Kaiso Power: Sound Revolution in Trinidad 1970- 1980 is a collection of rare jazz, calypso and percussive gems from Trinidad and Tobago from the revolutionary generation of the ’70s, bringing radical new political vision and reclaiming ancient spiritual consciousness through music.
…From Soundway comes a slim (just ten tracks) and somewhat understated, but no less sublime, compilation of calypso and jazz from a time of political unrest and sonic experimentation in Trinidad. It’s with the second track, ‘Tabu’, that this compilation makes its personality clear – a laid-back feel that yields dancing alongside revolution. ‘River Comes Down’ is a welcome moment of slightly wilder abandon among the more easygoing pieces – it’s also one of…
Category: world
This album is such a remarkable document, and on so many levels. Perhaps its main “story” is that it could well be the very last studio recording by Jack DeJohnette (1942-2025), having been made during sessions on two successive days at a studio near the great drummer’s home just outside Woodstock in upstate New York, at a time when he was already avoiding travel, and, as it was to turn out, not quite a year before he died.
DeJohnette was indisputably one of jazz’s greats and the sheer wonder of his musicianship shines through on this wonderful record. As Ethan Iverson has written, among jazz drummers “Elvin-Tony-Jack was and is the holy trinity”, referring to Jones-Williams-DeJohnette. DeJohnette has almost 100 album credits on ECM, notably…
Jocelyn Balu’s debut album is one of a Congolese artist stepping into a lineage and making it breathe again. Rooted in the rumba of the ’40s to ’70s, Borumba follows the music’s Atlantic circle, from Kongo traditions and forced exile to Cuba and back. But the nine tracks never treat heritage as museum glass. They are warm, alert, political and gloriously alive, with every arrangement revealing fresh rhythmic depth, historical purpose, memory, grace and delight.
Balu’s golden, gospel-trained voice is the album’s centre of gravity, opening with a solemn a cappella on ‘Mobembo’ before it unfurls its elegant guitars, elastic bass and dancing percussion from a band assembled in southern France. The title-track states the mission with irresistible grace.
Born in rural Bandjoun and raised in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, Kareyce Fotso is the daughter of a sculptor father and a businesswoman mother who also worked as a professional mourner. A former biochemistry student, she chose theatre and music instead. Accompanying herself on instruments including guitar, bells, percussion and sanza, as she does on this, her fifth album, she has since become one of Central Africa’s most distinctive voices. Her métier is a sort of bluesy Afropop with social conscience and strong emotional wallop. On Gwà, named after a traditional women’s healing circle, she turns that voice towards testimony, solidarity and survival, delivering a song cycle devoted to female survivors speaking truth to power.
Amigos has been beloved for decades by both long-time and recent Santana admirers, with multiple generations of fans drawn in by the record’s contagious blend of R&B, Latin, rock, and funk elements. As well as its immense accessibility. Coming off a series of albums that heavily leaned into jazz fusion, the band returns to the more dynamic and concise approaches of its earlier works without losing the sense of adventurousness, craftsmanship, and virtuosity that turned it into a juggernaut embraced by both the mainstream and experimentally minded communities.
The enhanced aural perspectives extend not only to Carlos Santana’s intoxicating fills and solos, but to the rich tapestry of the rhythmic, melodic, and vocal elements that help Amigos…
Can you say where you are from after many years living in a country not your own? Can you belong to more than one place at the same time? These are the questions Curió Curió, a Brazilian-German duo, attempts to answer on their debut album.
Actress and singer Luiza Monteiro moved out from her hometown of Rio de Janeiro nine years ago to pursue a career in Europe. There she met Dustin Braun, a German producer, best known for his work with Berlin-based Turkish alternative musician Peki Momés, forming Curió Curió. After almost a decade abroad, Monteiro felt she was “not the same person she’d been in Rio,” but not fully from her new home, either. To address this ambiguity, Braun wrote music that is definitely Brazilian — elegant, groovy, sensual,…
Roberto Carlos Lange and Fabi Reyna feel like kindred spirits. Long before they met two summers ago, they were making music — as Helado Negro and Reyna Tropical, respectively — building their names with heart-on-your-sleeve electronic and indie-folk songs that touch on diaspora, longing, and love.
On their collaborative record, Helado Tropical, these two worlds naturally collapse into each other, as the seasoned emotional excavators lean into their shared strengths. The result goes down as easy as mango-champagne sorbet.
