Jazz / Soul / Funk

Original deadstrock copy. Japanese Obscure Private Issue New Age gems!

A wonderfully fine-feathered free jazz zinger from L.A., 1978, Horace Tapscott and the Pan Peoples Arkestra’s ‘The Call’ is reissued by DJ Harv’s Outernational Sounds for the first time 

“Our Music is contributive, rather than competitive” - Horace Tapscott. Working under the right kinda steam, Tapscott and company play a blinder here, sending us reeling with the deliciously complex, rolling syncopation and flighty horns of ‘The Call’, then seducing with the mellifluous appearance of Adele Sebastian in ‘Quagmire Manor at Five A.M.’ before erupting into needlepoint bebop, and back out to Adele. Percussion fiends will then be in their element with the lithe, Afro-latinate swing and frenzied paso-doble vamps of ‘Nakatini Suite’, before they switch up and out again with the heady sway of strings and wind, hunched breaks and searching clarinet of ‘Peyote Song No. III.’

Kit Sebastian – composed of K. Martin and Merve Erdem – announce their new album ‘New Internationale’, set for release 27th September on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder record label, and unveil lead single “Metropolis”.

Speaking on “Metropolis”, Kit Sebastian says “The hook of this track was influenced by how many famous Azerbaijani’s musicians (like Vagif Mustafazadeh or Rafig Babayev) approach their melodies, but played over a more western funk groove. We use the familiar Italian analog synth found in a junkyard and a mock-choir to create a choral texture. It ends with a samba section, with two drum kits, horn section and string section partially fed through an analog synth to process it.”

Lyrically, “Metropolis” portrays the immigrant experience, highlighting the pressures and disillusionments of trying to find control, meaning, and a sense of belonging in a seemingly indifferent and foreign world, all while grappling with the compromises between pursuing art as a profession and seeking stability. It is about projecting one's hopes and desires onto a new city, the naive sense of freedom this brings, and the inevitable disillusionment and desolation that follow.

‘New Internationale’—their musically irrepressible and emotionally sophisticated third album, and their debut for Brainfeeder—is deliberate in a way Kit Sebastian has never really been. They wrote most of it on the road, energised by the sounds they discovered as they magpied instruments during their travels—Turkish clarinet, santour, oud, gangsa, zither, harpsichord, and on and on. They cut most of the tracks in London during brief breaks, longtime drummer Theo Guttenplan and double bassist David Richardson joining a panoply of horn, string, and percussion players. And during a year off from the road, where K. and Merve could concentrate on making sure the pieces moved together, they decamped to the French countryside for two weeks, leaving the distractions and moodiness of home. They captured vocals for 14 songs there in only half that time. Both Kit Sebastian’s busy touring schedule and subsequent break from it allowed Merve to step fully into these songs and their ever-shifting shapes, her confidence and versatility rising in tandem.

But rather than sounding stitched together from these assorted scenes, ‘New Internationale’ is a riveting synthesis of the sounds and styles that have long tantalised Kit Sebastian—French pop and Anatolian psych, vintage Tropicália and early rock ’n’ roll, with breezes of soul and prog blowing through the open windows of the pair’s collective imagination. 

There are lots of outstanding Joe McPhee LPs. Nation Time being chief among them, but there's also Pieces Of Light, Oleo and Topology. The Poughkeepsie, New York-based multi-instrumentalist, by now an international star of free music, has amassed a daunting discography, no doubt. If you want to peer deeply into the soul of Joe McPhee, however, there's no way around it, you need to spend some quality time with Tenor. " Tenor is McPhee's first solo record. He did not set out to make it. It was an afterthought, quite literally, born of a gathering of friends at the Swiss farmhouse of cellist Michael Overhage. A beautiful meal, some drinks, warm conversation, and ... why not, an impromptu recital. Hat Hut producer Werner X. Uehlinger was there and a year later issued it as McPhee's third LP for the label (Hat Hut C in their famed letter series). "The existential blues 'Knox' sets the stage, indicating that this will not just be a toss-off postprandial singalong. 'Good-Bye Tom B.' carries on with aching melancholy, through burred notes and hushed harmonics. The relatively jaunty 'Sweet Dragon' is also emotionally loaded with Ayler-esque vibrato, slurs, wipes, and blasts of tone. The side-long title track comes without a theme, as a kind of pure investigation of the horn, its potential, its limits, its expressive capacity. There have been few solo sessions as comprehensive and devastating as this spontaneous after-dinner diversion in rural Switzerland in 1976. We're very lucky someone pressed record."

"Black Magic Man is arguably the pivotal Joe McPhee release. It bridged the span between the regional and the international, bypassing the national altogether. "Recorded in the same sessions that produced Nation Time, Black Magic Man consists of music not chosen for that LP. Like its much-feted sister, technically it falls under the domain of CjR, Craig Johnson's herculean effort in support of McPhee. An erstwhile painter, Johnson became a self-taught audio engineer, acquiring equipment expressly to document McPhee's music. In December 1970, five years after Johnson and McPhee had met, they recorded two days of activity – a concert followed by an additional day of recordings – at Vassar College where McPhee was teaching in the Black Studies department. About half of the material was used to make Nation Time. While they had planned to issue a follow-up, the money wasn't there, so the tapes sat dormant. "Fast-forward five years – Werner X. Uehlinger, a Swiss businessman who worked for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, contacted Johnson while on a trip to the US, and over dinner with McPhee, they discussed putting out some of the unused tracks from the Nation Time sessions. With this casual encounter in 1975, Hat Hut Records was inaugurated. The new label's maiden release was Black Magic Man, dubbed Hat Hut A, the first in what would become Hat Hut's letter series. Along the way, the series would feature seven Joe McPhee records, including the first four in a row."

