Nana
Africadeus (Red Vinyl)

Shawn Lee's country-soul solo album Rides Again in 2019 was a fascinating one that picked up, rightly, plenty of plaudits. Now he returns with follow up long player Rides Yet again on Germany's Legere Recordings. He is in a more personal and reflective mode than before with an intriguing set of songs. US born but London based he is a prolific singer, songwriter, musician, producer, arranger, filmmaker and author so this album has a strong narrative arc running all throughout it. Soulful but with hints of Americana, it's a unique proposition.

A few years in the not-so-distant past, a clairvoyant delivered an indelible message to Connan Mockasin. Inferring a project involving his father that had not yet been started, a woman he’d met only by chance told him: “You need to make it your priority, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life”.Though Connan and his father, Ade, had always joked that they’d make an album together, it was this extrasensory perception that summoned It’s Just Wind — its name a retort used by Ade’s father “whenever he broke wind and caused a ruckus around him” — into the realm of the real. Ade had himself only recently hovered precariously between realms; suffering a sudden cardiac arrest which left him flatlined for 40 minutes, and then in a coma. “I couldn’t win a raffle if there were two tickets in a plastic bucket” he muses, “so the chances of surviving a coronary ... surviving was good luck.”Match struck against the box by future-seeing eyes, Connan proposed that the next of his yearly artist residencies at Mexican Summer’s Marfa Myths festival, in Marfa, Texas, be used to make the album that had been stirring in Ade for 40 years or more; for despite maintaining a lifelong interest in music, playing in various bands throughout the 1960s and 70s, recording sessions, and even making an album with his band The Autumn Stone, which survives only in the form of damaged master tapes — a fate he blithely aligns with the nearly-but-never-quite of The League of Gentleman’s Creme Brulee — an Ade Hosford album had never yet tasted the air.With both label and medical sign-off, Ade left New Zealand on a desert-bound plane, armed with a children’s school exercise book of song ideas (“I wrote ‘POETRY’ on the front so the Americans didn’t see I was writing lyrics”). Aside from Ade’s notes, the album didn’t yet have a definite shape. Travel-weary, knee-deep in first-night margaritas, and on the precipice of going to bed, Connan and his band spontaneously upped instruments and began playing together in the studio they’d set up to start recording the next day. And, in a souplike stupor of which he has little memory (“I had a lot of nasty drugs pumped through me, my doctor at the time said it’d cooked the brain a bit”) Ade joined them, testing out bits of lyrics from his book, getting them wrong by accident, getting them wrong on purpose, cutting, sticking and ad-libbing through the fug, around Connan and Co.’s improvised arrangements, never quite sure of what the hell was going to come out next. When they listened back to what they’d captured on the 8-track cassette the next morning, they found that they had, somehow, committed the majority of an album to tape. “The whole recording was quite a fluke; it was the most natural recording I’ve ever been involved with,” reflects Connan. “It just seemed to be the right thing at the right time... There was a nice magic to it.” Ade concurs: “I got a bit emotional at one point, because the music was rolling right over the top of my head. I was standing facing the engineer and I had keyboards [John Carroll Kirby] one side, Connan [guitar, number two vocals], drummer [Matthew Eccles], bassist [Nicholas Harsant] the other side, and number two guitarist [Rory McCarthy, aka Infinite Bisous] right behind me, sitting on the couch, so I was completely enveloped. The sound roared over the top, and it got me.”After just a couple more days of mixing and tweaking, still in-situ in Marfa, It’s Just Wind materialised: as much one continuous piece of music, operating on its own auto-written dream-logic, as a series of ten discrete songs. It starts with the big, bad tale of ‘The Wolf’ — a twisted, bongwater-and-panpipes spoken-word rehash of the familiar tale over a drum-machine beat, featuring three porky little shits and a rent-demanding lupine landlord. Sandwiched between instrumentals that are sometimes like mist rolling around a mountain-top (‘Edge of Darkness’), sometimes smooth, breezy and just slightly jolty, like the tape has worn thin in places (‘It’s Just Wind’) and sometimes 68-second master strokes of squelchy weirdo-funkery (‘What It Are’) are snippets of mussed-up vocal interjection from Connan (‘Tight Waxing’), and gruff rhythm-and-blues-inflected observations of the seemingly mundane (“Thirty-two leaf / sixty-four pages / seven millimeter ruled”, Ade sings on ‘Stuck’ — a lyric pulled not from inside his notebook, but from its very material reality).Tucked under the ruckus of jam, distortion, and wry surrealism, there’s also a quietly contemplative narrative thread. ‘Te Awanga’ tells of a 6-week journey, undertaken long ago in a metal boat, from a far-off land to a distant land. ‘Marfa’ laments the inevitability of the 9-5, and ‘Round Peg in a Square Hole’ considers the quiet melancholia of not fitting in. “It’s primarily a story about a guy who was born in London, England, and came to New Zealand as a young child ... just a matter of survival basically, a story of some guy surviving in a new land,” Ade surmises. The lines between the jest and the serious, the fictive and the lived, blur, as the plotline of It’s Just Wind bends gently around Ade’s own. Indeed, the cover art — a drawing of a former boss, found by Connan with a stash of other artwork in the roof of Ade’s house — is also plucked from Ade’s past. A quality of bittersweet self-reflection, redolent of Bowie’s Blackstar or Cash’s American IV, pervades, as an old man, from a point of slight detachment, surveys his life like a landscape. Whiskey in hand, Ade looks across life and land both, from a porch, on final track ‘Clifton’. He laughs at it all. At slight remove from his debut album — to be released on the occasion of his 72nd birthday — he laughs at that too. “I’ve been listening to it every day for three years, and I still don’t understand it”.Both a lifetime in the making and utterly impromptu, it means everything and nothing. It is, after all, just wind.-Diva Harris, June 2021

