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Linda Oh, Initial Here

2012 | Label: KOCH Records / Entertainment One Distribution

05.22.12 On her terrific second album, bassist and composer Linda Oh digs deep within her personal history and surrounds herself with top-flight musicians to bring her ideas to life in full-blown color. Oh was born in Malaysia to Chinese parents and when she was only three, her family migrated to Australia; by the time she moved to New York to study jazz bass at the Manhattan School of Music in 2006 she had already studied piano and bassoon, and followed classical training with a love for pop and jazz. There's a malleable rigor to music on Initial Here, suggesting a band that trusts ones another. On tune after tune her excellent quartet — drummer Rudy Royston, tenor saxophonist Dayna Stephens and… more »

Fela Kuti, Live in Detroit 1986

Label: Knitting Factory / IODA

05.08.12 There's a moment at nearly 15 minutes into the 40-minute performance of "Confusion Break Bones" on this live slab that stops the entire thing cold. Recorded in Detroitin 1986, "Confusion Break Bones" wasn't released for four more years (on 1990's O.D.O.O.; it's now a bonus track on Underground System), and it's not a funk bomb, but turgid near-cocktail jazz. At about 14:50, a voice erupts from the crowd: "Too western! Too western!Africa! Too western!" Much later, at 32:40, a two-minute percussion solo begins, but the tempo never leaves its poky 4/4. African, western, whatever — Fela Kuti did what he wanted.

"Beast of No Nation" is mellow as well, with Kuti playing ruminative organ and similarly searching sax intermittently over a… more »

Benny Moré, Cuba, Cubaneando

2011 | Label: Discos Cada / The Orchard

05.03.12 Once or twice in a generation, a figure turns up in music whose influence extends beyond the production of records or performance, expanding to become an actual cultural touchstone, coloring the way people think and feel. In American vocal music, Al Jolson, Frank Sinatra, Hank Williams and James Brown did that. But perhaps no one has shaped the range of a country's collective musical perspective as thoroughly as Cuba's Benny Moré. This can't be attributed solely to Moré's unequalled voice — though that's a significant factor. It is more a question of the authenticity of his vast body of work — his unique ability to invest each tune with a kind of existential resonance reverberating straight to the heart of… more »

Los Miticos Del Ritmo, Los Miticos Del Ritmo

2012 | Label: Soundway Records / Believe Digital

05.02.12 Hardcore cumbia. That's what Will "Quantic" Holland loves. And that's what he makes with Los Miticos Del Ritmo. Quantic takes a step into the Tardis and emerges with a sound that's straight out of the 1960s, sweaty as a summer's day in Bogota, and played with passion.

Quantic — a Brit who now lives in Colombia — has already shown he loves the music, both as a bandleader and assembler of the excellent compilation, The Original Sound of Cumbia. This time, he's gone a step further, not only putting together a seven-piece cumbia lineup but recording them on analogue four-track tape. The results have all the joy of a collector discovering a hidden gem buried in bargain crates. There's… more »