The singular musical spirit Joseph Deenmamode aka Mo Kolours presents an exciting new body of work. A catalog of critically acclaimed records, including his self-titled debut (2014), ‘Texture Like Like Sun’ (2015), 2018 album ‘Inner Symbols’ and three companion EPs, established Deenmamode as a prodigious musician and vocalist. Pitchfork extolled his “hypnotic, tribal-infused dance grooves”, DJ Mag appreciated the “colourful celebration of soundsystem culture”, and Resident Advisor advocated that “no one sounds quite like Mo Kolours”. Musical analogies were drawn by The Guardian as “The best album Curtis Mayfield never made with A Tribe Called Quest and Lee Perry” and Mojo as “like Marvin Gaye produced by J Dilla”. Five years ago, Deenmamode moved to the Japanese countryside. Far away from familiarity, he contemplated his place and further questioned his identity. “I had none of my ‘own’ people around. I had time to really find what makes me tick musically. Japan has helped me go back to those subconscious leanings, really go deep, and reflect the aspects that make up my story”. The tracks on ‘Original Flow’ have been constructed from sessions, improvisations and soundbites captured around the world during this time; collecting contributions from musicians including Deenamode’s brothers Reginald Omas Mamode and Jeen Bassa plus Andrew Ashong, Charles Bullen, Dwaye Kilvington, Eddie Hick, Stefan Asanovic, Myele Manzanza, Ross Hughes, and Tom Dreissler. Deenamode says “I’m proud of this album’s creative process. Coming from a tradition of scouring through hours of records, I wanted to create my own samples, to find that perfect loop that no other producer could put their hands on. I decided to invite a group of friends and acquaintances, who also happen to be incredible musicians, to a studio in Crystal Palace to improvise based on some loose ideas I had. We spent all day, and recorded everything”. ‘Original Flow’ is an album of UK street-soul nouveau, future indigenous jazz fusion, Rasta Segga, Nyahbinghi jazz, Malagasy Hebrew hip hop. While retaining a spirit of exploration and improvisation, it sees Deenmamode grow and flex beyond beat tape brevity, expanding composition and stretching his musical muscle to play live with other musicians. Themes of empowerment, overcoming adversity, and mental liberation coexist with notes from ancient history, futurism, and science, as well as musings on family and togetherness. ‘Magik Momentum’ springs from a discussion that features at the start of the song, an inspiring mentor answering a question from Deenmamode about improvisation and what role it plays in life when planning and manifesting the future. ‘Rockets to Mars’ questions the lack of care for the billions of people with nothing, while governments plan to explore space. “This sparked a comparison in my mind to a Sonny Okuson song that I would reference when performing. Okuson’s song talked of the lack of resources in many communities in the world, while governments go to the moon”. He says the music behind ‘The News These Days’ is “possibly my favourite on the album”. Looped like he would a late sixty jazz-fusion sample, there was nothing added and the track was complete within a matter of minutes. “It was the first and best moment from the entire Crystal Palace session”, he adds. The album’s contrasting title track with minimal instrumentation played solo by Deenamode. While frustratingly searching for gems in past recordings, he thought in a burst of ego, “I don’t need no-one else to make a dope beat!” picked up his ravanne, (the traditional frame drum of his fathers home-land of Mauritius), pressed record, and started to play. He says, “In my thoughts were the rhythms of the Nubians in Upper-Egypt and Sudan, the swing of the huge drums played by Mauritanian women, of-course the Sega beat of Mauritius, and the ever inspiring beat of James Yancey”. Driven by UK broken beat, Cuban congas, Nigerian and Mauritian inflections, ‘Love Vibration’ follows the concept that all emotions carry a vibratory frequency and pays homage to the frequency of creation and the power of love. The two part ‘Tatamaka’ tells of the history of Deenmamode’s ancestors, the maroons of Mauritius. “We are people who managed to run from our oppressors and find refuge in a corner of the island called ‘Le Morne’ where they could not reach us. One bloody day they came in numbers to re-capture, to revenge. Many of us chose to jump to our deaths, rather than be taken back into subjugation. The poem by Creole Richard Sedley Assonne says; “there were hundreds of them, but my people, the maroons chose the kiss of death over the chains of slavery”. Tatamaka was the name of a famed maroon leader who was murdered for claiming his, and our people’s freedom. The song is the imagined journey of escape and freedom by an ancestor of the maroons of Le Morne”. Born in the west midlands and raised on the traditional sega music of his father’s Indian Ocean homeland of Mauritius alongside records by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Santana and Michael Jackson; his influences expanded with late 90s jungle and drum and bass nights in Bristol, experiments at art college in Camberwell, and the rich culture of Peckham, “at the time we called it the Afro Quarters of London” says Deenmamode, adding hip hop, dub, soul and soundsystem styles to his individual sound. He explains, “I love drum music, from hand-drums to 808s. I love music from the ancient past, heritage music, indigenous music, traditional music passed down from the beginning of time. Music from the body, hand claps, grunts and foot stomps. Music with audible depth, busy, bustling, highly charged. Music from the soul, the music from beyond. I love music from the islands and the mountains. The music of the streets, hustle music, alleyway beats. Club music”. He describes the creative process as thinking in images. “The visual world and the world of sound seem to intermingle in my thought process. When I play the drum with my eyes closed, a world of imagery dances and moves with beat. Improvised drumming feels like I am listening to what I want to hear, rather than trying to play what I want to hear. Following the rhythm and finding new pathways to walk within the patterns is what I experience. In this way I often feel I am just a listener, instead of the player”.

Gondwana Records are proud to announce Morning Sun / Arrival, a limited two track 12” release from the sublimely beautiful and immersive LA instrumental project Phi-Psonics Phi-Psonics is a meditative, deeply soulful jazz group from Los Angeles, led by bassist Seth Ford-Young and featuring Sylvain Carton on woodwinds, Mitchell Yoshida on electric piano, and Josh Collazo on drums. Their beautiful music draws on jazz and classical influences together with Ford-Young’s own musical experiences, relationships, and his introduction to spirituality, yoga and philosophy at a young age. Along the way they create something uniquely their own, sharing beautiful landscapes for your spirit to roam freely within. Morning Sun / Arrival was recorded from the same sessions that formed Phi-Psonics second album Octava - it’s an emotional, introspective, and unusual approach to meditative jazz that offers us a beautiful space for uplifting contemplation and wields a quiet power to create a spiritually inspiring world of timeless, warm melodies and instrumental exploration for the deep listener and thoughtful voyager. Pressed on high quality black BioVinyl at Optimal in Germany for maximum sound quality.

