Francis Bebey
Le Solo De Bruxelles

A solo piano performance is an act of faith, a pregnant musical proposition with potential to orient the alert listener towards higher human ideals. It’s a faith in pianism as a process — so that by daring to physically shape sound into form, into coherent interplay of sonority, rhythm, inflection and phrasing, the pianist as sonic pilgrim may point us to discover a path towards more. This path we discover as listeners by being alert. It’s a promise rooted in the axiom that there is revelation in improvisation. Kyle Shepherd is a devoted improviser.After The Night, The Day Will Surely Come, recorded as the world wrestles with death, disease and losses occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic, marks Shepherd out as a pianist and musician committed to hope in positive human possibility. In this way, he offers this bouquet of 10 songs as an elixir against darkness and despair.Shepherd’s compositions explored in this album include new articulations of well-liked familiar melodies like Sweet Zim Suite, Cry of The Lonely, along with improvised marvels in Zikr, and Desert Monk. Shepherd displays a rare ability to push towards adventurous tonal harmonies while preserving the pulse and keeping the music listenable; emerging here as more than just a pair of feet and two hands on pedals and keys. It’s in how he embodies the well-travelled compositions with renewed brilliant order and athleticism, retaining the supple filigree of their cherished earlier versions.By being attentive listeners, we may discover the pianist as a mind at work: intelligence and taste allied with formidable technical command; pursuing known sonic routes, but eschewing easy and predictable note choices on that journey — alert, alive pianism. Shepherd crafts a base of superbly controlled chordal underpinnings to every bit of sweet lilting lyricism in laments and levities, or a faintly echoed call of the adhan; the staccato of the incantatory Xhosa, or the faded IXam- ka tongues and modern Cape Malay street scamto.Shepherd embodies much of South Africa’s piano tradition with visionary clarity. More than his own ingenuity, he holds up an appreciation of the richness of a shared musical inheritance. This must be underscored by an understanding that all pianists, in fact all artists of real commitment, have a wish to be distinctive, along with a real rootedness. The selection of tunes treated here, shores this up about Shepherd. It also points to a deeper, loftier revelation: jazz, and creativity as the ultimate articulations of human hope.— PERCY MABANDU

VARIOUSLeonardo Marques Presents: Ilha Do Corvo Sounds Volume 1180g x Disk Union

RECCOMENDEDThe best thing about music is the way it continually presents you with people that have been doing their thing for time, and very well indeed, but have somehow managed to do that thing far from your wandering ear. Introducing John Carroll Kirby, just one star in the constellation of Los Angeline music, but one who has worked with the likes of (drum roll, please) Solange, Norah Jones, Frank Ocean, Miley Cyrus, and Bat For Lashes, among others.In truth, you can probably hear as much of those artists as you can another of his conspirators, Connan Mockasin, here. Cryptozoo is a record out of time, but perhaps not timeless. We wander through strange ambient jazz, elevator hooks, and cut scenes from a forgotten Final Fantasy game. It's the past and present, it's familiar and yet exploratory, and it makes perfect sense as aural accompaniment to a movie about metaverse beasts.

Regarding some tracks, quality is VG to VG+ or better. Togolese artist, born april 1948, died on the 10th of november 2013. This one is the most wanted Afro Funk album from Togo and also the most researched Lp from this artist. Never see or ear about the cover who should go with this LP. It seems that it has never be commercialised with the cover. Please listen to Hustle a totally mad Afro Funk / Afrobeat tune

Kolida Babo is the collaboration between two Greek woodwind musicians from separate regions - Socratis Votskos is from Pella, and Harris P is from Athens. This, their debut album, was recorded in improvised live-take sessions beginning on the night of the “Kolida Babo” folk rituals of music and dance in northern Greece in winter 2013. The sessions proceeded over three years, exploring the ancient music of Armenia and the folk traditions of northern Greece’s Epirus and Thrace regions alongside abstract electronics and free jazz.As musicians of modern Greece, the sonic palette is developed in part as a means of processing the country’s immediate actualities: its relation to its regional traditions, its urban centres and its humanitarian and economic crises. In this, the music is at once clearly located in traditional sounds and disjointed from them, at times contrasting or harmonious in both concept and sound.The Armenian Duduk that anchors the project is a double-reeded woodwind instrument made of apricot wood with thousands of years of history and generations of venerable masters - the duo cite Djivan Gasparyan as a main influence, and Harris studied with Vahan Galstyan. Traditionally its music is played in duet: a melody on one duduk, a low drone accompaniment (“the dum”) on another. Kolida Babo preserves and extends the dual nature of duduk music in many ways, replacing the dum at times with the tones of a moog synthesizer to allow the two players to weave harmonies together in duet. And there is a persistent duality in the braid of Kolido Babo’s sonic associations - modern and ancient, local and global - sometimes underpinning one another, sometimes undermining. “Sometimes we mock modern times and sometimes the other way around”, they say - it’s a collision, or an engagement, romantic or pugilistic, and the sense is of an experiment without expectation, without preciousness or exoticism of folk culture. The elements challenge each other and the listener - while the music is very much about texture and tone, the sounds aren’t clearly modern or ancient: it’s futile to identify, we’re reminded, and instead we experience the immediate presence and power of the combination. Influences include Armenian Folk music, Greek Rebetiko, German Kosmiche, Spiritual Jazz, the Fourth World Music of Brian Eno and John Hassell, British Trip Hop, Electrified West African Funk. But where these can be identified they are as sidelong journeymakers through the borderless idiolect belonging to the dialogue between the two players and enabling its free and full execution, subtle markers used to co-ordinate the collaboration.