funk
peter.quinn
Funkier than a James Brown bridge, the mighty Soul Rebels Brass Band swung back into town last night and flattened all before them. Possessing that rare combination of serious chops, impeccable stagecraft and down-home soul, they confirmed their position as one of the most explosive live acts on the scene. From the very opening bars of Stevie Wonder's “Living for the City”, taken from their current Rounder album Unlock Your Mind, the Soul Rebels had the entire QEH off their seats.The continuous set featured the reggae-fied uplift of the title track, the dazzling call-and-response interplay Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Where’s the African car? Seun Kuti wanted to know. There are German cars, Chinese cars (he grimaced) even Brazilian cars. At least, anyway, there is “original African music”, not traditional but something new. Actually, not entirely new, as some of the music and some of his band, Egypt 80, were that of his father, that visionary genius, subversive and sex maniac Fela. (Not just 28 wives “on a rota system” as Fela explained to me in an interview I wrote up for theartsdesk, but plenty of groupies, too.) One of the things I found impressive about Seun and his band last night was how he Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Joker, aka 22 year old Bristolian Liam McLean, is one of the most individual talents of the dubstep/grime generation. His long run of dancefloor-directed single releases, some originally recorded when he was in his early teens, showed natural gifts for finding the funk in the sparsest rhythms and for frazzlingly catchy melodic synth riffs which meant his productions leapt out of DJ sets wherever and whenever they were played. Now, following a quiet 18 months, his debut album shows that he's not content to rest on his laurels.The Vision is a high-gloss affair. McLean has always been a Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This is a strangely kaleidoscopic approach to documentary. A selection of recently unearthed footage and interviews which shows the Black Power movement in the USA through the eyes of idealistic Swedish film-makers, now re-edited and framed with the voices and music of both modern and veteran black radical cultural figures, it provides a disorienting, shifting set of superimposed viewpoints of a period in which in any case change seemed to be the only certainty.The footage itself is gripping and often truly eye-opening, particularly when it's at its most ordinary. The stories of dramatic Read more ...
howard.male
There’s more than one way to reinterpret or simply embrace the extraordinary wealth of Ethiopian music that Francis Falceto has given us with the still growing Ethiopiques CD series of 1970s Ethio-jazz (as the style has been inadequately labelled). For example, Dub Colossus were seduced by the dissimulating aspect of the music that they felt it shared with dub reggae. And the Heliocentrics embraced its “otherness” over which they imposed their own art-school sensibility. Somewhere between these two approaches comes Switzerland’s Imperial Tiger Orchestra.Switzerland? You query, trying but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By 1977, disco was a cliché to be mocked. But a few years earlier, before its ubiquity, disco was a liberating music uniting minorities on the dance floor. Funk, too, became a cliché, little more than a reductive musical cypher. Two new reissues celebrate these genres when both were still vital, still able to surprise. Disco Gold: Scepter Records & The Birth of Disco is exactly what its title says it is, while Darondo’s Listen to My Song: The Music City Sessions collects A-grade funk that had languished in the vaults until now.Disco wasn’t just the place to dance, but the music, too: a Read more ...
bruce.dessau
I'm not quite sure why Anthony Kiedis bothered to put on his multicoloured frock coat. It certainly wasn't to keep warm. The atmosphere in Koko was positively volcanic even before the Red Hot Chili Peppers appeared on stage at this exclusive Radio 1 showcase. Highlights are due to be broadcast during Zane Lowe's show on 12 September from 7pm to 9pm, but a radio airing will convey only a miniscule fraction of the zip of this age-defying band.This gig was intended to promote the new album I'm With You, but they also did a pretty canny job of mixing old crowd-pleasers with new tracks. As soon as Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In 1989 when Lenny Kravitz released his debut Let Love Rule people complained that he had failed to quite master the Sixties influences that cut through it. They were wrong. That year it made Kravitz the most exciting black/white crossover artist since Prince. Since then, his path has been mainly a little more straightforward - maybe a little retro, but still consistently stirring. However with Black and White America Kravitz has again thumbed back through his Black-American songbook to find new styles with which to score his treatise on 21st-century race relations. Is it as good as Let Love Read more ...
Joe Muggs
At the start of September, the fourth Outlook Festival takes place in a 19th-century fort on the Croatian coast. Already this festival has become a vital point in the calendar for those involved with dubstep, grime and other UK underground scenes – not only a jolly in the sun (“dubstep's Ibiza”), but the one time in the year when everyone involved takes a break from international touring and comes together in the same place, a time to compare notes and take stock of the progress. Its British organisers make even bigger claims for it, though: they see it as drawing together decades' worth of “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Little Rock, the state capital of Arkansas, usually comes to mind in association with hometown boy Bill Clinton. Soul and funk fans, however, aren’t fussed with the sax-playing former governor and president and fixate on the city’s True Soul label, the home of a raft of rare and sought-after sides. Two volumes compiling the imprint have just been issued and include previously unissued tracks. The harmony-driven soul, Southern grooves and tight funk make a case for True Soul being an essential component of soul USA.Musically, Bill C’s sax was in keeping with Little Rock’s limited musical Read more ...
peter.quinn
Bassist, vocalist and composer, Esperanza Spalding is one of the most exciting things to happen to jazz in recent memory. Born and raised on what she has called “the other side of the tracks” in Portland, Oregon, Spalding grew up in a single-parent home. Encouraged by her mother, she began playing violin at the age of five and gained a place in the Chamber Music Society of Oregon. By the time she left, 10 years later, she had risen to the position of concertmaster. By then, she had also discovered the bass, and all of the non-classical avenues that the instrument opened up for her: funk, hip- Read more ...
howard.male
Most of the arrangements on this collection of covers of Eighties and early-Nineties UK soul tunes actually have more of a mid-Seventies live band feel to them. This proves to be an excellent way of rescuing the material from the often stultifying effect of programmed drums and cheesy keyboards which has rendered so much music from this period unlistenable to. Largely the approach works very well, although on one or two tracks the end result doesn’t quite measure up to its template.For example, “Apparently Nothing” by the Young Disciples still sounds cooler and more edgily contemporary in its Read more ...