The Exploding Star Orchestra is Rob Mazurek’s vehicle for blowing minds and reshaping worlds. For more than a decade and a half, the multi-instrumentalist has guided the variably configured big band through appearances on three continents. Its first performance in his former hometown of Chicago in more than five years determined to be more than just a concert. With support from the city’s Experimental Sound Studio and International Anthem, the Exploding Star Orchestra not only played music from the new Lightning Dreamers LP, but Mazurek and Co. also showed the processes behind its creation. The event took place under the dome of Adler Planetarium, which provided a suitably cosmic surface upon which to project Mazurek’s visuals. A painter, sculptor and digital artist as well as a musician, he spends a typical day at his home studio in Marfa, Texas, improvising electronic music, whose signals he translates into visuals, whose digital information is then fed back into the music. Some of this work might eventually manifest as pure sound, flickering light or compositions for one of Mazurek’s bands; in this setting, he could finally unleash the whole shebang. A digital projection flashed an ever-changing stream of vividly colored, abstract shapes derived from his paintings and animations over the audience’s heads, while the Orchestra, which on this night numbered eight musicians besides its leader, transformed the stylistically disparate pieces from Lightning Dreamers into an enveloping maelstrom. Electric pianists Angelica Sanchez and Craig Taborn pushed layers of plush texture back and forth over the intricate, tripartite grooves of bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and two drummers, Chad Taylor and Gerald Cleaver. Mazurek’s trumpets and wordless cries, Tomeka Reid’s cello and Nicole Mitchell’s flute and voice periodically surfaced out of the flow, issuing sharp, energetic statements, while Damon Locks’ proclamations flickered in and out of the mix like an erratic signal from some interstellar radio announcer. Together, they reimagined the brooding sound of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew as a force for transcendent uplift. The concert’s climactic moment was a visual one. At one point, Mitchell put down her flute, spoke into Mazurek’s ear and pointed up to toward the dome. As he looked up, his own horn came down, and for a moment, the two of them gazed with undisguised awe at the spectacle that the Orchestra had unleashed. In a time when so many forces conspire to bring people down, this concert was an invitation to look up and out past the horizon. — review by Bill Meyer; originally published in Magnet Magazine, April 2023

Portico Quartet announce Monument, the electronic driven follow-up to their acclaimed ambient-minimalist suite Terrain, presenting the band at their most direct. It's rare that a band releases two albums within six months of each other, rarer too that while both are so different, they are both as epochal in terms of the band's output as Terrain and Monument are to Portico Quartet. The irony is that Monument, a stripped-back, intentionally direct album, was the album that the band set out to write in May 2020, before the dream like long-form Terrain came into focus. Briefly they were two halves of the same record, but the band ended up developing these two distinct bodies of work concurrently. And although they were written side-by-side and recorded at the same sessions, they are records best understood as distinct from each other, each with opposing ideas and forms. Monument is one of Portico Quartet's most accessible, direct records to date. If Terrain addressed the darker side of how Duncan Bellamy and Jack Wyllie made sense of the pandemic, then Monument resonates as an ode to better times. If not quite a dance record, it nonetheless pulses with an energy, radiance and a scalpel sharp focus. Jack Wyllie explains: "It's possibly our most direct album to date. It's melodic, structured and there's an economy to it that is very efficient. There's not much searching or wastage within the music itself, it is all finalised ideas, precisely sculpted and presented as a polished artefact." Bellamy expands "Monument sits somewhere between our albums Portico Quartet and Art in the Age of Automation. It has perhaps a more overtly electronic edge to its sound – there are more synthesisers and electronic elements than we have used before and the music is often streamlined and rhythmic". After the ethereal, stage-setting of Opening, the album kicks into overdrive with Impressions, a short energetic track that pairs a club influenced groove with hang drum and close, delicate saxophone. It's the balance between these elements that push and pull the track through a selection of melodic and rhythmic re-configurations, contrasting human touch with a machine-like focus. Ultraviolet is a kaleidoscopic, krautrock inspired track with a haunting introduction and an insistent pulse. The wistful Ever Present builds from a simple piano refrain; a nostalgic melody line floats over the top as drums and bass groove insistently underneath, before reaching a euphoric peak. The title track Monument builds around a looping vocal sample, drums and an enigmatic melody, the ending giving way to a gauzy, weaving synth line. The power here is in its economy and luminosity. AOE flips back and forth, like a dial that's been switched. Mining the tension between a pastoral inflected cello and saxophone melody, with an abrupt shift to jilted live drums, wailing delayed saxophone and a flickering synth line. Warm Data comes straight from the same Portico Quartet tradition as older tracks like Current History and Laker-Boo. It's a marriage of instrumental minimalism with drum machines and synths. Finally, the album closes with On The Light, a track that transmits a sense of suspense and freedom, driven by the twitching drums of Bellamy and evocative sax of Wyllie. It offers the perfect bitter-sweet and evocative ending to Portico Quartet's latest Monument. Mastered by John Davis at Metropolis. Artwork by Duncan Bellamy for Veils Project.

