Bajka

Star Borne - A Collection Of Black Fusion From CTI & Kudu

A great little dip into the CTI and Kudu catalogs of the 70s - put together by Kyoto Jazz Massive, and featuring some of the hippest funky tracks from both labels! The "Star Borne" title here is very apt - as the grooves are often spacey and cosmic - stretching out with plenty of keyboards amidst the funkier drums, and usually produced with a flanged-out way that electrifies the best elements even further! All tracks are long and soulful - and while the collection's not the most all-encompassing CTI set you'll ever buy, it may well be one of the hippest! (Dusty Groove)

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Debbie & Kermit

Big Apple Rappin' - The Early Days Of Hip Hop Culture In New York City 1979 To 1982

I can make no claims to be any kind of expert when it comes to hip-hop. Growing up in rural Arizona, it just wasn’t something I was exposed to outside of the occasional Salt-N- Pepa or LL Cool J video on MTV, unless you count the one kid at my Catholic elementary school who always wore a Malcolm X hat and talked a blue streak about NWA and Public Enemy. Much later on I would find out about Gang Starr and the Wu-Tang Clan and plenty of other things, but I was never really educated about hip-hop in the same way that I imagine people must be when they grow up closer to big cities like New York or Boston or Chicago.

From my vantage point, a release like Big Apple Rappin’ is an invaluable history lesson. The 16 tracks – plus 64 pages of photographs, liner notes and interviews – examine the birth of hip-hop in New York City during a four-year flurry of activity in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Needless to say, this isn’t just another old school compilation with the predictable Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Flash and Sugar Hill Gang classics. You know you can expect more from a Soul Jazz release, and they really deliver with this one. The compilation doesn’t come from left field in quite the same way as New Star’s Original Style disc or Stones Throw’s similar Third Unheard anthology of hip hop from Connecticut, but there are definitely a ton of songs on here that most people probably haven’t heard before. Aside from a couple of big names like Spoonie Gee and the Cold Crush Brothers, most of the featured artists are pretty obscure: T Ski Valley, Masterdon Committee, The Fly Guys et cetera.

You can really hear the influence of disco on some of these recordings, starting on the very first track with Peter Brown and Patrick Adams’ production for the classic “Spoonin’ Rap.” Another song apes the backing track from Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and Brother D & The Collective Effort’s ultra-political “How We Gonna Make The Black Nation Rise” is based around a loop of “Got To Be Real” by Cheryl Lynn. Reggae production techniques are all over the place too. “Rapping Dub Style” by General Echo is the most obvious example of this, but there are also some amazing echo effects on “Rock The Beat” by the Jamaica Girls. And Xanadu’s “Sure Shot” has the mighty Joe Gibbs himself behind the board!

Disregarding the aforementioned academic value of this double album, Big Apple Rappin’ is a hell of a lot of fun to listen to from start to finish. And that’s what’s most important, isn’t it? Whether you’re looking for some historical perspective on the emergence of hip hop or just looking to have a good time, there’s a lot to love about this release. (Rob Hatch-Miller)

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Merle Haggard: Mama Tried

Mama Tried is a typically fine late-'60s LP from Merle Haggard, comprised of a number of strong originals and several excellent covers. While "Mama Tried" stands out among Haggard's original material, "I'll Always Know" and "You'll Never Love Me Now" are both solid songs. Still, those two tracks pale next to the best covers on the record. Merle delivers "Little Ole Wine Drinker Me," "In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)," "Teach Me to Forget," "Run 'Em Off" and "Too Many Bridges to Cross Over" with grit and an open, affecting honesty that makes Mama Tried one of Hag's best records.

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Kate & Anna McGarrigle

Debut albums simply aren't supposed to be as accomplished and beautifully crafted as Kate & Anna McGarrigle's first record, which is as lovely and superbly realized as folk-rock gets. While producers Joe Boyd and Greg Prestopino assembled an all-star crew to back up the McGarrigle sisters (including Lowell George, Tony Levin, Steve Gadd, and Bobby Keys), nothing steals the spotlight away from Kate and Anna, both of whom sing with a pure clarity that's never so pretty it fails to reflect the real world, harmonize with an uncanny grace, and write songs that are clever, witty, wise, and often deeply moving. Lots of folkies have written movingly about the troubling ties of home (as in "My Town" and "Talk to Me of Mendocino"), a good number have sung about the ache of a broken heart (like in "Heart Like a Wheel," famously covered by Linda Ronstadt), some can communicate bitter resignation or sly, sarcastic wit ("Go Leave" and "Jigsaw Puzzle of Life"), and no more than a few can express the joys of grown-up eros ("Kiss and Say Goodbye"). Kate & Anna McGarrigle is a record that manages to make all these emotions ring true, and never with one canceling out another. Quite simply a nearly perfect record, and if you're not a fan, repeated listenings to this album might make you one. (AMG)