These nine songs—or perhaps seven, since “Luna” and “Sol” (another iconic pair) flow seamlessly into and out of the floaty, syncopated standout track “Fluye”—were born from a three-day…
Swampy surf rock, psychedelic Peruvian chicha and ambient blues – within Brian J. Gitkin’s global genre-hopping, guitar-twanging discography, these are the elements that keep coming back around. And they’re here again on his fifth album, together with touches of New Orleans music and gospel. Although he plays most of the instruments here himself, Gitkin’s real speciality is in his composition, where he pulls on the threads of these different styles and reweaves them together so confidently that the blend feels entirely natural. What really binds it all is the atmosphere. There is a nostalgic but slightly unreal quality across the album’s six instrumentals and four songs, the guitar ripples and organ reverbs evoking romantic and somewhat dreamlike images…
Heavy Metal (Live! Nairobi International Casino!) is a landmark Zamrock album by Paul Ngozi and the Ngozi Family Band, originally captured live-in-the-studio style in 1977.
Blending psychedelic rock, heavy fuzz guitar effects, and African rhythms, it stands as a cornerstone of the ’70s Zambian rock movement. The album relies heavily on Ngozi’s signature “Gee Flanger” guitar effects pedal, creating a swirling, psychedelic fuzz texture that drives tracks like “Heavy Metal” and “Dangerous Woman”
…Zamrock was a bona-fide rock scene, with albums released through independent labels based in Zambia. This music scene was complete, encompassing the genres of rock, acid folk, fusion, Afro-beat, South African jazz and…
Coming out of Montréal and Canada’s rich Persian music scene, this debut album, Unveiled, from Parisa Karimi Molan is a revelation. Growing up singing in secret in Iran, Molan was forbidden, like all other women, from performing publicly. Therefore, she was taught behind closed doors by masters, including Iranian diva Parissa, who shared the art of avaz, a centuries-old classical style of Iranian singing. Living in Montréal now, Molan’s free to sing again, and you can hear the joy and power she brings to the music.
Joined by Tehrani Drom – Iranian musicians on setar and tar, and a surprisingly great accordionist from Moldova who fits right in – the songs here are rooted in both folk and Persian classical traditions. Molan shines a spotlight…
America is Orquesta Akokán’s fourth album. In a relatively short time, the multi-generational, international big band has won over audiences from Miami to Tokyo and many stops between with their reinvigorated take on the golden era of Cuban mambo, rhumba, salsa, bugalu, Latin soul, tumbao, and cha-cha-cha all wedded to 21st century Latin jazz.
Issued just a week after the U.S.’s 250th anniversary, the set, recorded live to tape by Daptone’s Gabriel Roth at Penrose Recorders, still relies heavily on always swinging mambo, at once intimate and poignant. They debut new vocalists in singer/musicologist/recording artist Mariam Elhajli (who has worked with Mali Obomsawin, Adam O’Farrill, Jason Lindner…
Organetto (small diatonic button accordion) luminary Riccardo Tesi teams up with his Tuscan hometown pal, classical flautist Paolo Zampini (who worked with Ennio Morricone), to channel organic acoustics and a shared passion for prog rock. Camerock, a portmanteau of ‘chamber’ and ‘rock’, offers much more than the title suggests. Joined by a great cast including pianist Daniele Biagini, who co-wrote three pieces, the duo merges global influences with baroque, classical and rock elements. The album features newly penned compositions alongside a chamber rendition of Morricone’s ‘Nuovo Cinema Paradiso’ and an impressive take on Jethro Tull’s ‘Living in the Past’ (an adolescent idol of the pair), woven into Tesi’s ‘Presente Remoto’, where his…
If Caetano Veloso started working with Arthur Russell instead of Arto Lindsay at the end of the ’80s, it might have sounded like Bruno Berle. Since his 2022 debut, No Reino dos Afetos, the Brazilian songwriter has bridged lo-fi dream pop and música popular brasileira, or MPB, by adding his acoustic guitar and thick vocal timbre to looped sample-based beats. On his latest album, Sem Fronteiras, when the alchemy works, he lands on weird, tender lullabies like “A Noite de Estrelas” that extract and expose the alien elements of the Brazilian sound into a kind of “hyperbossa.” When it fails, it’s because Berle is still finding a way to compound the many genres he is interested in — indie rock, forró, lo-fi hip-hop, and disco — without erasing their distinct identities. In “Amor Inteiro,”…
Lost Tape – 1980 sounds like the half-remembered fever dream of a long-ago journey across some wild and distant country, riding in the back of a battered taxi through the desert, a tape distorting loudly on the car’s player, eating into the lower tiers of your dreams like a fungus. It’s jarring, lulling, painful, absorbing, unexpected and weird all in one go. Who was Abdou El Omari? He grew up in Tafraoute, in the Anti-Atlas mountains, south of Agadir, and began recording in the 1970s while still in his early twenties, around the same time as Nass El Ghiwane and the mighty Oudaden. But his music was wilder, more futuristic, more experimental and more global than his peers. Perhaps too much so. By the 1980s, he had gone quiet and ventured into hairdressing.