“Portico Quartet stake claims to territory occupied by Radiohead, Cinematic Orchestra and Efterklang”. The Guardian ***** Mercury Prize-nominated Portico Quartet has always been an impossible band to pin down. Sending out echoes of jazz, electronica, ambient music and minimalism, the group created their own singular, cinematic sound over the course of three studio albums, from their 2007 breakthrough ‘Knee-Deep in the North Sea’, and 2010 John Leckie produced ‘Isla’, to the self titled record ‘Portico Quartet’ in 2012. Now rebooted as Portico Quartet after a brief spell as the three-piece Portico, the group are set to release their fourth studio album Art In The Age Of Automation this August on Manchester’s forward thinking indy jazz and electronica label Gondwana Records. It’s an eagerly anticipated return, with the band teasing both a return to their mesmeric signature sound and fresh new sonic departures in their new music. So much so that their four-night run at Archspace E8 (June 22-25) sold out in less than an hour as fans from around the world scrambled for tickets to hear the return of Portico Quartet. Recorded at Fish Factory Studios in London at the beginning of the year and mixed at Vox studios, Berlin, Art In The Age Of Automation finds the band building on the sound world they first explored with their eponymous 2012 release Portico Quartet, mixing the cinematic minimalism, that first made their name, with electronic and ambient textures alongside a welcome return for Jack’s ethereal saxophone and Duncan’s unique mixture of live and electronic drums as well of course as the band’s signature sound, the chiming other worldy tones of the hang drum. It’s hard music to define, as Jack acknowledges. “Our sound falls between many genres, jazz, electronic music even minimalism in places, but naturally it’s an amalgamation of everything we’ve listened to”. And as you would expect from a band that have evolved with each recording, this is no barren retread of the past, instead it represents another step forward sonically and musically in the band’s ongoing evolution, as Jack explains. “We’ve really gone into detail with the sounds and production, building dense layers and textures but retaining a live, organic feel to it. We wanted to use acoustic instruments but find ways in which they could interact with more modern production techniques and technologies to create something that was identifiably us but sounded fresh and exciting, futuristic even.” Its an ethos that also informs the album’s title and the distinctive artwork by Duncan Bellamy (under his Veils Project identity) that adorns the album’s cover “The artwork came about when I started to explore the idea of scanning moving images. The resulting image is exactly that - a film playing on a tablet whilst the scan is in action. So the image is something created by the scanner itself, and in this way it establishes a relationship with the title of the album”. And it’s the mix between the human and the electronic that makes the music on AITAOA so fresh and exciting as Portico Quartet one again evolve their music into the future. The album opens with insistent, catchy Endless, which references the classic Portico Quartet sound, but expands outwards into a hypnotic, blissful collage of strings, hangs, electronics, saxophones and Bellamy’s unique drumming. It’s a sound that permeates the whole record, feeling both familiarly Portico Quartet, but transformed into something bold and new, sounding somehow bigger than ever but even more detailed. Elsewhere Rushing draws on the bands love of minimalist music, a repeated piano motif merges with a contorted vocal sample that twists its way through juxtaposed spaces to reach an uplifting resolve. Meanwhile the title track offers a moment of down-tempo respite: the hang drum is joined by a full horns and string section, culminating in a orchestral outro where cellos and violins blend with saxophones and hang drum to form a densely layered blanket of sound. The sound of strings are prevalent on much of the record, and as Jack explains they add an extra layer of humanity to the music “It’s exciting working with a string section and to hear the ideas you sketch on a computer being played on acoustic instruments, then being able to direct them in a way in which is just not possible on a computer, it brings a real emotional depth and nuance to the record”. On A Luminous Beam an infectious drum grove drives the piece while synths, flutes and strings are layered with the saxophone floating freely over the top. Beyond Dialogue is classic Portico Quartet, exploiting the ethereal, otherworldly timbre of the hang drums and Jack’s saxophone to create a hypnotic track that references minimalism and ambient music to create something beautiful and new. Current History has nods towards more electronic and urban music as drum machines underpin a collage of hang drums and saxophones. The album finishes on the aptly tilted Lines Glow, the saxophone weaving its melody over an organ and string section culminating in an epic, euphoric moment of release. It’s a fittingly uplifting way to end an album that announces the return of one of the UK’s most singular, and influential bands, one that a decade from their founding are still pushing the boundaries of their music into the future and still sound like nothing you ever heard before.

For fans of: Sessa, Caetano, Veloso, Alabaster DePlume, Bala Desejo London has a bright new Brazilian talent in town, who goes by the name of MOMO. Not so new, actually. One of the recent generation of artists influenced by the Brazilian classics, from 1970s tropicália, Os Mutantes and Milton Nascimento. MOMO. releases his 7th album Gira, on Batov Records bringing together some very special musicians and guests from London’s bustling and hustling jazz community, with fellow Brazilian artists, recorded and cut to tape at East London’s Total Refreshment Center. A journeying collaboration which effortlessly swings, guided by Marcelo Frota’s soft yet reassuringly familiar vocal, with ruminative and explorative brass twists, Gira was recorded with friends and guests including Alabaster DePlume on tenor sax (in whose band Marcelo toured), Jessica Lauren on keys, Tamar Osborn on baritone sax, Nick ‘Emanative’ Woodmansey on drums, Carwyn Ellis of Rio 18 fame on piano, Magnus Mehta from Penya on percussion and Caetano Malta on bass. Gira is MOMO.’s eighth album yet his first recorded in London. After a musical odyssey that took him from his home of Rio de Janeiro to Angola, Michigan, Chicago, Spain and Lisbon, MOMO. now calls London his home, where he lives with his young family, and whose creative spirit has inspired him for the last three years. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the new album marks a real departure. His debut from 2006, A Estética do Rabisco was named one of the best albums of the year by the Chicago Reader and set Marcelo’s musical path in motion. His singer-songwriting talents have already earned him plaudits from royalty like Patti Smith and David Byrne and he was invited to participate in A Tribute to Caetano to mark the 70th birthday of Brazilian musical legend, Caetano Veloso. Inspired by seeing his young daughter breaking out in dance to some music at home, MOMO. thought, "I would love to make an album that she could dance to" and Gira was conceived. In recruiting his new London friends as collaborators, MOMO. rekindled the fun and feel of his earliest recordings in Rio, when he would invite people over to his studio and "just see what happened." And the best way to capture such spontaneous energy was to record Gira live. In this case, at London’s Total Refreshment Centre, a creative hub that is also a concert space, artist workshop and studio which has become a beacon for jazz music since its ‘warehouse’ inception in 2012 by promoter Lex Blondin. The title Gira means to move. "It made sense to start with the grooves, the patterns, then start filling in the melodies,” MOMO. explains. So drummer Nick Woodmansey, leader of the genre-melting jazz collective Emanative, along with co-founder of Penya, percussionist Magnus Mehta, and fellow Brazilian immigrant and bassist Caetano Malta, combine to anchor the resulting effortless grooves, while other contributors then spark the little touches of magic in its wake. Alabaster DePlume's saxophone adds an exotic touch to Oqueeei. Francesca Ter-Berg's cello adds a startling dimension to two of the longer improvisations, the superb opener Pára and A Walk in the Park. Rosie Turton's brash, brittle trombone embellishes Summer Interlude and the first single, Jão. Inspired by the early work of Tim Maia, the album's shortest song pictures a guy in a gafieira (where people go to dance to samba in couples), MOMO. explains, "just dancing and having fun." Fun is a hallmark of Gira. "You come, you play, we have fun," MOMO. told his collaborators. You can hear it so clearly on that simmering eight-minute-plus opener Pára, chosen as the second single: the way MOMO. savours its memorable vocal refrain like a tasty morsel while Jessica Lauren's keyboard vamp takes root and Tamar Osborn's deliciously resonant baritone sax echoes Ronnie Cuber’s trademark work for Eddie Palmieri on Harlem River Drive. Fun, too, is what MOMO. had in collaborating with his old friend Wado on the lyrics to six of the album's 10 songs. The third and final single Rio, for example, is a tribute to the city where MOMO. grew up and first learned to play the guitar. Appropriately, Carwyn Ellis of Rio 18 fame was invited to play electric piano and add his touch to the song. The album’s finale, the focus and title track, is ”like folkloric music, like a baião but with a London vibe.” Gira is a new departure for MOMO. While previous albums have always started with guitar and voice, Gira begins with the groove – yet succeeds sublimely in balancing this new emphasis on spontaneous improvisation and songwriting. “Life brought me to London and I think I’ve made my lightest album; it could only have been created here." When Brazil meets London, you can't help but move to the groove.

