Fela Ransome-Kuti And The Africa '70 With Ginger Baker ‎– 'Live!' (Signpost)

Afrobeat meets British jazz here, or at least Ginger Baker sits in on a second drum kit to make this collaboration. This is the only Fela Kuti record I own but I've heard a lot of those classics from the 70s, and this sounds more or less in line. Tony Allen is a formidable enough drummer that Baker is probably only adding accents and thickening; it's panned a bit so you can get some separation, and this has a pretty excellent sound for a live recording from the time, though there's no credits as to when or where this recording was made. Baker is explicitly introduced by Kuti, who speaks between each of the cuts, and when Baker starts to tap about on the drums, Kuti quickly says 'That's enough, that's enough' and moves into the next song ('Ye Ye De Smell'), which is supposedly written for Baker because he does NOT in fact smell. It's some good natured ribbing I'm sure but Kuti makes it extremely clear who's in charge, as if there would be any doubt. 'Smell' is a banger though, but they are all, of course. This album came out in '71 so it's actually one of Kuti's first releases, and they're already playing a well developed form of their music here. Four songs, opening with the nicely named 'Let's Start' and and propelled by Kuti's shouts and sax, Igo Chiko's fiery solos and of course the drumming, from not just Allen and Baker but the small army of congas and other percussion instruments. There's a long electric piano solo on 'Black Man's Cry' that is also uncredited - no keyboards officially appear on the album, unless it's some sort of insane guitar technique. It's just before he climax of the record building up with the clattery guitars until it just stops and leaves some space for Kuti to begin soliloquising again. When the theme comes back in towards the end (it's a twelve minute piece), with trumpets and sax ringing in harmony, it feels at once like a beautiful orchestrated pop song and the rallying, radical cry its title implies. The final cut is the most somber, being midtempo and transferring all of the polyrhythmic shuffling to be between the beats, though somber for Fela Kuti is maddeningly energetic for most others. Titled 'Egbe Mi O (Carry Me I Want to Die)', it builds to a 'Hey Jude'-like wordless chant, which while sung by the entire band and presumably live audience, attains a wistfulness which is only echoed by the exuberant trumpets. The bands builds it up under this, until it's a somewhat distorted wall of sound, coming back to a lovely theme as is the formula.

Konono N°1 - 'Congotronics' (Ache)

Somehow this feels like a long time ago already; it has been 13 years, I guess, but this time has passed somehow both slowly and quickly at the same time. Which is maybe a cheap metaphor for describing the music of Konono?Congotronics arrived at the right time for me. Perhaps it had felt like I and my friends had exhausted our investigations of caucasian music as far as they could go, a feeling which was absolutely not true but certainly how I felt at the time. Perhaps the sheer awesomeness of this music, equal parts novelty, energy and magic, was undeniable. And why not? The newsprint poster included here explicitly maps out the connection between this recording and 'today's most underground forms of music', no doubt referring to their use of homemade electronic amplifiers. I guess that's something, though I've been to basement noise gigs in Ohio built around similar homemade amplifiers and it felt nothing like Congotronics. This isn't a blown out, distorted sound but one that is bathed in a warm fuzz. The bass likeme is the star of the show and the reason I like to listen to this on vinyl; its tones are soothing despite having a thump and kick. The percussion, well, it's all percussion I guess, but the non-likembe percussion, being pots, pans and tam-tam, feel more like a light dressing on top. The pulse here is not so much hypnotic as scatterbrained; there's an off-kilter balance throughout, constructed by the rising and interacting waves of likembes. The slow numbers, 'Kule Kule' and its reprise, are my favourites, as they have the same ability to pull my head and my heart together as I first felt when hearing Steve Reich and Philip Glass. The longer pieces, well, they're just a party that never seems to stop. I'm no expert on African music but have my fair share of Ocora releases and it's easy to make a superficial connection between the structures of those recordings and these. Horizontality is the game here, but that could just as easily work as a comparison to, well, 'today's most underground forms of music' circa 2005 (so, really, yesterday's). It's logical that this hit when it did; the predominantly white sounds of my life were struggling to accommodate more disparate influences, and I remember a lot of local rock/post-punk bands employing 'African' material, not to mention stuff like Vampire Weekend. Hey, it happened before in the early 80s too; white is always going to look to black for inspiration and I'm not one to get hung up on authenticity. But this still transports me to never-actually-experienced smoggy night in Kinshasa; it's this type of audiotourism that justifies owning so many goddamned records.

