Makaya McCraven
Universal Beings E&F Sides

Slipping through the cracks of infinite timelines, Man from the Future just can't put his past behind him. His journey can be filed as a score for breaking the space-time continuum as written by the Polyrhythmics releasing their sixth full-length studio release coming out on Color Red on May 8, 2020. Continuing the band’s exploration across genre and stylistic lines, Man from the Future documents them at their most evocative and cinematic yet.Spurring particles from their previous LP Caldera, Man from the Future rises out of the ravine to tell a tale that paints vivid stories that bridge the gap between the past, present, and future tying them together on one plane. That imagery alone plays into the writing process behind the album. Reflecting Caldera, there is music featuring and authored by each member of the band on this record. With tunes penned by each of the eight members of the ensemble, each paints their own account with the Man from the Future and etches their mark in the continuum. Also much like Caldera, the music for Man from the Future was composed at a mountain retreat, this time in the Mysty Mountain Properties alongside the Skykomish River in Barring, WA. During their stay at this ranch compound, the band got snowed in, hunkered down, and spent the 72 hours running grooves and melding ideas together. “Time was not an issue,” explains drummer Grant Schroff.From workshopping grooves in the mountains came months of road-testing songs that would see the group refining their deepest vibes and heaviest grooves to date. Man from the Future is a collection of songs that transcend your typical head-solo-head format. A collection of songs that serves as a fresh palate for every member to fulfill both rhythmic and melodic roles. And a collection of songs that can conjure an abundance of imagery and emotions without saying a word. “People want to search for a mood rather than an artist when they’re listening to music these days,” says percussionist Karl Olson, “We’re creating a vibe that happens within a song and it happens at several points across this album. A lot of people will want to listen if they know that they can evoke a mood out of this music.”Man from the Future is a “track-to-track musical landscape,” continues saxophonist and flautist Art Brown. “Yeti Set Go” sets the stage for Man of the Future’s quest through the space-time continuum with a Daktaris meets Roy Ayers soundscape. “Digital Cowboy” is poignant and calculated beckoning the future with synthesizers exploring modern sounds and fusion-based modalities. Fast forward to “In the Trees” and you find the band pulling influence from Italo Calvino’s 1956 novel The Baron in the Trees to create a stripped-down spaghetti western tune that stirs up a pensive sound palate. The scaled-back instrumentation features guitar, bass, an old Italian Vox Continental, light percussion and synthesizers and is unlike any tune the band has released prior. “We are able to take much bolder steps in composition and production style to create distinct feelings,” explains Olson. “Chelada” is a spicy melange of flavors where the band veers away from traditional compositional tactics. The rhythm section is at the forefront and the horns are in the background. The melody is carried by Ben Bloom on guitar and Jason Gray on bass while backed by Scott Morning on muted trumpet and Art Brown on flute playing horn pads. The static grooves give headway the synthesizer and percussion to stretch out. The title track “Man from the Future” takes direct queues from Tower of Power’s “Man from the Past” and features Schroff’s linear-style drumming and funky pocket grooves tipping their hat to Herbie Hancock’s iconic fusion album Thrust.The biggest takeaway from Man from the Future is that this is an album that transcends any type of formula and creates vibe pockets. “It’s a live instrumental mixtape,” says trombonist Elijah Clark. “If you think about a DJ crafting a set, it’s more about crafting pockets of different vibes. There’s tension and release and it’s less about songs and more about a cinematic piece of music that has different movements,” Schroff elaborates.Now on their sixth album and tenth year performing, Polyrhythmics, take all sonic exploration experiences of past albums combined with mad scientist experiments testing the tunes on the road and roll them into the final product that is Man from the Future. “We learn so much about how to get the sounds we want—and we do this ourselves. Every record we make, we build off the experiences of the last record,” says Schroff. The album was recorded at Studio Aleph and engineered and mixed by the band’s bassist Jason Gray at Blue Mallard Studios. It was then mastered by Doug Krebs of Doug Krebs Mastering and will be released on Color Red, record label and music platform founded by Eddie Roberts of The New Mastersounds.

