So far, 2018 has been pretty good to Ed Motta: the renowned Brazilian singer, pianist and guitarist is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of his first album, and also releasing a new album, the excellent Criterion Of The Senses, an homage to the music he loves: soul, funk and the entire AOR galaxy dominated by his beloved Steely Dan. Among the things Ed doesn't care for: today's music, soccer, the beach, insincere musicians and mixing music and politics ...
The seventh Anthony Joseph's album, People of the Sun has the qualities of its predecessors (unstoppable syncope, vocal charisma, social chronicles, and poetic writing), while at the same time allowing marginal innovations, such as beautiful string arrangements.
Like Sibusile Xaba in 2017, Thabang Tabane signs a sumptuous album of malombo, a genre created in the 1960s in Pretoria by his recently deceased father. The succession is assured.
Jerry Williams began his career in R&B in 1954 at the age of 12, and for a long time clashed with the music business, to the point of choosing an alter ego in 1970, Swamp Dogg, inspired by LSD, Zappa satires and revolutionary movements.
The announcement had been posted on social media: they were looking for cassettes recorded and sold between 1975 and 2000 by Walter Gavitt Ferguson, a calypso legend for whom some fans and musicologists knew the address in Cahuita, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica that he never wanted to leave. It was urgent.
The Habibi Funk compilations go back through the music of North Africa and the Middle East. Explanations from Berlin cratedigger Jannis Stürtz as Volume 8, devoted to Sudanese musician Kamal Keila, is released.
The album Lower East Suite Part Three completes a trilogy chronicling the gentrification of New York’s Lower East Side. Founded by Isaiah Barr, this young group ties the New York jazz scene together, from free-jazz adventurousness to the rhythmic loops of the new esthetics.
The crime film The Friends of Eddie Coyle was a commercial failure whose soundtrack wasn’t even released. This injustice has been righted, as the score has been issued on vinyl for the first time.
Guadaloupean producer Henri Debs's influence on music from the Lesser Antilles spans four decades. A compilation made by Hugo Mendez and Emile Omar, divided into three volumes, the first of which (1960-1972) has just been released goes over this musical history which also features also Casimir Létang, Guy Conquette and Ry-Co Jazz.
The Brazilian multi-instrumentalist, who made a connection between Nordeste traditions and Miles Davis in the 1970s, just added four volumes to an already massive discography. His oeuvre is as iconoclastic as it is sophisticated, and at age 82, he is touring with it again.
