The best Awesome Tapes for ages!
The mighty, game-changing, iconic Asnakech in narcotic, bare-bones performances from 1975. Her singing and virtuosic krar-playing are intensely gripping throughout, accompanied by Hailu Mergia’s cosmic, zonked organ, and Temare Harege’s ultra-minimal brush-work and foot-pedal, like a barely audible drum-machine.
Haunting, intoxicating, wonderful stuff.

Terrific, deep roots, protesting the imprisonment of Desmond Trotter for the 1974 murder of a US tourist in Domenica. (Trots was fingered by a young lady from Antigua called Pretty Pig, the court was told.)
Originally released on the Jumbo Caribbean Disco label run by Brooklyn’s African Record Center shop. Discomixes, both sides.
Don’t miss it.

Ace organ-driven rocksteady cut of Love Is A Message, recorded at Treasure Isle on Bunny Lee’s ticket, by youngsters Jacob Miller, Lawrence Weir and Lassive Jones aka Delroy Melody.
They were going by the name The Young Lads, but Jones remembers Striker’s strong advice: “there are too much Lads group, you boys are going to school, you boys are School Boys.”

‘An extraordinary gift. Maxine Gordon’s rigorously researched, jazz-inflected, genre-bending account of the many dimensions of this prodigious life provides an occasion to appreciate Dexter’s resounding musical genius as well as his wish for major social transformation’ (Angela Davis).

A second helping as sublimely pleasurable as the first, with Prince Buster, Rupie Edwards, Derrick Harriott, Dobby Dobson and Joe Higgs amongst the singers.
‘Enthralling to anyone,’ according to The Guardian.

The recording debut of Baptista from Nagoya in Japan — ‘impulsive and driving but earthy and dark, buzzing with dense energy like a jungle yet spacious like the hall of a mountain king’ — topped off with a remix by Hodge.

Brainy but intensely pleasurable piano-saxophone/clarinet duets; judiciously allusive, searching and rigorous.
Ortiz is a protégé of Muhal Richard Adams whose playing riddles Noncarrow with rumba, Messiaen with Monk, Yancey with yambu. Don Byron is a favourite of ours way back to Tuskegee Experiments and his revival of Mickey Katz.
The opening tribute to Catalonian jazz pianist Tete Montoliu — who smuggled flamenco into post-bop — is twinned with something from Musica Callada, by Federico Mompou, a kind of Catalonian Satie. (“The complexity of simplicity,” Ortiz calls it. “Mompou’s music doesn’t land the way we expect it to, and the resolution is like a door to what’s happening next. Mompou’s pieces have a lot of these doors, and they give a lot of space to creativity.”) There are interpretations of Black And Tan Fantasy (by way of Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington), Benny Golson’s Along Came Betty and Geri Allen’s Dolphy’s Dance; and a luminous arrangement of a Bach violin partita for solo clarinet. Byron chips in compositions dedicated to Lorraine Hansberry and Andy Capp; Ortiz some twelve-tone serialism and a tune based on ‘the triangular relationship within a series of three notes’.
Invigorating music; brilliantly recorded.