitude, with the textural and dynamic flexibility of her large ensemble covering musical ground from groove-focused modal melancholia to anthemic brass and string themes. Striking upon first listen and even richer on repeat visits, gratitude scores the soul of contemporary Black London with philharmonic craftwork in the tradition of legendary jazz arrangers like Mary Lou Williams, Oliver Nelson, and Carla Bley.
Similar to those keystone writer-arrangers, here Kinoshi wields the power of a large ensemble to convey nuanced human emotion. “gratitude was written as a means of guiding my own healing,” says Kinoshi. “My mother told me that she keeps a gratitude book where she writes one thing, no matter how big or small, every day that helps to re-focus her mind on practicing gratitude. The examples that she gave were seeing the flowers that she'd recently planted in her garden bloom and a kaleidoscope of butterflies that she saw flitting about a tree in her garden.”
Inspired by her mother’s focus on natural beauty and the meaningful minutiae of everyday life, Kinoshi was driven to work through her own relationship with mental health and to pour that into composition. “I was spending a lot of time on my own, often at my desk writing continuously,” says Kinoshi. “At 3pm everyday, the winter sun would be positioned opposite my window and shine directly onto my face. The task of writing this piece was one of the most difficult I've endured – because of the headspace that I was in at the time – and this would be the one thing in the middle of the day that would bring me a very deep sense of contentment… my first attempt at consciously practicing gratitude for something that I so often take for granted.”
“At this point in my artistic career, highlighting the often overlooked subject of mental health and what it means to move towards creating healthy, positive and introspective practices in regards to both understanding and regulating one's own mental health is of the utmost importance to me.”
Throughout the writing process Kinoshi had the privilege of knowing that her composition would eventually be interpreted by seed. — an ensemble of players she founded in 2016 and whose collective talents she knows through and through. “The binding concept of seed. has always been to have a creative outlet that allows me to express and highlight subject matter important to me alongside musicians that I deeply respect, admire and enjoy spending time with,” explains Kinoshi. “It is the one environment where I feel extremely comfortable being able to experiment with sound authentically. Over the years, it has evolved in the sense that the more comfortable the band members get with interpreting my music, and the more we develop a creative language together, the more honest the music sounds.” That profound musical and personal trust helped make the ensemble a perfect vehicle for a composition augmented by new collaborators — in this case the LCO and NikNak.
Kinoshi and seed. first met turntablist NikNak at the Marsden Jazz Festival in 2019. After spending some time talking politics and sharing jokes it was clear that a creative relationship was possible. “I find that working with formidable artists that I get on well with on a personal level always leads to my best work, and knew as soon as I met NikNak that I wanted to work with them.”
On the genesis of her collaboration with the LCO, Kinoshi says: “I have always wanted to combine seed. with electronics and orchestral elements, as I have always envisioned the band performing multi-disciplinary works. I have long admired the members of the LCO and their way of successfully melding orchestral arrangements and improvisation with more contemporary artists. I was introduced to them via Lexy Morvaridi during his time at the Southbank Centre. It was through his support, creative insight and trust that we were able to make this project happen.” The beauty and harmony of these communal connections plus the depth and deftness of all the musickers involved truly made Kinoshi's dream of this composition a reality.
Running confidently at 21 minutes and 33 seconds (not including the album’s B Side / final track “Smoke in the Sun,” which was recorded separately at Total Refreshment Centre) and going straight for the heart, gratitude is an evolved, emotionally attuned, creatively ambitious and compositionally exquisite philharmonic expression of post-millennial UK jazz.
Liner Notes by Thandi Ntuli:
I travelled to Los Angeles and the USA for the first time in 2019. Although I had not met Carlos in person, we connected via Instagram where he saw a video of me playing a piano motif (titled ‘The One’ in this sequence) that he really liked and expressed a wish to record. This was around 2017. We tried a few times to get me over to Los Angeles, but the timing was always off. Through a performance organised by a creative collective called The Nonsemble at The Ford Theatre we finally got the opportunity to meet, play together and subsequently go into studio to record some improvisations as he guided the recording process.
Having been aware of some of his work – in particular his collaborative projects as Carlos Niño & Friends, as well as with his friend and long-time collaborator, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson – I knew that, with Carlos as producer, the artistic direction of the album would likely take me to a place I’d never considered going. A fact that had me both curious and terrified (as one tends to be when stepping into the unknown) Lol!
Initially keen to record the song that he had seen/heard me play on Instagram, our performance a few days before the session drew him to the song Rainbow off my sophomore album, Exiled (2018). On that zen-like California afternoon in Andy Kravitz’s cozy studio in Venice Beach, he encouraged me to play around with various iterations of Rainbow. “Try it this way”, “How about adding that?”, “Can you breathe into the mic?”, “What if you focus on the last section?”, and many other explorations that eventually went through a few cuts, edits, yays and nays to become this body of work. Rainbow Revisited was birthed through that session, another session a couple of days later, and a series of many small synchronicities that led up to that moment.
A particularly special moment for me was when he invited me to play something from home, which lent itself to me recording a song originally written by my grandfather that we often sing when at family gatherings. The song is called Nomayoyo.
So much has happened since that session in late 2019. Many changes in our personal and collective universes. Losses and gains, births and transitions into the next life, Mother Nature’s ever-constant cycles reminding me that through all the chaos there remains, just beneath, this perfect order in Her ebb and flow. And most importantly, reminding me to feel for Her and to listen.
She speaks!
If Rainbow in my initial birthing of it, expressed a discontent with what we have accepted as freedom in South Africa and, possibly, around the world, I’d like to think that Rainbow Revisited is some kind of a response. Where the idea of ‘the rainbow nation’, with all the baggage it carried, had hijacked the innocence and mystical nature of a rainbow, I now reclaim its meaning through going back, going inward, healing, and rebuilding with the hope of a less heart-breaking and more fulfilling tomorrow.
Lihlanzekile!