Udu
Sound Of The People

When his mother brought Stanley Turrentine’s Salt Song LP back from a trip to Canada, Julien Lourau, then a teenager, was impressed by the scope of the sound and the groove of the saxophone. He was also charmed by the lush arrangements and funky sound of the record, typical of releases on the CTI label. Created by producer Creed Taylor, CTI left an imprint in the minds of 70s jazz fans much like Blue Note did in the 60s, and it even ended up releasing work by artists who started out on this mythical label such as Stanley Turrentine and Freddie Hubbard. The two even shared the same sound engineer, the great Rudy van Gelder.Yet CTI, though highly prolific during its 15 years of activity, has not benefitted from the same aura as its predecessor.“To breathe life into this album, I listened to a wealth of CTI releases and discovered some I had never heard before. I noticed, oddly, that many of today’s musicians know very little about CTI - a label unfairly considered as minor.”The choice of tracks was determined by Julien’s personal tastes, always keeping in mind a desire to help people discover them yet focusing on the joy of actually playing them too.“The album is made up of 9 pieces. Mathieu Débordes got everything down to the nearest note before we even attempted to play them. CTI didn’t hold back in fuelling their compositions with brass and violins, but I erased this aspect and pared things down to a bass, drums and two keyboards.”English drummer Jim Hart, someone Julien worked with during his London years, propels the group - from hard-bop polyrhythms with “drum & bass” inflections to a reworking of classic Red Clay.Sylvain Daniel on the bass and Arnaud Roulin on the analogue keys are two musicians close to the saxophonist, and that he met when they were students in 1999 while organising a master class at the Conservatoire de Nantes. Since then, they have become his esteemed companions.The collaboration with young pianist Léo Jassef began on this recording, where he also plays the Prophet 5. The dynamic and overlap of the many keyboards played by Arnaud and Léo bring the record a richness of timbre and harmony that the strings and brass provided on the CTI recordings.For the final track on the record, Julien called upon his friend of 30 years, guitarist Bojan Z, for a fresh, Gospel take on Love and Peace, a track recorded by Quincy Jones in 1969, which here, is dedicated to Bojan’s recently departed brother.“When it comes down to it, this album really is as I had imagined it, with, luckily, a few unexpected turns. I created a playlist I then claimed as my own. But in the end, I must admit that I would have loved to have composed some of these tracks.”

Award-winning Iranian percussionist Mohammad Reza Mortazavi describes the rhythm of eternity or ‘Ritme Jaavdanegi’ in eight transfixing ways on his first vinyl album, following 12”s with Padre Himalaya and Burnt Friedman’s Nonplace in recent years.A prodigious child student turned absolute master of the tombak - a traditional Iranian drum famed for its wide range of tonalities and striking techniques - Mohammad Reza Mortazavi brings an unparalleled instinct and knowledge to his instrument with each new release, and in recent years has found fine foils in Europe’s experimental garde with collaborators such as Mark Fell, Fis and Burnt Friedman, while also performing at prestigious venues including Berlin Philharmonie and the Sydney Opera House. On this, his 6th solo LP, Latency give Mortazavi room to let his heart run free thru his fingertips. Reflecting on his childhood in Iran - where he first learned the tombak and famously surpassed his teacher’s knowledge by the age of 9 - the artist found an 11/8 time signature in the Farsi phrasing for “Rit - me - Jaav - da - ne - gi”, which gave naturally gave birth to this album.Playing within the tricksy, off-kilter meter, Mortazavi beautifully resolves its lop-sided equation in a fractal not fractious style, with rhythms endlessly rolling from others in a seemingly effortless chain reaction of ballistic physics that barrels straight from his head and heart from fingerskin to drumskin.

Killer !

Originally released in 1986, Brother Resistance's 'Rapso Takeover' blends calypso, reggae, disco, funk and poetry to create the artist’s signature Rapso sound* "A progressive form of poetry from Trinidad and Tobago, Rapso emerged as a means by which to articulate the daily suffering symptomatic of the social unrest afflicting the nation throughout the 1970s and 80s. Brother Resistance played a significant role in the Rapso movement, deploying his music to spread messages of hope and liberation. The authorities took Brother Resistance’s rising status seriously, destroying what they could of his studios and in the process leaving only a small amount of his music in circulation. Now for the first time we can hear Brother Resistance’s finest work remastered. The music and the message live on through Rapso Take Over’s stripped back rhythms infused with steel and strings, all carried by the voice of resistance