…The album was recorded in situ by Grammy Award winning producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Ustad Saami, The Good Ones).
In Oman, descendants of the “other” African slave trade continue to live in the Ash-Sharqiyah region that hosted the main port.
Centuries on, Al-Mudema (“sailor songs”) musicians continue to sing mostly in Swahili and feature music mixing African rhythms and bagpipes. These descendants are referred to as the Zanzabari (or sometimes locally as Khal people). And they sing the songs of those who were brought forcibly by ship centuries before.
Rather than bagpipes (qurbah) being appropriated from Scotland or introduced by the British colonizers as is commonly claimed,…
Pascal Bideau’s second album as Akusmi is infused with feelings of wonder and delight, and dashed with fleeting touches of humour and charm. The record is at the same time energetic but pensive, exciting but foreboding, taking the listener through a narrative arc of marvel and adventure.
Opening track ‘A Waking Dream’ starts with ethereal and dream-like piano, harp and sax passages, reminiscent of a flowing river; aquatic and sparkly, with some slightly murky elements in the lower ends. Once the rhythmical percussion and wind instruments kick in, however, the listener is transported with a sense of forward movement, making it the perfect opener for what appears to be a riveting musical journey. This leads into subsequent track ‘Anima’, an invigorating…
Assa’d Khoury’s second and final record has an almost mythical status among Arabic record collectors. Originally copies of the 1978 landmark LP are scarce, making the Syrian musician’s unique blend of microtonal Farfisa, fuzz guitars and Middle Eastern percussion a holy grail for crate diggers and psych hounds for decades.
Its reputation is well-deserved, as — despite its cheesy retro album art and exotic album title — Khoury’s re-imaginings of traditional Arabic melodies for modified electronic organ somehow manage to sound both impressively futuristic and weirdly retrograde, as if a Damascus lounge band had been abducted and forced to perform at an intergalactic casino.
Despite its far-out, futurist sounds, Khoury…
Toronto was always a sort of musical melting pot, so it is no wonder that the core trio of Toronto-based, Brazilian native multi-instrumentalist Felipe Sena with co-writers Artu Bastos and Dan McLay that goes by the name of Orbital Ensemble, has found its nesting place there.
With a help of a multitude of truly experienced musicians, this true ensemble has come up with its second album, Continua, recorded primarily live with the core six-piece that is often the manner in which Orbital Ensemble plays on stage, Sena, Bastos, and company have come up with something that is labelled quite precisely as neotropical psychedelic sound.
And yes, that is exactly what this mostly instrumental music sounds like – a combination…
The Brazilian religious and musical tradition of candomblé is a rhythmic barrage. Originating in the 19th century among enslaved west Africans, candomblé manifested in music as a ritual practice of drumming circles, where polyrhythms were hammered out to induce possession by spirits. Athens-based archival label Flee presents a treasure trove of this ceremonial music from a community in Salvador in the late 1980s, alongside a series of ingenious remixes made by contemporary artists.
Side one of the album hosts the field recordings. Hazy, unbalanced and full of tape hiss, the 10 ritual compositions pull listeners into the frenetic environment in which they were recorded. It is as if we are sitting next to the tape recorder…
The term tropicanibalismo has been circulating within experimental music scenes in Colombia since at least the early ’00s, broadly encompassing new and innovative approaches to coastal popular and folkloric music forms. Cumbión Planetario is Bogotá-based duo Rizomagic’s newest contribution to this tropicanibalismo landscape. Rooted in cumbia (with a particular nod to languid, Monterrey-born cumbia rebajada), perhaps the most emblematic Colombian music and dance genre, the slow-motion music of Cumbión Planetario is distinctly contemporary.
Hints of dub, a deeper camaraderie with music that might be termed IDM, and particular investments in the idea of cosmic tuning serve as important contours. Group members…