MUSIC | Records – Jazz & World ALSO RELEASED
JAZZ & WORLD
Benoit Pioulard JAZZ THE GROUP Live (No Business) ●●●●●
BILLY BRAGG Drummer Brian Blade’s deconstructed metres and oblique interventions bring
A dream team of first generation free jazzers (altoist Marion Brown, bassist
Sirone and drummer Andrew Cyrille) and 1970s avant- gardists (violist Billy Bang, trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah and bassist Fred Hopkins), The Group left no studio recordings in their two years together, making this 1986 live recording the first evidence of their ‘interdependence’ concept.
Informed by the skewed abstractions of Ornette Coleman and the pluralism of the Loft era, The Group
extend the language of post-bop jazz. A lengthy exploration of Mingus’ immortal ‘Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat’ hears Brown and Abdullah caress the wistful melody over several solo verses, before Bang’s gutsy live-wire fiddling pushes it all out; and Brown’s ‘La Placita’ sounds like a Mariachi Albert Ayler, its joyful refrain marching towards freedom. Tuneful, swinging and thrillingly inventive, this is gloriously creative and soulful music. (Stewart Smith)
JAZZ WAYNE SHORTER QUARTET Without A Net (Blue Note) ●●●●● Wayne Shorter’s first album for Blue Note in 43 years is not quite the daredevil
leap into freedom its title might suggest, but it does show the 79-year old saxophone legend in inquisitive form, leading his group through an artful live set of freebop and European influenced jazz. Shorter revisits his past by reworking Miles Davis’s ‘Orbits’ into something dark and angular, with Danilo Perez’s ominous piano channelling Holst’s ‘Mars’ while Shorter’s soprano sax flits restlessly between the main theme and giddy abstractions.
a sense of freedom to even the more structured compositions, such as the classically-influenced ‘Pegasus’. As a sprightly and elegant theme gives way to a head-spinning Shorter improvisation, one audience member is moved to exclaim ‘oh my god’. And who can blame him? ‘Flying Down To Rio’, meanwhile, sees Fred Astaire dancing on the moon. Ingenious chamber jazz. (Stewart Smith)
WORLD DUR DUR BAND Volume 5 (Awesome Tapes from Africa) ●●●● ●
Following last year’s brilliant album from Ghana’s Bola, the redoubtable Awesome Tapes from Africa have uncovered this gem of 1980s Somali pop. Recorded in 1987, Dur Dur Band’s Volume 5 gives a tantalising flavour of Mogadishu’s vibrant music scene before the country destabilised in 1991.
Their sound is immediately striking, combining hot dance rhythms of modern African pop and American R&B with the modal melodies of traditional Somali folk, and otherworldly sounds drifting over from the Middle East. The slinky electric guitars, simmering organs and heavy grooves of ‘Tajir Waa Ilaah’ and ‘Amiina Awday’ are incontestable evidence that Dur Dur had the funk. But Sahra Dawo’s incredible vocals are something else, taking us from the Horn of Africa to outer space, her heady Arab-inflected melodies drenched in the kind of psychedelic echo and reverb which helped make those 1970s Ethiopiques recordings so magical. Awesome stuff indeed. (Stewart Smith)
WORLD VARIOUS Scattered Melodies: Korean Kayagum Sanjo (Sublime Frequencies) ●●●● ● ‘Invented’ around 1890 by Kim Chang-jo, sanjo, meaning ‘the scattering of
melodies’, is a major form of traditional Korean music, most often played on the kayagum, a smaller relation of the Japanese long, flat, stringed koto. The musicians develop melodic and rhythmic patterns
through improvisation, establishing the basic material with the slow and stark chinyangjo before building tempo and intensity through subsequent movements. Like all great improvisers, the musicians here explore the full
sonic properties of their instruments, plucking, snapping and bending kayagum strings in a manner that, to Western ears, recalls the rawest country blues.
You can’t help but revel in the eerie pentatonic scales and the encouraging murmurs that emanate from a dislocated voice. Companion volume The Crying Princess: 78 RPM Records from Burma is equally disarming. (Stewart Smith)
JOHN GRANT AUTECHRE
Pale Green Ghosts (Bella Union) ●●●●● You know how returning to Texas and hooking-up with Midlake again would have been the obvious way for Grant to follow-up the critically exalted Queen of Denmark? Well, he didn’t do that. Instead he moved to Reykjavik, worked with a guy out of GusGus and created this odd but rather brilliant amalgam of synth-pop and brutally cathartic lyricism. Think Rufus Wainwright produced by LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. (Malcolm Jack)
DAUGHTER If You Leave (4AD) ●●●●● The debut album from London trio Daughter only partly lives up to the promise of several EPs released during their steady emergence over the last 18 months. Elena Tonra’s hauntingly pretty voice and nakedly honest way with a lyric will prove irresistibly compelling to many, but nothing surpasses ‘Youth’ for a meeting of gauzy post-rock guitars and chronicles of terrible love. (MJ)
Exai (Warp) ●●●●● You know what you’re getting every time Autechre release an album, only this time around there’s more of it. Their eleventh studio album features two discs of unpronounce- ably-named, hacked-up beats; not so much the future any more as a small pocket universe travelling perpendicular to the current of a bedroom-bound generation which has finally caught up with them. (Dave Pollock)
Tooth & Nail (Cooking Vinyl) ●●●●● A kind of British companion piece to Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball, Bragg’s new album eulogises the ordinary guy and girl living in tough times with a homespun, slide guitar-massaged hint of Woody Guthrie. It’s ever-likable if a bit predictable, and not quite as unmissable as Billy showing up on Question Time. (DP) DAWN MCCARTHY & BONNIE
PHOSPHORESCENT ‘PRINCE’ BILLY
Muchacho (Dead Oceans) ●●●●● New dalliances with analogue electronic gadgetry account for the best moments on Brooklyn-based Alabaman Matthew Houck’s latest – specifically, the gently rippling elec- tro-gospel incantation ‘Sun, Arise! (An Invocation, An Introduction)’ and gobsmackingly pretty string samples-constructed ballad ‘Song for Zula’. But he remains on familiar alt-country ground for the most part across Muchacho, with only fleet- ingly distinctive results. (MJ) What the Brothers Sang (Domino) ●●●●● What an unlikely and very special idea – to set maudlin but deeply affecting alternative country icons Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Dawn McCarthy of Faun Fables loose upon the often-underestimated catalogue of The Everly Broth- ers. It’s a remarkable and highly recommended collection, although to hear them rock their way through ‘Somebody Help Me’ is an unexpected sensation. (DP)
HEY ENEMY Random Acts of Malpractice (Predestination/BlocMusic) ●●●●● If these Stirling noise-punk menaces are keen to fill the hole Danananana- ykroyd left in Scottish music, they’re liable to do it with the corpses of dead dogs (they’ve got a song called ‘Puppy-hammer’). Guitars are wield- ed like weapons, and their drum fills are liable to take someone’s eye out. We’d declare them ones to watch, but the police beat us to it. (MJ)
BENOIT PIOULARD Hymnal (Kranky) ●●●●● Nominally influenced by religion and religious architecture, there’s some- thing almost medieval about Benoit Pioulard’s (real name Thomas Meluch) new collection, a dense and atmospheric bed of foreboding electronic noise, weird folk of the Wicker Man variety and dramatic, reverb-treated vocals. One of those records which sinks in like earth soaking up rain. (DP)
76 THE LIST 21 Feb–21 Mar 2013