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Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star

While Puff Daddy and his followers continued to dictate the direction hip-hop would take into the millennium, Mos Def and Talib Kweli surfaced from the underground to pull the sounds in the opposite direction. Their 13 rhyme fests on this superior, self-titled debut as Black Star show that old-school rap still sounds surprisingly fresh in the sea of overblown vanity productions. There's no slack evident in the tight wordplays of Def and Kweli as they twist and turn through sparse, jazz-rooted rhythms calling out for awareness and freedom of the mind. Their viewpoints stem directly from the teachings of Marcus Garvey, the legendary activist who fought for the rights of blacks all around the world in the first half of the 20th century. Def and Kweli's ideals are sure lofty; not only are they out to preach Garvey's words, but they also hope to purge rap music of its negativity and violence. For the most part, it works. Their wisdom-first philosophy hits hard when played off their lyrical intensity, a bass-first production, and stellar scratching. While these MCs don't have all of the vocal pizzazz of A Tribe Called Quest's Phife and Q-Tip at their best, flawless tracks like the cool bop of "K.O.S. (Determination)" and "Definition" hint that Black Star is only the first of many brilliantly executed positive statements for these two street poets. (AMG)

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An England Story

When it comes to any form of pop that involves an MC, it’s hard not to think in terms of geography. Pit bosses, rappers and party-movers love to shout out to their neighborhoods and cities because their represented denizens usually have their backs. But aside from touting area codes and flashing hand signs, MC’ing is, in itself, a geographic-specific art form. We make finely grained distinctions between styles – for instance, we distinguish Southern from Northern hip hop and then, within the former category, distinguish the styles of Texas, Louisiana and Georgia from each other. But the overarching assumption, at least in this country, tends to be that MC’ing is a singularly American form. Namely, it is rhyming to a beat, just as it used to be in the South Bronx more than three decades ago.

Soul Jazz’s An England Story, which impressively chronicles the last 25 years of the MC in the U.K., puts this American-centric view to the test. And, in the catalogue’s double-disc thoroughness, Stateside hubris suffers a serious blow. Indeed, the most striking part of An England Story is its revelation that America, where rap was coined and given currency, has had such minimal influence on U.K. MCs. In the States’ absence is an enormous indebtedness to that other former British colony across the Atlantic: Jamaica.

The entirety of An England Story is tinged, if not dyed in the wool, by Caribbean hues. This is true of even the segments of grime featured here. Grime, to many East Coast listeners, had always seemed to be the U.K. take on American hip-hop, a British subgenre that expatriated itself from Jamaica, Queens rather than from Kingston proper. But An England Story suggests otherwise. Gervase de Wilde and Gabriel Myddelton, who perform as the DJ outfit Heatwave and compiled this collection as well as wrote the informative liner notes, do a fine job situating grime, U.K. hip hop, and other variants as descendents of dub’s aqueous bass and dancehall’s scatted patois.

The arrangement of the material on this compilation helps expose the commonality between U.K. MCs. De Wilde and Myddelton choose not to segregate the songs by chronology or genre, but instead let them all abut each other from track to track. If the underlying order of the songs is not obvious, the cumulative effect is clear: England’s rappers do not need their American counterparts; their Caribbean heritage is enough. This is felt most strongly towards the end of An England Story’s first disc, in the trio of Riko’s “Ice Rink Vocal,” Jakes & TC’s “Deep” and Jah and Screechy’s “Walk and Skank.” The tracks evidence a multiplicity of British approaches to MC’ing – grime, garage and reggae, respectively – each of which, though borrowing from the Caribbean, are distinctly British. (“Deep” may be the most firmly British of the three; MC Jakes’ voice bears a striking resemblance to actor Alan Rickman.) As if to drive the point of British sufficiency home, de Wilde and Myddelton include London Posse’s “Money Mad,” which improves the Boogie Down Production kick drum formula, a hallmark of American hip hop. Navigator and Freestylers’ “Ruffneck” achieves a similar result with their take on Marley Marl and Pete Rock’s James Brown lifting. Neither song falls in the trap of Brits aping American originals.

An England Story is ultimately a worthy contribution for the simple reason that it exposes the Caribbean roots permeating contemporary Black English music – even in those styles that appear to hail clearly from African-American sources. More powerfully, it is proof that MC’ing need not be understood narrowly as an exclusively or dominantly American phenomemon. But enough theory. Whatever critical or historical position An England Story takes, it will remain a sweet mix of galvanizing British music that is often hard to find and navigate in the United States. There are few, if any, duds on the two discs; most of the material delivers convincingly. And as the weather warms here, finally, on the East Coast, An England Story’s reggae-themed material arrives right on time. (Ben Yaster)

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Horace Andy: Skylarking

Debut album from the legendary Horace Andy.