Continuing their exploration of São Tomé and Príncipe with DJ Tom B., Les Disques Bongo Joe proudly announces the release of África Negra Anthology Vol. 2. We've carefully selected and remastered 13 standout tracks for this volume, digitized from studio tapes by their tour manager. The album includes a booklet with updated liner notes and vintage photos of the group. África Negra, established in the early 1970s by Horacio and Emidio Pontes, is São Tomé and Príncipe's most renowned musical group. Their blend of Puxa and Rumba, infused with Leonildo Barros' guitar riffs, Armando Tito's bass lines, and vibrant percussion, gained them recognition beyond the archipelago. This volume offers a glimpse into their musical journey, featuring unreleased sessions from 1979 and 1990, showcasing lead vocalists like João Seria and Sergio Fonseca. Reformed around Leonildo Barros and Antonio Menezes since 2008, the group has released three albums since 2012 and resumed touring in recent years, with João since 2014. Their performances continue to captivate audiences with energetic rhythms, graceful harmonies, socially charged poetry, and distinctive dance moves, supported by their Lisbon-based tour manager, Afonso Simoes (Filho Unico), who facilitated the excavation of these tracks. Since the tragic passing of Joao Seria on May 4, 2023, followed by national funeral honors, 90s lead vocalist Sergio Fonseca has rejoined the group, accompanied by Iju, a renowned younger São Toméan vocalist, delivering an engaging show. Pacheco, known for his devastating bass riffs and unique style of playing, has also returned, having lived in Cape Verde since 1987 and recently resettled in São Tomé. This anthology is dedicated to the memory of General João Seria, Gabriel João, Sep 1, 1949 - May 4, 2023.

'Mighty Vertebrate' is the International Anthem leader debut from Adelaide, Australia-born bassist and composer Anna Butterss. Butterss has steadily become a first-call for tour and studio work since moving to Los Angeles (after a stint in Bloomington, Indiana) in 2014. They’ve racked up credits with notables across the indie, jazz, and pop worlds alike – including Makaya McCraven, Phoebe Bridgers, Jason Isbell, Andrew Bird, and Daniel Villarreal – but their most notable contributions to the burgeoning West Coast creative music scene have been as a core member of both Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet and rising proto-trance supergroup SML, who Pitchfork says “represents the thrilling next phase of a vibrant L.A. community.” Their first solo album, 'Activities', was similarly hailed by Pitchfork as "one of the most exciting, undersung jazz releases of 2022," but the improvise-edit-reconstruct method used on that record couldn’t be further from the foundation of 'Mighty Vertebrate', which began amid the very real challenge of threading solo work into the dense calendrical web of an in-demand collaborator. “I had just gotten off of a bunch of touring at the end of 2022 and just wanted to write music,” says Butterss. “The best way for me to do that, I’ve found, is to set myself a discrete and focused task." - I’m going to make a song where the bass doesn’t function in the role of a bass. - I’m going to work on this for an hour and then I’m going to stop. - I’m going to make a song that uses groups of three-bar phrasing. - I want to sample something and make it into a song. - I’m going to start with a drum machine. “Every song was like that,” they continue. “Then once I got started I just followed where my mind wanted to go. It was very structured.” The music itself reflects that structure beautifully, with the material being tightly composed and melodically realized by Butterss well in advance of production concerns. They eventually migrated the operation to Chris Schlarb’s Long Beach hideaway BIG EGO to track a selection of full band material. With Schlarb at the controls they reconvene a group of trusted longtime collaborators to bring their compositions to fruition: Josh Johnson (sax), Gregory Uhlmann (guitar), and Ben Lumsdaine (drums, guitar, production). “I am definitely hearing this group when I’m writing the music or thinking of how it’s going to be played live,” Butterss notes. “I’m hearing these specific people. They’re going to understand what this is supposed to feel like. We’re not going to have to talk about it much. It’s just going to feel very natural, which it was.” The results speak to the natural quality of those interactions, and their breadth and scope might have been difficult to achieve otherwise. From the Robbie-Shakespeare-in-groove-mode intro to the album opener “Bishop” to the spacious cinematic doom of “Seeing You”, there is a lot to wrangle into one cohesive concept. It’s the bedrock of the lineup which keeps the circle unbroken. Butterss’ deep rooted musical relationship with the album’s co-producer, multi-instrumentalist and IARC labelmate Ben Lumsdaine, is also an undeniable factor in the cohesion. The duo have played together since meeting as teens in music school, and worked closely with one another on every aspect of the ten tracks that make up 'Mighty Vertebrate'. That comfort level extends the confident and natural feeling of the sessions to post production, granting the internal arc of each piece the same tidy-yet-adventurous quality found in the compositions themselves. For instance, “Dance Steve” opens with overlapping samples expanding, contracting, and quickly focusing into a rhythm blended with a lo-fi bedroom beat just before the sonic scope is widened with a tuff-and-crunchy guitar riff over a straight boom bap 808 rhythm. Synth repetitions chirp dizzily while chorused guitars soften the scene and the subtly dense percussive layers build and unbuild. The song’s halfway mark finds the listener cooling down as the melodies retreat and the rhythm settles into ambient-trance mode. It’s only a chance to catch a breath, it turns out, as the last third of the track is the big reveal. Enter Jeff Parker (the album’s lone featured guest) on electric guitar along with Lumsdaine in a deep-pocket tambourine-accompanied groove. All synths, samples, and guitars have brightened and been rendered percussive – a web of tiny pulsing rhythms – and Parker uses the moment to lay down a classic JP solo. Butterss steers the ship with a dubby bass groove threaded between the beats. It’s as if the shades have been thrown open to greet the sun, but most importantly it’s a complete story. A narrative arc in under five minutes. Jeff Parker’s impact is hard to miss when discussing any forward-thinking, groove-oriented jazz and experimental music. Perhaps even more accurate in the case of 'Mighty Vertebrate' is the influence of Tortoise, the long running post-genre group of which Parker is a member. Butterss’ “Pokemans” echoes the band’s excellent 2001 album 'Standards' as much as it does Four Tet or any of Junichi Masuda’s 8-bit school bus classics; but this is more than just inspiration, influence, or some detached version of a musical continuum. Butterss has played with Jeff Parker for years; Tortoise’s John Herndon did the cover art for 'Mighty Vertebrate'; these artists exist within the same close-knit community. Here Butterss finds themself firmly in the protégé-to-peer pipeline. Ultimately, each track on 'Mighty Vertebrate' could be excavated and studied or simply taken at face value. It’s a solid, mature, and endlessly fun glimpse into the world of an artist whose potential for growth is seemingly unlimited.