Kaito Winse est originaire d’une famille de griots musiciens issus du Burkina Faso. Il est véritablement le messager de leurs traditions. Son premier album en solo, Kaladounia (‘Ici le monde’), s’inscrit dans cette idée de perpétuation et de transmission, entre tradition et spiritualité (et chant d’amour, J’aime t’adorer seul morceau chanté en français). Il a capturé sur enregistrement divers chants adressés aux ancêtres ou aux nouveaux-nés ou encore en prise directe avec la terre et en communication avec la nature, des chants soutenus par le tambour, l’archet et des flûtes traditionnels, d’une voix très touchante, particulière et puissante… Tout ici respire l’authenticité et la sincérité.KaladouniaKaito Winse

To write these few lines, we spoke to saxophonist François Jeanneau, an old friend of Jacques Thollot who also played on several of his albums, including the “Watch Devil Go” which interests us here. He told us a story which, according to him, sums up the personality of Thollot. A noted studio had reserved three days for a Thollot recording session. The first morning was devoted to sound checks and putting some order in the score sheets which Jacques would hand out in a somewhat anarchic manner. Then everyone went for lunch. When the musicians returned to the studio, Thollot had disappeared. He wasn’t seen again for the three days. When he reappeared, he had already forgotten why he had left, The music of Jacques Thollot is in the image of its’ author: it takes you somewhere, suddenly escapes and disappears, returning in an unexpected place as if nothing had happened.Four years after a first album on the Futura label in 1971, Jacques Thollot returned, this time on the Palm label of Jef Gilson, still with just as much surrealist poetry in his jazz. In thirty-five minutes and a few seconds, the French composer and drummer, who had been on the scene since he was thirteen, established himself as a link between Arnold Schoenberg and Don Cherry. Resistant to any imposedframework and always excessive, Thollot allows himself to do anything and everything: suspended time of an extraordinary delicacy, a stealthy explosion of the brass section, hallucinatory improvisation of the synthesisers, tight writing, teetering on the classical, and in the middle of all that, a hit; the title-track - that Madlib would one day end up hearing and sampling.“Watch Devil Go” was in the right place in the Palm catalogue, which welcomed the cream of the French avant-garde in the 70s. But it is also the story of a long friendship between two men. Jacques Thollot and Jef Gilson had known and respected one another for a long time. Though barely sixteen years old, Thollot was already on drums on the first albums by Gilson starting in 1963 and would play in his big band (alongside François Jeanneau once again), ‘Europamerica’, until the end of the 70s.In a career lasting half a century and centred on freedom Jacques Thollot played with the most important experimental musicians (Don Cherry, Sonny Sharrock, Michel Roques, Barney Wilen, Steve Lacy, François Tusques, Michel Portal, Jac Berrocal, Noël Akchoté...) and they all heard in him a pulsation coming from another world.Jérôme "Kalcha" Simonneau

Formidable travail réalisé par le globe-trotter Miles Cleret alias Mr Soundway Records. Un territoire atypique, encore peu “exploité musicalement” par ce type de label, une compilation de morceaux très rares, des recherches ethnographiques développées dans un livret de 8 pages, un vinyle 7 pouces en bonus, un très bel artwork… Tous les critères d’une excellente compilation semblent être réunis sur ce nouveau projet de Soundway. Padang Moonrise est l'histoire de la musique indonésienne moderne qui a émergé sous les volcans de Java, l'île la plus peuplée de l’archipel. Plus de 17 000 îles et 1 300 groupes ethniques distincts, sa capitale, Jakarta, était le centre de la plupart de l'identité nationale postcoloniale, de la politique, de l'administration et de la production musicale. Les chansons traditionnelles de Java, Sumatra, Bali et au-delà ont été réinventées par un petit groupe de musiciens parrainés par l'État qui ont également composé et arrangé de nouvelles musiques. Ces chansons visaient à consolider un pays géographiquement disparate avec une nouvelle langue et de nouvelles idées du caractère national. Cette compilation rassemble une poignée de ces enregistrements qui combinent des éléments de musique populaire régionale, Gambus islamique, Gamelan et Kroncong javanais et balinais, avec du jazz, de la musique et de l'instrumentation afro-latine, et des harmonies vocales influencées par le doo-wop américain interdit et le rock & roll. Les résultats sont un mélange unique de styles qui sont restés pour la plupart isolés du monde extérieur à l'Indonésie jusqu'à ce qu'une récente résurgence mondiale de l'intérêt pour la musique enregistrée de toutes formes ait jeté un nouvel éclairage sur ces enregistrements presque oubliés.

Rino Lapin Almy ‎– Laissent Le Bon Temps RoulerRare 80's french Folk from South of France.