“Cold Turkey Time” from Ernie Hawks’ debut album gets a single treatment here arriving back to back with the 45 only track “Tracking Down”. The latter should make the b-boys move even if heard in the relaxing steams of a Turkish bath, where its breezy melodies eventually point at.
A record that definitely lives up to its title – an obscure Italian sound library session that blends instrumental touches that evoke an America at the start of the 70s with some of the hipper, deeper currents you’d expect from the team of Stefano Torossi and Giovanni Tomasso. There’s plenty of expected sound library funk in the mix here in a way that makes for one of the most unique sound library sessions we’ve ever heard.
Msic From Memory took a deep dive into the archives of obscure British multi-instrumentalist Mike Turtle, resurfacing with a fine double-album of largely previously unheard cuts. Two years on they’ve taken another stroll through Turtle’s well-stocked vault, resulting in another essential collection of quirky cuts. Check, for example, the psychedelic patchwork “Reincarnation”, where backwards drums do battle with exotic Indian samples, or the delay-laden, lo-fi synth-pop pulse of “Uiko’s Return to Jeka”, which boasts strange spoken word vocals from Turtle and South African style juju guitar solos. You’ll find these kinds of imaginative experiments throughout; tracks that really shouldn’t work, but instead entertain, excite and inspire in equal measure.
Back in the day, French pianist, composer and all-round jazz superstar Jean-François Quiévreux, a.k.a. Jef Gilson, was up there alongside the likes of peers John Coltrane, Oscar Peterson, and Sun Ra. In a fitting homage to the decades worth of sublime music, and his sad passing away in 2012, French quarter Palm Unit have released a lively, honest tribute, upbeat and contemporary re-interpretative vision of his legacy.
After touring the world looking for sounds suitable for their vibrations, Nu Guinea decided to go back to square one, Napoli, where Massimo Di Lena and Lucio Aquilina were born and raised. They watched their city from a distance reconstructing its energy from their studio in Berlin, calibrating the synths on the meridian of Vesuvius, the volcano that has always protected and threatened Napoli. ‘Nuova Napoli’ is the result of a long musical research that has become a historical investigation on the sound that shaped Napoli during the ‘70s and ‘80s, starting from the contamination of genres (disco, jazz-funk, African rhythms) which ended up in Nu Guinea’s DNA. In this album the synthesizers fill the spaces between the past and the future, tightening in a single body acoustic instruments, electronics and voices in Neapolitan dialect. It is the first time that the duo has worked with such a large group of musicians, some of whom are exponents of the contemporary Neapolitan scene.
Jimi Tenor is a multi-instrumentalist and music master in general. ‘Quantum Connection’ is Jimi’s contribution to the recent Kraut-Life craze of the Berlin underground. Kraut-Life is the brand-new hybrid of Ghanaian Highlife and German – here extended to Northern Europe, as Finnish kitchen is also kraut-based – romantic melancholy. A heavy and driving Highlife beat, screaming psychedelic sound-fragments and a sung desire for a subatomic love affair makes the song another undoubted original by Jimi.
A volume entirely dedicated to the jazz atmospheres of the Italian movies from the ‘60s, including genres such as noir, melò, giallo, dark comedy and crazy ‘musicarelli’. With a great variety of styles and moods, jazz represented the perfect soundtrack for the Italian “nouvelle vague” season: an element of great innovation that radically disrupted the way traditional scores were conceived. No longer entrusted to cumbersome orchestras but light combos, with a fresh and dynamic sound. This record is the result of a research that focused on the soundtrack archive of RCA Italy and consists of songs that have remained unpublished until today. It demonstrates how Italian jazz benefitted from its relationship with the film industry, which provided a fertile ground to experiment and create to great musicians such as Piero Umiliani, Romano Mussolini, Amedeo Tommasi, Robby Poitevin, Piero Piccioni or Armando Trovajoli.
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