Paradise Cinema is a project led by multi-instrumentalist Jack Wyllie (Portico Quartet/Szun Waves) with contributions from Khadim Mbaye, Tons Sambe and Laurence Pike. The first, eponymous, Paradise Cinema record, released in 2020, was recorded in Dakar and featured the dense rhythms of Mbalax music combining with Wyllie’s textural saxophone and synth playing. New album ‘returning, dream’ was created in London by Wyllie with additional recordings from Dakar and Sydney. While Wyllie’s other projects move between tight-knit electronica, widescreen minimalism and improvised ambient sounds, ‘returning, dream’ contains nods to Jon Hassell, Terry Riley, Don Cherry and Midori Takada as well as more contemporary electronic, ambient and non-western music and even draws inspiration from physics and science fiction.

Strut introduces a pioneering new compilation 'A Dancefloor In Ndola,' curated by revered East African DJ, Kampire. Forging her reputation through memorable sets for the Nyege Nyege Festival in Uganda over the last decade, Kampire now tours worldwide and is celebrated for her brilliantly curated sets spanning the full range of African music styles from the ‘70s and ‘80s to the present day. Although born in Kenya to Ugandan parents, Kampire spent her formative years in Ndola, Zambia. ‘A Dancefloor In Ndola’ is inspired by artists and songs that formed part of her soundtrack during that time. “It is important for me to continually reference Africa’s own musical history,” she explains. “At 17, I didn’t pick up on my Dad’s music but now I love and collect those records. I’m constantly referencing them in my music sets today. I love that feeling of shared nostalgia where people recognise a song they haven’t heard in a long time. It is a touchstone for me when I’m playing.” The compilation flows through different East African and South African genres from Congolese rumba and soukous to 1980s township bubblegum and the rich guitar-led sounds of Zambian kalindula. “There are styles of music on the compilation which are often considered unsophisticated from rural areas. I and other contemporary African artists and DJs draw inspiration from them; it is part of what makes us ourselves.” Kampire also shines the spotlight on many incredible women in African music from the ‘80s, including Congolese legends like Pembey Sheiro, Feza Shamamba and Princesse Mansia M’bila to V-Mash and Di Groovy Girls from South Africa.

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. 

ドラマーのTom Sunneyとキーボード奏者のFilip Sowaからなる西ロンドンのデュオ、Kessoncodaによる最新アルバム『Outerstate』が英国の現代ジャズの聖地〈Gondwana Records〉からアナログ・リリース。ロックやエレクトロニカ、アンビエント、ブレイクビーツ、映画のサウンドトラック、Squarepusher、Radiohead、Clarkといった様々なインスピレーションを軸としつつ、アコースティックの伝統とエレクトロニカの間に佇む彼らのサウンドは、メロディアスなオスティナートが織り込まれたピアノと揺るぎないドラムのブレンドに基づいた、心地よく、新しいヴィジョンを示すものとなっています。

With her third Gondwana album, ‘Constellation’, Caoilfhionn Rose has come of age as an artist, digging deep to find experimental new ways of expressing her wonder at nature’s beauty, her love of music in all its diversity, and her belief in the restorative powers that both afford in the troubled post-COVID world. The ten tracks on ‘Constellation’ feel rooted in a knowledge of folk, jazz and all the twentieth century’s classic tunesmiths, and yet they seem to create a magical, otherworldly space of her own imagining, blending Caoilfhionn’s core piano with synths, and pitting a live rhythm section and saxophone embellishments against ambient samples and future-facing production techniques. ‘Constellation’ features contributions from Halsall’s rhythm section, drummer Alan Taylor and bassist Gavin Barras, as well as Jordan Smart from Mammal Hands, whose supple sax exquisitely colours the fringes of most of its songs. Also guesting: John Ellis, former member of The Cinematic Orchestra, beatifically tinkling the ivories at the end of ‘Fall Into Place’, and producer Aaron Wood via a raft of ambient samples adding textured loveliness throughout ‘Rainfall’. “I love being open to collaboration,” Rose enthuses, “and the record’s a collage, knitting together all these influences, sounds and players, and just really going for it with the experimentation in the production.”

