KILOMBO – EARLY SPRING 2007

A belated Happy New Year – and my apologies to the many whose requests for a Kilombo 2007 update have been met with a constant ‘Soon come’. It’s been a busy 2007 – I’ve just completed two compilations for the excellent Rough Guide series – the first, ‘Africa and The Middle East’ is out this month, and the second –‘North Africa Café’ – should be released late spring. Plus the live performance thing’s been taking time: I’ve been doing the opening parties at Knightbridge’s uber-cool new Brazilian Bar/Restaurant Mocoto (had Naomi Campbell samba-ing the Friday before last!)so here’s the first chapter. As usual, this is a review of everything that I’ve liked the sound of in recent months, regardless of genres.

One of my favourite vinyl labels is Raw Fusion – Sweden based but with a press office here in the UK. They cover everything that I like – hip hop, funk, boogie, latin, Brazilian, Afro, all with a twist – a true modern spirit with none of the choking parochialism of most mainstream dance music scenes. Raw are pioneering the idea of sending promos as electronic files rather than vinyl or solid CDs – a great idea in these energy-conscious times (although I really need to ditch my PC and get a Mac – so much easier for music downloads). Particularly notable on the label are Mark ‘Spiritual South’ Roberts’ outstanding remixes/mash-ups. ‘Hullabaloo’ and the old Harry Belafonte chestnut ‘Calypso Blues’ get dusted down ,but Mark’s real gem is ‘Ipe Amarelo’, a Rio Carnival-style work- out in two courses, the first being more traditional jazz-batucada, the second in a boogie/jazzy house mould that rings a series of dazzling rhythm and arrangement changes through 10 whole minutes.

On the equally-impressive Lovemonk label, Spain’s Gecko Turner builds on the buzz from his debut 2004 release with a remix off his new album – track entitled ‘Afrobeatnik’. The tune receives several treatments, all good. Check the albums, too, they’re both consistently interesting.

On the subject of Spain, two of my favourite ‘underground-underground’ remixers are Alex Acosta (Mojo Project) and DJ Floro. Madrid-based Floro is a wonderful club DJ with an ear for the unusual: his two Afrobeat comps ‘Afrobeat Republic Vols 1 & 2’ avoid the Fela clichés and go for the more leftfield material. I’ve got a UK ‘exclusive’ currently on several of their remixes, two of unreleased Ska Cubano tunes, one of Ojos De Brujo and two more from the brilliant flamenco-funk outfit Los Deliquentes. You can hear them only at Futuro Flamenco (Notting Hill Arts Club, fourth Saturday each month) –or Guanabara on the second Friday of each month - but if you can’t wait till March 9th (Kilombo at Guanabara, Covent Garden, or Futuro Flamenco At n
Notting Hill Arts Club, March 24th), I might be persuaded to play them this Friday, 2nd March, at Afriklub (Big Chill House.Pentonville Road, Kings Cross).

Thanks to the hordes who turned up to the first night of my new Urban Afro residency AFRIKCLUB at the uber-cool new Big Chill House, Pentonville Road, King’s Cross (just by the Thameslink railway station). This is two floors of DJs and live music with a pronounced African heritage (which obviously includes a little Afro Latin, Afro Brazilian etc, as well as ‘pure’ Afro), plus cutting-edge vids and DVDs from Africa, 9-4am, free all night, 600+ capacity. The next one, on November 3, features as my guest DJ the legendary Jo Hagan, who forsook DJ-ing during the late 80s for architecture, but has now returned to the fold with a crazy-but-it-works mix of Afro, reggae and Country & Western – and if you know West African radio, you just can’t get any more authentic than that!

If you were wondering what had happened to the wonderful Afro-Andalous fusion outfit Radio Tarifa, their aura-tastic lead singer Benjamin Escoriza has his debut solo album out within the next few weeks on the Clapham-based World Network label. Powerful afro-flamenco bizness all the way.

Meanwhile, Brazilian jazz stalwarts Azymuth continue to release quality material, regardless of the fads and crazes that sweep through Brazil on a near-daily basis. Their latest, on Joe Davis’ UK-based Far Out label, builds on the tradition that they’ve built over the last 40 years, and has a much stronger samba flavou than their previous outing. Several vinyl remixes also available.

Independent label Afro-influenced action from the last few months: Soothsayers’ ‘Blinded Souls’ (Red Earth label) (especially the Quantic remix – that’s Will Holland of the Quantic Soul Orchestra, another mightily talented remixer in the same vein as those above); ‘The Traveller’ by The Haggis Horns (First Word); and the stupendous Beat Out Shrine’s ‘The Chant’ (Schema). probably still available (but not for long I suspect) is Helsinki tenor-man Timo Lassy’s ‘African Rumble’ (Ricky-Tick) from late 2005 but still an essential tune in the early ‘social beats’ hour of my Partido Del Mundo monthly sessions at the Big Chill Bar on Brick Lane. And don’t forget the long-overdue reissue of the long-lost ‘Egyptian Jazz’ LP by Salah Ragab and the Cairo Jazz Band (Art Yard). Now see if you can track down the three or four 60s and 70s sessions that Salah recorded with Sun Ra (reputedly pressed in batches of just 100 each)…

This month’s Afriklub guests are Ilka (from BBC’s Africa On Your Street), and Trenton Birch (Black Mango Sound System). Trenton’s compilation ‘Afrolution’ concentrates on pan-African hip hop, with great stuff from South Africa, Kenya and Senegal especially. A noteworthy label on this tip is Germany’s Out|Here, where Jay Rutledge puts together some refreshingly original Afrobeat comps concentrating on the urban sounds of modern Africa – especially ragga and hip hop. By contrast, the Out|Here release that has brought the label to more mainstream worldbeat attention is the debut solo album from Bassekou Kouyate. Kouyate is master of the Malian ngoni, a traditional string instrument of the lute family: beautiful contemplative music that once again confirms that the blues came from West Africa.

That’s all for now – Brazilian and Latin section later..

DON’T FORGET

FRIDAY 2 MARCH @ BIG CHILL HOUSE, PENTONVILLE ROAD, KINGS CROSS – AFRIKLUB - SOLID URBAN AFRO DIASPORA BEATZ ALL THE WAY IN TWO ROOMS FROM 9 TILL 4AM. RESIDENT DJ JOHN ARMSTRONG IN ROOM 1, GUEST DJS ILKA (bbc) AND TRENTON BIRCH (black mango sound system) IN ROOM 2. FREE BEFORE 9, THEN £5

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