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Eden Ahbez: Eden's Island

Eden Ahbez was best known for writing "Nature Boy" - a big hit for Nat "King" Cole. This album, however, should be viewed as an instrumental album (a Martin Denny style cross between islandesque and jazz music - featuring jazz great Paul Moer!) with a sort of beat poetry accompanying it. (Bob Keane of Del-Fi Records described Ahbez's lyrics as a cross between Kahil Gibran and Rod McKuen.) In any event, the lyrics and the music work together to create a very ethereal sound that is absolutely haunting - in a positive way! (Amazon)

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Trojan Reggae Sisters

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Chick Corea: Now He Sings, Now He Sobs

This adventurous yet lyrical trio LP was Chick Corea's career breakthrough album, establishing him as a significant pianist and composer. Over three days in March 1968, Corea recorded with Miroslav Vitous and Haynes (they have since reunited many times over past 34 years) and produced a total of 13 great performances only five of which were used on the original albums. The material ranged from soon-to-be Corea classics like "Matrix" and "Windows" to extended improvised pieces like the title tune to creative interpretations of Monk's "Pannonica" and "My One And Only Love".
Newly remixed and remastered in 24-bit, this milestone session is complete on this CD and sounds better than ever. (Amazon)

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Charlie Haden: Liberation Music Orchestra

A fascinating reissue that comfortably straddles the lines of jazz, folk, and world music, working up a storm by way of a jazz protest album that points toward the Spanish Civil War in particular and the Vietnam War in passing. Haden leads the charge and contributes material, but the real star here may in fact be Carla Bley, who arranged numbers, wrote several, and contributed typically brilliant piano work. Also of particular note in a particularly talented crew is guitarist Sam Brown, the standout of "El Quinto Regimiento/Los Cuatro Generales/Viva la Quince Brigada," a 21-minute marathon. Reissue producer Michael Cuscuna has done his best with the mastering here, but listeners will note a roughness to the sound -- one that is in keeping with the album's tone and attitude. (AMG)

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Jef Gilson: Œil vision

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Jojje

Eric Dolphy: Out To Lunch!

Out to Lunch stands as Eric Dolphy's magnum opus, an absolute pinnacle of avant-garde jazz in any form or era. Its rhythmic complexity was perhaps unrivaled since Dave Brubeck's Time Out, and its five Dolphy originals -- the jarring Monk tribute "Hat and Beard," the aptly titled "Something Sweet, Something Tender," the weirdly jaunty flute showcase "Gazzelloni," the militaristic title track, the drunken lurch of "Straight Up and Down" -- were a perfect balance of structured frameworks, carefully calibrated timbres, and generous individual freedom. Much has been written about Dolphy's odd time signatures, wide-interval leaps, and flirtations with atonality. And those preoccupations reach their peak on Out to Lunch, which is less rooted in bop tradition than anything Dolphy had ever done. But that sort of analytical description simply doesn't do justice to the utterly alien effect of the album's jagged soundscapes. Dolphy uses those pet devices for their evocative power and unnerving hints of dementia, not some abstract intellectual exercise. His solos and themes aren't just angular and dissonant -- they're hugely so, with a definite playfulness that becomes more apparent with every listen. The whole ensemble -- trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, vibist Bobby Hutcherson, bassist Richard Davis, and drummer Tony Williams -- takes full advantage of the freedom Dolphy offers, but special mention has to be made of Hutcherson, who has fully perfected his pianoless accompaniment technique. His creepy, floating chords and quick stabs of dissonance anchor the album's texture, and he punctuates the soloists' lines at the least expected times, suggesting completely different pulses. Meanwhile, Dolphy's stuttering vocal-like effects and oddly placed pauses often make his bass clarinet lines sound like they're tripping over themselves. Just as the title Out to Lunch suggests, this is music that sounds like nothing so much as a mad gleam in its creator's eyes. (AMG)

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Los Tiempos Van Cambiando

Jan Johansson: Jazz på svenska

Jazz på svenska ("Jazz in Swedish") is an album by the Swedish jazz pianist Jan Johansson. It was issued in 1964 and consists of jazz arrangements of Swedish folk songs. All arrangements are very sparse, consisting only of Johansson's piano play and Georg Riedel's bass. It is one of the best selling jazz albums in Swedish history and many of the tracks are famous within Sweden, especially the lead track "Visa från Utanmyra". (Wikipedia)

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