"Sandman has added South Indian music to the genre-bending mix, along with funk grooves and nods to the Heath Robinson analog-synth adventures of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1950s and 1960s" ⭐️ All About Jazz (UK) ⭐️ “The Sandman Project speaks the universal language of…global pop” ⭐️ Bayern Radio 7.4/10 (DE) ⭐️ “An exhilarating ten-track oeuvre, an evocative, borderless potpourri of global surf 'n' turf styles with a jazz ethos" ⭐️ Greedy For Best (DE) ⭐️ “It pivots around the character of Mulatu Astatke and the Fleet Foxes with winds and guitar and a little electronic touch from Brian Eno” ⭐️ DJ Magazine (ES) ⭐️ “This outfit is a jack of all trades and, on this evidence, a master of them all too” ⭐️ Pipelines Magazine (UK) ⭐️ “Brilliant album, will playlist on my PBB Radio show” ⭐️ Laurent Garnier (FR) ⭐️ Sandman Project’s long awaited debut album Where Did You Go? is a borderless amalgam of brass heavy sounds, a document of a band whose musical tendencies mimic their open-minded ethic where Ethio- jazz, Afrobeat, American soul music and psychedelic, Mediterranean funk traverse. Led by guitarist and composer Tal Sandman, Tel Aviv based Sandman Projects’s last release was in 2018 on their debut EP, their only existing recording. Six years later and it is no surprise this expansive work is positively brimming with an ocean of ideas, rooted in jazz, exceptionally crafted and boasting a myriad of musical pivots with a subtle but crucial production and synth touch by producer Tomer Baruch. Absolutely key to this new recording and Tal’s adult musical upbringing and education is the ongoing influence of saxophonist Abate Barihun, sometimes known as the Ethiopian John Coltrane who is an Ethiopian Jew who emigrated to Israel in 1999. Whilst he doesn’t feature directly on the record, Tal has long been mentored and stewarded by him and she affirms that “his inspiration continues to play a crucial role in my creative process.” And so, to the album’s title track Where Did you Go which oozes film- noir with Tal’s omnipresent Tizta sound using the Tezeta scales from Ethiopia dictating the mood whilst synths transcend and build an immersive soundscape something akin to Mulatu Astake jamming with the Fleet Foxes with Brian Eno-esque electronic manipulation. The Sandman project line up comprises of 5 core musicians with Tal Sandman on electric guitar, Tal Avraham playing trumpet, Tal Eyal on percussion, Noam Cherchie on drums and Ariel Harrosh on bass. Additional synth and organ provided by producer Tomer Baruch and guest vocalist Dafna Shilon joins on the album closer The Other Side. The group all live in Tel Aviv with Tal living in the Jaffa neighborhood for 12 years and the official birth-place of the Sandman Project. Jaffa is a diverse urban region where Arabs, Jews, Christians and many more live harmoniously together and it’s here where Tal has been active in building community ties and where she has recently started learning Arabic. The recent and shocking violence and war in Israel and Palestine has strengthened the bonds within the Jaffa community and a sense of unity and desire for peace has pervaded echoing Tal’s wish for peace, for real and imagined boundaries to dissolve and war and survival to be replaced with compassion and humanity. Jaffa is also Tal’s place of respite and spiritual place of being, where she returned to after significant musical and creative excursions to Goa in India (where she formed the Goa Afrobeat Band) and to London where she created a branch of the Sandman Project. Tal’s recent trip to Goa is effectively soundtracked on the album opener Karnataka, which borrows from the east, both the spirit and it’s drumming, inspired by a South Indian wedding ceremony. Trumpets and Tal’s incessant but measured guitar riffing using Indian scales transcends into a beautiful soundtrack of jazz and psychedelia energized with a propulsive funk. Temptation & Figs reverberates with a sly groove, an organ filled and chilled groove given a life affirming vibe with it repetitive and harmonized vocal pass building to a trumpet crescendo. The cine flavoured edge of Sandman Project goes wide screen on The X Files as bizarre electronic gurgling remiss of early BBC Radiophonic recordings intertwine with horn stabs and a percussion solo. Further vintage synth excursions repeat on Cauda Equina, with Tal’s heavy fretting giving the track a funk feel, and a dreamy one as the trumpet builds. Dafna Shilon’s entrance at the end of the album on The Other Side is unique in that it brings a skank to proceedings and is the only lyrical song from the collection. Six years in the waiting, and with plentiful personal and collective transformation giving Where Did You Go? a deeper sense of geography and global nuance, the new sound of Sandman Project is rich, porous and dreamy and essentially, full of hope.

3rd album by Los Angeles based jazz duo Nicole McCabe and Logan Kane. Widely known for legendary concerts featuring instrumental madness amongst many synths and bonkers dance beats, Dolphin Hyperspace finds a new lane of expression within modern jazz and beat culture.

A pillowcase filled to the brim with delectable Halloween treats from across the Numeroverse, Haunted Presence is a fun size mix of ghoulish garage, skeleton-rattling soul, mutant proto-metal, and spine-chilling ’60s kitsch. With a wingspan of 20 tracks, this double LP is certain to liven up any costume party, séance, or monster mash. Warning: Prolonged exposure may cause ear decay.

