Recent Music

There are musical seasons where I re-listen to the old faves, the kind of stuff you can read about in my half-year of “Song of the Day” essays from 2018. This autumn I find myself listening to new music by living people. Here’s some of it.

The musical influx is directly related to my adoption of Qobuz, whose weekly editors’-picks are always worth a look and have led me to more than half of the tunes in this post. Qobuz, like me, still believes in the album as a useful unit of music and thus I’ll cover a few of those. And live-performance YouTubes of course. You’ll spot a pattern: A lot of this stuff is African or African-adjacent with Euro angles and jazz flavors.

Ghana Downtown · The Kwashibu Area Band, founded in Accra, have been around for a few years and played in a few styles, sometimes as Pat Thomas’ band.

What happened was, Qobuz offered up their recent Love Warrior’s Anthem and there isn’t a weak spot on it. Their record label says something about mixing Highlife and jazz; OK I guess. Here’s their YouTube channel but it doesn’t seem to have anything live from the Love-Warrior material. It isn’t often that I listen to an entire album end-to-end more than once.

Loud Rude Brits · The New Eves are from Brighton and Wikipedia calls them “folk punk” which is weird because yeah, they’re loud and rude, but a lot of the instrumental sound is cello/violin/flute. Anyhow, check out Mother. I listened to most of their recent LP The New Eve Is Rising while driving around town and that’s really a lot of good and very intense music.

Rwanda Sings With Strings · That’s the title of the latest from “The Good Ones”, here it is on BandCamp. Adrien Kazigira and Janvier Havugimana are described as a “folk duo”; the songs are two-voice harmonies backed with swinging acoustic guitars. This record is just like the title says: They set up in a hotel room with a couple of string players and recorded these songs in a single take with no written music and no overdubs.

It’s awfully sweet stuff and while none of the lyrics are in English, they offer translations of the song titles, which include One Red Sunday, You Lied & Tried to Steal My Land, In the Hills of Nyarusange They Talk Too Much, and You Were Given a Dowry, But Abandoned Me. This music does so much with so little.

Rapper Piano · Alfa Mist was a rapper who went to music school and learned to play keyboards as an adult. The music’s straight-ahead Jazz but he still raps a bit here and there, it blends in nicely. If you get a chance to listen to an interview with him you should, if only for his voice; he’s from South London and of Ugandan heritage, which results in an accent like nothing I’ve ever heard before but makes me smile.

The problem with AM’s music is that’s it’s extremely smoooooooth, to the point that I thought of it as sort of pleasant-background stuff. Then I took in a YouTube of a live-in-studio session (maybe this one?) and realized that I was listening to extremely sophisticated soloing and ensemble playing that deserves to be foreground. But still sweet.

Kora Magic · The Kora is that Gambian instrument with a gourd at the botton and dozens of strings. Sona Jobarteh, British-Gambian, plays Kora and guitar and sings beautifully and has a great band. Here she is at Jazz à Parquerolles.

And now for something completely different · Vanessa Wagner is a French classical pianist of whom I’d not heard. But Qobuz offered a new recording of Phil Glass’s Piano Etudes which, despite being a big fan, I’d never listened to. Here’s Etude No. 2, which is pretty nice, as is the whole recording; dreamy, shimmering stuff. I found myself leaning back with eyes closed.

It makes me happy · That there’s plenty of music out there that’s new and good.

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