JuJu - 'A Message From Mozambique' (Black Fire)

And that message is, loud and clear, 'we are teeming with life and energy'. Except JuJu aren't from Mozambique, they're from Richmond, VA and some form of this band still exists today, still based around saxophonist Plunky Nkabinde. 1972 was a great era for merging free jazz and African nationalism, or perhaps I should say continentalism; the iconography is made clearly visible on the cover and clearly audible throughout the heavily percussive LP of searing jazzjams under review here. If one didn't know better, this photo could pass as the bizarro Art Ensemble of Chicago (from around this same era), but the music is much more built around flow than space, showing that facepaint alone does not indicate sound. Compositionally, A Message From Mozambique is spread across the whole band, and the six cuts here have distinct personalities. Nkabinde's '(Struggle) Home' opens up with 16 minutes of rapid, toe-tapping melodic jamming, creating the sound that I remember the most about this record. It's driving, with two percussionists and fast, thunderous piano runs from Al-Hammel Rasul and much soloing from Nkabinde; free, yes, but the dissonance fits within a widely defined space and the overall motion is harmonic and energy-producing. Rasul's beautiful 'Soledad Brothers' would seem to pull things down a notch, except this open piano framework allows vibes and smaller percussive elements to run amuck between the chords. It's rising and falling cadences are beautiful and propelling, wrapping up the nervous energy into the centre of the soundstage and harnessing the group power in a quieter, more focused form. It's my favourite cut on the record and a tragedy that it's only five minutes long. A more 'traditional' group jam comes with the wonderfully titled 'Make Your Own Revolution Now', which feels most at home against the ESP/skronk scene of the preceding few years. The drums and piano tend to dominate here, but when Nkabinde and flautist Lon Moshe come in, they make their presence felt through fast, dynamic exaltations. The remainder of side two pulls away from western jazz entirely, being drum/percussion workouts that are sometimes deceptively minimal-seeming ('Freedom Fighter') or more explicitly exploring the influences of indigenous music (the traditional 'Nairobi/Chants' which does involve some spirited vocalisations). JuJu's success is in synthesising these genres in such a palatable way - certainly we've heard it before in ways more impressionistic (the aforementioned Art Ensemble, or the work of Don Garrett) or more futurist (later Ornette Coleman), but this is an Afro-jazz record that is remarkably fun and I daresay even 'accessible', at least for a free jazz entry. That JuJu and Nkabinde never became household names, nor even enshrined in the same canon as other figures from this time (Archie Shepp, Frank Wright, etc.) may be due to this balance being slightly more 'fun' that one would expect; yet both the playing and compositional sense are as strong as anything else from the era.

Muhal Richard Abrams - 'Lifea Blinec' (Arista Novus)

Source: Ross, of course, on Aug 2, 2002 (the day that 3 MRA albums entered my life a la fois)

Muhal Richard Abrams really rips it up as bandleader, here flanked by Douglas Ewart and Joseph Jarman. I don't know what a "lifea blinec" is but I'm into invented languages, so why not? The Bud Powell tribute is enough to wake the guy from the dead - it ain't Chicago Eye and Ear Control style-energy but rather AACM alumni at their best. It bounces just right without that sheen that takes over jazz just a few years later. Whenever Amina Claudine Myers' voice pops into the mix it's great, though her contributions are more percussion and piano . Jarman and Ewart slice each other apart liked waxed-paper kazoos and Abrams has his moments too. It might be a bit easier to excel on a record when your solos are here and there (instead of 40 straight minutes of solo). The ending duos are maybe even the highlight; 'Duo 1' actually sounds a bit like Third Ear Band or some Swedish prog-folk band if they were trying to pay tribute to Coltrane. I was gonna try to end this with a horrible joke somehow involving the punchline "Muhal-land Drive" but instead I'll just quote the sleeve: ALL THERE IS OR IS NOT USING MUHAL AS A CHANNEL. Blinec, blinec!