Consider this your invitation to Café Molly, a lounge bar like they don’t make them anymore. The lights are low, the martinis are ice cold, the banquettes are velvet, and the stage is set for the electrifying talent of whistler Molly Lewis. Molly’s soft-focus cocktail music conjures up visions of classic Hollywood jazz clubs, Italian cinema soundtracks and lingering embraces between lovers. After the exotica stylings of The Forgotten Edge EP and the tropicalia-indebted Mirage EP, Molly wanted to encapsulate the sound of Café Molly for her debut album On The Lips, a dreamy tribute to classic mood music. That spellbinding sound, which usually comes to life in Los Angeles, has also popped up in Mexico City dancehalls, graced the runways of Paris and London Fashion Weeks, and made a magical appearance at a children's fairyland. Molly Lewis’s love for this smoky corner of the world doesn’t end with her songwriting. She is a devotee and an archivist, capturing and enlivening the pieces that endure. She was a regular at the legendary shows by Marty and Elayne, the lounge duo who spent almost 40 years playing LA’s Dresden bar. The duo came to global fame after an appearance in 1996’s Swingers and kept going long after that spotlight faded, finally finishing their nightly residency after the death of Marty at the ripe age of 89 last year. “That felt like the end of an era,” says Molly. But there are still flashes of that world to be found, and she finds them. “I’ve been spending a lot of time in New York lately, where there are a lot more of those moody, classic jazz bars,” she explains. Molly celebrates the poet Kenneth ‘Sonny’ Donato, a former drinking buddy of Charles Bukowski, on the album’s swooning ‘Sonny’. “He’s a total LA character with a great voice and great style, as well as a champion of me and my music,” says Molly, who met Sonny when he was tending bar at Hollywood’s iconic Musso and Frank. “He would MC my Café Molly shows and introduce the night with a poem about LA. Everyone loves him.” Over the past few years Molly has flexed her one-of-a-kind musical skill alongside Mark Ronson on the Barbie soundtrack, as well as with Dr Dre, Karen O, actor John C Reilly, Mac De Marco, fashion houses Chanel, Gucci and Hermes, and folk rock royalty Jackson Browne. After a performance with longtime friend Weyes Blood on Burt Bacharach’s The Look of Love during a Café Molly evening at LA’s Zebulon, Molly supported the singer on a US tour, introducing her sound to a brand new audience. “I forget sometimes that what I do has that factor of surprise and uniqueness – it is something that most people have never seen before,” says Molly. She too might never have entered the idiosyncratic world of whistling had she not as a teenager seen the 2005 documentary Pucker Up, which details the International Whistling Competition. Equally amused and bemused by the eccentric event, in 2012 she competed herself. Spending her early twenties in Berlin she then moved to LA to work in film – and returned to the contest in 2015 to take home first prize. One evening Molly did a turn at an open mic at the Kibitz Room, a tiny late-night bar inside historic LA deli Canter’s. Her display led to appearances at performance art happenings across the city, and she soon caught the ear of independent record label Jagjaguwar. On The Lips was recorded with producer Thomas Brenneck of the Menahan Street Band, Budos Band, Dap-Kings and El Michels Affair, at his newly-built Diamond West Studios in Pasadena. The pair bonded over the work of 1960s soundtrack composers Alessandro Alessandroni and Piero Piccioni, and, with something of an open door policy during the sessions, a stream of acclaimed musicians ended up across the album’s 10 tracks. “We were all sitting around having beers and amazing people would just come by,” says Molly, who fitted out the studio with a vintage tiki bar she picked up at a local flea market. “It was a wonderful place to be social, sometimes almost too social!” Step forward Nick Hakim, who would lend bossa nova piano to ‘Cocosette’, which also features the smooth sounds of Latin Grammy-nominated Brazilian guitarist Rogê. Elsewhere Leland Whitty of Canadian instrumental group Badbadnotgood lends a searing saxophone line to the jazzy ‘Lounge Lizard’, while Sal Samano and Alex Garcia of Chicano soul group Thee Sacred Souls appear on the melancholy ‘Crushed Velvet’. Badbadnotgood’s Chester Hansen also plays bass across the album, while Beck collaborator Roger Joseph Manning Jr. lends organ to the lush ‘Moon Tan’, which pays homage to film score composer Piero Umiliani. Experimental jazz pianist Marco Benevento and El Michels Affair’s Leon Michels both crop up on the perky ‘Silhouette’. There are a couple of covers, too, just like you’ll hear at a Café Molly night. This time it’s Dave Berry’s 1960s pop standard ‘The Crying Game’ and Jeanette’s ‘Porqué Te Vas’, which Molly fell in love with after hearing it on the soundtrack of Carlos Saura’s acclaimed 1976 drama Cría Cuervos. “The original is such a great song – I always wanted to do a few covers and I don't really gravitate towards more upbeat music in my own songwriting, so it was fun to try and think of a more upbeat track to include, to try to kind of change up the movement of the record.” With her intoxicating compositions, and wry brand of stagecraft (she might not be singing up there, but she can sure tell a joke) Molly Lewis looks set to join her heroes in the storied lore of the Los Angeles lounge scene and beyond. So pull up a chair, order your favorite drink, and prepare to fall for On The Lips.

Big Crown Records is proud to present Dave Guy’s debut album Ruby. Having lent his talents both on stage and in the studio to artists like Amy Winehouse, Lizzo, Pharrell, and Sharon Jones to currently playing every night on The Tonight Show as a member of The Roots, Dave steps out on his own with a jazz record that is both unique and modern. Ruby mixes his musical influences with the energies of the city that raised him, capturing different moods and inviting the listener into the world as Dave Guy sees and feels it. Recorded in Queens at The Legendary Diamond Mine, the album is produced by Homer Steinweiss and Nick Movshon and features musical contributions from Leon Michels, Marco Benevento, Claire Cottrill, and more. Ruby instantly sits with the classics as an album that is fully realized and not simply a collection of songs. Lead single “7th Heaven” opens the album with an anthemic energy as Dave’s horn lines soar over thundering drums, ethereal vocals, and dancing piano. Keeping the energy high, “Footwork” is a Latin inspired number that is sure to soundtrack many a dance floor from SoHo to Harlem. The synth intro of “Pinky Ring” cleanses your palate for the mood shift when the track drops. Deep bass tones underline the impeccable drumming and Dave effortlessly finds the pocket wasting no notes as the verses and choruses trade off. The record leans into spiritual jazz vibes on “Diamond Encore” with a dark and deep almost “Axelrodish” rhythm track then picks the energy back up with the stomper “Still Standing”. “Dave Wants You” has a bop all its own with an unorthodox drum pattern that Dave anchors with his trumpet hits. The otherworldly arrangement of “Drony Boy” puts the production on a pedestal. The first intro almost serves as an intermission on the album while the second intro sets up the neck snapping track that is about to drop. A menacing guitar signals the builds and the whole thing is juxtaposed by Dave’s beautiful trumpet riffs. “Quesodillas” & “Green Door” begin the autumn of the album with their mellow & intimate energy and “Ruby’s Rubies”, the album’s closer is the perfect ending to the journey.

As soon as came back from a long concert tour in Asia, The Albert Mangelsdorff Quintet went in their Frankfurt studio to record many of the originals performed on the road. This session offers a splendid mix of Eastern and Western music. Featuring "Now, Jazz Ramwong," an enticing modal piece inspired by a Thai folk dance and "Three Jazz Moods?", a jazz adaptation of music by sitarist Ravi Shankar.