Impatiently returning to the golden age of Ecuadorian musica national, this second round of retrievals is more of a selectors’ affair: less reverent, more free-flowing, with more twists and turns. There is no let-up in the quality of the music, maintaining the same judicious, heart-piercing balance between emotional desolation and dignified endurance, the same bitter-sweet play between affective excess and formal sublimity.
This time around, the woman steal the show. Laura and Mercedes Suasti were child stars, with an exclusive Radio Quito contract. Unlike nearly all the men here, they lived long and prospered: Mercedes died last year, at the age of 93. Gladys Viera and Olga Gutierrez both came to Ecuador from Argentina. To start, Gladys plugged the scandalous new Monokini swimwear; Olga performed for visiting British royalty in 1962. Olga was glamorous but tough. She would make little of the amputation of one of her legs: ‘I don’t sing with my leg.’ She is accompanied on our opener by quintessentially reeling, sultry musica national: haunted-house organ, twinkling xylophone, Guillermo Rodriguez’ heart-plucking guitar-playing, and lilting, dance-to-keep-from-crying double-bass. ‘Sometimes I think that you will leave me with no memories,’ she sings, ‘that you hold only disappointments in store for me… In the future your love will search me out, full of regret. By then it will be too late, there will be no consolation, only disappointment awaiting you.’
Other highlights include the two contributions of Orquesta Nacional: Ponchito Al Hombro, like an off-the-wall forerunner of the Love Unlimited Orchestra, beamed into the tropics from an unknowable time and space; and the tone poem Atahualpa, a mystical yumbo invoking Quito’s most ancient inhabitants, the Kichwa. Also the tremulous, gypsy-flavoured violin-playing of Raul Emiliani, who arrived in Quito from Italy, suffering PTSD from the Second World War; the inscrutable, sardonic experimentalism of organist Lucho Munoz; and the mooing and whistling of Toro Barroso — cow-thief school of Lee Perry — in which a muddy bull dashes home to his darling chola, fearless, full of desire.

Lavishly presented, with a full-size, full-colour booklet, with transporting art-work and expert notes. Luminous sound, by way of Abbey Road, D&M and Pallas.

Truly spell-binding music.

‘Home to Cuca Records and hundreds of Nashville-fantasizing pluckers and singers, Wisconsin’s Driftless region was a hotbed of country music in the 1960s. Influenced by old-timey ethnic songs, Bakersfield outlaws, countrypolitan rainbows, and the lonesome twang of every rural route roadhouse, these seventeen Driftless Dreamers washed up at Jim Kirchstein’s Sauk City record plant with little more than $100 and a longing.’

Deep-fried rural psychedelia, primitive drum-machine grooves and woozy country-funk — including unlikely covers of The Blackbyrds, Michael Hurley and Jimmy Cliff — by Matt Valentine (MV) and Pat Gubler (PG Six), locked down in Vermont with pals S. Freyer Esq, Jim Bliss, Coot Moon and Carson ‘Smokehound’ Arnold.

Gonzalo Benitez and Luis Alberto Valencia were kingpins of the musica nacional movement in Ecuador. Check them out on the cover, on a rooftop in Quito’s Old Town, surveying their dominion.
In 1970, when Valencia collapsed onstage during a performance of the yaravi Desesperacion — ‘My heart is already in ashes’ — and died four days later, aged 52, his coffin was carried through those city streets on the shoulders of a throng of his fans.
They began singing as a duo in their mid-teens. During twenty-eight years together they recorded more than six hundred songs, for Discos Ecuador, Nacional, Granja, Ortiz, Rondador, Onix, Fuente, Real, Tropical, Fadisa, RCA Victor — and of course CAIFE.
Their exquisitely romantic harmonising is a sublime blend of collected forbearance and abject self-annihilation, underpinned and elaborated by the heart-piercing, improvisatory guitar-playing of Bolivar Ortiz. Effectively the third member of the group. ‘El Pollo’ sets the tone and intensity for everything that follows: listen to his soloing at the start of our opener, Lamparilla.
Musically a pasillo — a cross between a Viennese waltz and the indigenous yaravi rhythm — Lamparilla draws its verses from a poem by Luz Martinez from Riobamba, written in 1918 when she was 15, under the influence of Baudelaire and Mallarme. Another pasillo here, Sombras (‘Shadows’) is one of the best-loved songs in the musica nacional canon, setting poetry about undercover sex and lost love by the Mexican poet Maria Pren, which was considered pornographic on publication in 1911. ‘When oblivion comes / I will lose you to the shadows / To the hazy gloom / Where one warm afternoon I laid bare my unbridled feelings for you / Never again will I search out your eyes / Or kiss your mouth.’
And Benitez & Valencia looked back still further, to the indigenous roots of Ecuadorian music, as the key to its future. Carnaval de Guaranda is their take on a song dating back to the era of the Mitimaes, a broad group of Bolivian tribes conquered by the Incas and displaced to Ecuador. ‘Impossible love of mine / I love you for being impossible / Who loves what is impossible / Is the truest lover.’
Fiercely beautiful, desolate music from the shadowy mists of time, the lip of oblivion, for anyone who had a heart, for anyone who ever dreamed.

Meditative, devotional music pondering racism and ancestorship, co-produced by Meshell Ndegeocello. Featuring the saxophonist’s usual quartet, plus vocalists for the first time — including Ganavya — who shine.

