Full of brightness, it’s a fitting goodbye to/from a great. ![]() It feels, at times, like one long track, but it doesn’t matter, that’s the Afrobeat way. His steady groove really sets an endless roll over which the other instruments have a ball. But Tony Allen really is an Afrobeat legend – he was Fela Kuti’s musical director for 12 years! – and around 78 when he cut this record in 2018 with Jazz Is Dead’s Adrian Younge in Los Angeles. When writing more regularly about club music, I recall a point when a DJ-producer simply needed to have been making records in the Michigan area to be a “Detroit techno legend”. ![]() “Legend” is the most over-worked word in music PR and journalism. The posthumous Tony Allen release is the latest in the increasingly acclaimed Jazz Is Dead series. It’s not all as hectic but this unit aren’t ones to leave much breathing space. Absolutely bonkers, and certainly a tune I’ll be hammering. Just check out the dementedly animated “The End of Soffer”, all whoops and speeding mania, amphetamine Afrobeat. Their second album, from 1979, is characterized by a rough-edged but rivetingly frantic sound wherein treble guitar fights it out with vocals and brass. Les Sympathics de Porto Novo Benin were a 1970s outfit led by Herman Laleye and his brother Marc (drums). Swerving between frantic and contemplative, it’s quite the trip. It’s a song to be lost in, riding a borderline slap bass, accompanied by looping female backing vocals singing “Millions of Us” (after a while, it starts to sound like “we’re in a mess”), topped by Zithulele Nkosi’s growled vocals in English and (I’m presuming) a Bantu language. The A-side offers up three lively cuts of their patented Afro stew but it’s the flip and the 20-minute title track that’s essential. I immediately purchased their then-latest album The Healing which lived up to the live show. I’d never heard of them but there they were, a Holland-based South African seven-piece, combining Afrobeat hypnotics and multiple drums with modern dance energy and shouty vocals. My introduction to BCUC (Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness) came at Bluedot Festival last year. Three releases with a strong infusion of Afro-beat in their bloodstream. Comes with an inner sleeve full of photos of the ornamental emblem statues found in small American towns as mascots giant wasps, corns, pineapples and so on.īCUC Millions of Us (On the Corner) + Les Sympathics de Porto Novo Benin Les Sympathics de Porto Novo Benin – Volume 2 (Acid Jazz) + Tony Allen Jazz Is Dead 18 (Jazz Is Dead) Angular yet mesmeric, astonishing and strange, Trouble on Big Beat Street is right out-there yet oddly welcoming. They are spiky, pared-back, post-punk-meets-Beefheart blues numbers, smeared in the electronic synthesis of band member Gagarin, and occasional no-wave-jazz brass. These songs have been played by the band one time, as they were recorded.” This might not work for most, but the sheer rawness of these songs is compulsive. The PR sheet quotes him, stating that the album is based on the principle, borrowed from Van Dyke Parks, that “a song is best the first time it’s played… repetition allows error to enter in. Like the late, lamented Fall, age only prods Thomas to revel in possibility. Far from it, Trouble on Big Beat Street, is as forward-pushing and faintly unhinged as anything they’ve ever done. ![]() Most bands of this tenure (they’ve been around since 1975) with a leader, David Thomas, who’s 70-years-old, might fancy a triumphal tour playing their greatest (non-)hits or celebrating their seminal 1978 album The Modern Dance.
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