Gary Bartz NTU Troop
Harlem Bush Music - Uhuru

FRANK is the latest release from Dolfin Records, a Texas indie label with a prominent underground roster that includes rapper Lord Byron, producer Ben Hixon, R&B singer Jon Bap, and former Stanley Clarke drummer Mike Mitchell. Liv.e is one of the newer artists on the label, having previously collaborated with Hixon through a series of DJ parties in Dallas (New Math Mondays). Hixon and Bap have significant marks on this project, providing production, mixing, and background vocals. The beats they lend are often heavy on the drums, with short, hazy riffs that resemble Dilla-style syncopated loops.FRANK opens with a short hiss, launching into a jittery pattern of cymbals and drums, stinging bass slaps, and bouncy guitar riffs. You can almost see the tape reels rolling in front of you as the instrumental loops play themselves out with occasional flutters and skips. A chorus of voices enter with harmonies out of the George Clinton songbook, blending in behind the slow, finger-snapping beat. It sounds more like a lost, dusty funk recording from the 70s than an R&B song made in 2017.

Long lost 1968 album from visionary South African jazz composer incorporating traditional African music sources and instruments. Officially licensed from the Nxumalo family and reissued with inner sleeve containing archival photographs and new liner notes by Francis Gooding.Gideon Nxumalo’s Gideon Plays might just be the most mythologised and sought-after LP in the whole South African canon. A sophisticated bop excursion with a distinctive African edge, it was only Nxumalo’s second LP as leader, despite his crucial place in South African jazz history. Pianist Nxumalo was a visionary jazz composer who had recorded regularly during the 1950s, and his 1962 Jazz Fantasia album was the first South African jazz recording to incorporate traditional African musical sources and instruments. But he was also the country’s most significant radio presenter and jazz tastemaker – from 1954 onwards, he had worn the nickname ‘Mgibe’ to introduce ‘This Is Bantu Jazz’, South African radio’s premier jazz show.But in the aftermath of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1961, Nxumalo had been side-lined from radio play, and was eventually sacked for playing records with political meanings. By 1968, he had not been heard on record or airwave for several years. Gideon Plays was a celebrated return to the studio for one of South Africa’s best loved and most forward-thinking jazzmen, and it showcases Nxumalo’s deep understanding of jazz, his brilliant touch as a composer, and his commitment to bringing South Africa’s indigenous sound into the music.However, it was released on the tiny JAS Pride label owned by production impresario Ray Nkwe, and after one pressing in 1968, Gideon Plays fell into the undeserved silence that has obscured so much of the South African jazz discography. It has since become a legend: hardly more than a rumour, it has been bootlegged by the unscrupulous, changed hands for eye-watering sums, and has scarcely been heard outside the circles of the most committed South African jazz devotees. It goes without saying that it has never been released outside South Africa, and even now only a handful of original copies are known to have survived.

In the years leading up to 1971, Sun Ra wrote many compositions and poems specifically inspired by the ancient African Kingdoms and many others with associated mythological and heliocentric connotations. As such, a visit to Egypt and the opportunity for the Arkestra to play there was a matter of necessity. Ra’s first ever concerts outside of the US had occurred in late summer and autumn of 1970 with performances in France, Germany and the UK and a second European tour was arranged for late 1971. At the end of that second tour, Ra caught wind of cheap flights from Denmark to Cairo.These releases comprise recordings made by Arkestra member Thomas “Bugs” Hunter made in December 1971 in the streets around the Mena House Hotel, Giza, from a concert held at the house of Goethe Institute ex-pat Hartmut Geerken in Heliopolis, from a live Cairo TV channel broadcast and a concert at the Ballon Theatre in Cairo. Ra subsequently edited the three LPs of the ‘Live In Egypt’ series for release on his Saturn record label and its affiliated twin, Thoth Intergalactic: ‘Dark Myth Equation Visitation’, ‘Nidhamu’ and ‘Horizon’.These three albums are now reissued for the first time individually in their original artwork and all tracks are remastered from the original tapes.