Opening in 1973, tucked into a tangle of railway parts scattered across an industrial park at the western edge of Orlando East, Club Pelican was Soweto’s first night-club, and its premier live music venue throughout the seventies.
Pretty much everyone on the scene passed through its doors — to sing, or perform in the house band, or hang out. Schooled in standards, and fluent in the local musical vernacular, the music would take off in different directions at a moment’s notice — SA twists on jazz, funk, fusion, disco — spurred by the sounds coming in from Philadelphia, Detroit and New York City.
One Night In Pelican encapsulates these halcyon times, with a musical roll call of all the key groups and players, besides evocative, previously-unseen photographs, cover artwork by Zulu ‘Batsumi’ Bidi, and notes by Kwanele Sosibo, lit up by a gallery of first-person testimony.

Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, drummer Tcheser Holmes, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and bassist Luke Stewart.
Raw, organic punk-jazz,  trying out electronics and synthesizers for the first time.
‘Irreversible Entanglements’ fearless music takes to task the police, American politics, capitalism, and racism (The Nation).
‘The jazz ensemble evokes our American topography, both physically and psychologically, by capturing what’s in the news and what’s underneath that surface’ (Pitchfork).

Peter Brötzmann, Milford Graves, and William Parker, live and direct form the front room of CBGBs in 2002, with the drummer’s hand-painted, Orisha-adorned double-bass-drum kit, captured in its full thunderous glory on this recording, occupying most of the available space.
First in a series of records presenting previously unreleased works featuring Milford Graves.

‘Following up To Cy & Lee, this sprawling double LP finds DePlume expressing both sides of his artistic character beautifully: (1) an articulate singer and songwriter who invokes the melodious crooning of Donovan as much as Devendra Banhart or Syd Barrett, whose tunes are almost like mini-sermons, full of existential comedy and spiritual enlightenment; and (2) a brilliant composer of simple, soothing, and viscerally nourishing instrumental melodies, with a gift for expanding them into intrepid collective improvisations, led by a delicate and distinguished saxophone tone that conjures the fluttery sweetness of the great Getatchew Mekurya.’

‘The city of Belém, in the Northern state of Para in Brazil, has long been a hotbed of culture and musical innovation. Enveloped by the mystical wonder of the Amazonian forest and overlooking the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, its Amerindians, Europeans and Africans pioneered musical genres such as Carimbó, Samba-De-Cacete, Siriá, Bois-Bumbás and bambiá.
‘There was a radio station, a recording studio, a music label and a deep, cross-genre roster of artists. Beginning as simple gramophones connected to loudspeakers tied to lamp posts or trees, the aparelhagem sonora of Belém evolved into sophisticated setups, drawing thousands of revelers.
‘The music and tales found in Jambu are stories of resilience, triumph against all odds, and, most importantly, of a city at the edge of the Amazon which has always known how to throw a damn good party.’

‘The area’s best club music from the mid-‘70s, an exuberant, carnival-esque mishmash of local carimbó and siriá styles with big-band brass and frenetic Afro-Latino percussion. Best of all there are the three hip-swivelling cuts by Pinduca, founding father of lambada and king of Carimbó’ (Q).

Magnificent Wolof drum music, performed by an extended griot family in the mystical setting of Lac Rose, outside Dakar.
Doudou Ndiaye Rose — who died in 2015 —  is a key drummer in the musical history of the world. He developed a system of five hundred original drumming patterns, ancient and new. Amongst the modern rhythms here is Bench Mi — ‘under the Baobab tree,’ a spot where where problems get solved.  Also Hibar Yi — ‘passing on information’ — the theme-tune of Senegalese TV national news for decades — and Les Rosettes, the signature rhythm of Senegal’s first ever all-female percussion group, convened by Doudou, and named after his grandmother.
These original compositions sit alongside important traditional rhythms, familiar to every Sabar player, such as Farwu Jar ( a courtship game sometimes resulting in a wedding), Ceebu Jin (also the name of the national dish of fish and rice), and Gumbé, often played after a successful harvest.
Recorded in joyful single takes, over seven consecutive days in February 2020, with no overdubs, mastered by Rashad Becker, the music is deep and thrilling, polyrhythmic to the bone, with a complex, pointillistic intensity at times evoking Jeff Mills in full flight.

Stunningly modernised Tsogho ritual music from the interior forest of Gabon.
Beaten rattles, synths, Bwiti harp, male-female dialogical singing.
Released in 1989, to the intense consternation of purists; never before available outside Gabon.
Game-changing, and as authentic as it gets; warmly recommended.

Sixteen wonders from the first three years of Franco’s own imprint Les Editions Populaires, founded in 1968. Mostly OK Jazz, performing ravishing rumbas and bolero ballads in Lingala, traditional songs in Kikongo, Kimongo, and even Yoruba, collaborations with Ngoma artists Camille Feruzi and Manuel d’Oliveira, and their own tough take on US funk.
Glorious music. Bim.

His first two, liberating, aching, rawly beautiful LPs: Something Else!!!! The Music of Ornette Coleman from 1958, and Tomorrow Is the Question! The New Music of Ornette Coleman, from 1959.
With Don Cherry, Walter Norris, bassist Don Payne, Billy Higgins; Don Cherry, Shelly Manne, Percy Heath / Red Mitchell.

Two teenagers’ amapiano music from Gauteng province in South Africa, drawing on jazz, folk, afro, deep and tech house, kwaito, and dibacardi… but sounding like none of them.