REVOLUTIONARY SPIRITUAL JAZZ FROM EXILENdikho Xaba left South Africa in 1964, an exile from his homeland who eventually found his place in San Francisco’s vibrant spiritual jazz scene of the late 60s. A songwriter, bandleader, pianist, and inventor of percussion and woodwind instruments, Xaba played alongside contemporaries like Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, and Sun Ra. But it was on the single album he recorded in the US, self-released in an edition of 100 copies in 1971, that Xaba realized his unique vision.Backed by a band that included Plunky Branch and Lon Moshe (Oneness of Juju and Black Fire label), Xaba bridged the Black Atlantic, connecting the music of Africa with the most brilliant lights of the Diaspora, and drawing a line between the Black Power movement of the US and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Across five songs, Xaba and the band move through spiritual invocations, wrenching soul, and dizzying layers of rhythm knocked out on homemade instruments. The album is a critical political and historical document, and one of our favorite spiritual jazz albums of all time.Licensed from Nomusa Xaba, Ndikho's partner, a poet, storyteller, album-cover artist, and namesake of the stunning track immortalizing her name. This is a re-issue of the remastered 2015 release by Matsuli Music, pressed on 160gm vinyl, including booklet with rare photographs and concert bills, personal recollections from Plunky Branch, and extensive liner notes by Francis Golding and the great Thulani Davis, who was a part of Xaba's musical community.

Kamasi Washington composed and produced the original score for Becoming, the four time Emmy-nominated film that provided an intimate glimpse into the life of Michelle Obama. Produced by Netflix Originals, Becoming documented a moment of profound change for the former First Lady, not only for her personally but for the country she and her husband served over eight impactful years in the White House. Washington, who joined the project in its embryonic stages, provides the powerful musical backdrop. Young Turks Recordings will be releasing Vinyl and CD of this Emmy nominated score on 11th December 2020.

Led by producer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Mark de Clive Lowe, Tokyo’s Ronin Arkestra brings together some of the most supreme and innovative players in Japan’s Jazz and electronic scene, featuring members of Kyoto Jazz Sextet, WONK, Cro-Magnon, Root Soul, Sleepwalker, Sauce81 and Kyoto Jazz Massive.Formed in 2017, the collective’s debut album ‘Sonkei’, released via Albert’s Favourites, fuses ’60s deep and spiritual jazz with experimental electronica and is mixed by label co-founder Scrimshire. Compositions such as ‘Lullabies of the Lost’ are a deep meditation that transports us simultaneously back hundreds of years into the right here and now, while the horn-heavy, fusion-driven ‘Art of Altercation’, confronts the skill of conflict and confrontation.Elsewhere, the impulsive and free-flowing ‘Cosmic Collisions’ merges raw grooves and electronics – an interstellar configuration of stars, light years from each other, while ‘Circle of Transmigration’ challenges the never ending circle of life, fusing soaring horns and piano-driven melodies.It’s a fascinating evolution that has a parallel to each member in the Ronin Arkestra collective - master musicians from different bands and clans coming together to create a vagabond band of like-minded musicians - weaving the stories of their lives into a collective sound. “The members of Ronin Arkestra are some of my favorite musicians anywhere and the way we all come together in battle formation with so much heart and soul is making magic,” says de Clive Lowe.

One of Andy Narell's most exciting and unpredictable albums, Light in Your Eyes ranges from the exuberant to the quietly introspective. Narell, who embraces electric keyboards and acoustic piano in addition to his main instrument the steel pans, is undeniably inspired on everything from the driving post-bop number "A Stitch in Time" to the poetic, South American-influenced "The Strayaway Child" to the somewhat Joe Sample-ish title song. World music has long been one of the charismatic Narell's strong points, and on this fine CD, he looks to locations ranging from Africa to South America to Trinidad (where the steel pans originated) for inspiration.