Author Archives: Joseph Neff

In 2016, On-U Sound delivered vinyl reissues of the 1980s work by African Head Charge, the collaboration of percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah and producer Adrian Sherwood, and compiled the material in the 5CD box Environmental Holes & Drastic Tracks 1981 – 1986. Now, the label has followed up that activity with five more vinyl sets and a second CD box, Drumming is a Language 1990 – 2011. The blend of Jamaican roots, African-derived rhythms, and the expected studio enhancements, including healthy servings of dubby weirdness, establish a high standard of quality; as the discs unfurl, the consistency can be rather startling. In whichever manner one chooses to partake, the music is out now.

For the details regarding African Head Charge’s formation and a deep word dive into the unit’s ’80s stuff, one should consult the earlier review in this column of their first four LPs. For this piece on the latest set, it suffices to say that Bonjo and Sherwood’s union was set into motion by the former’s membership at the start of the ’80s in the group Creation Rebel, an outfit associated with the latter’s extensive post-punk studio productivity during the same period.

What began as a studio project gradually morphed into a band scenario, though one with considerable fluidity of personnel, and Songs of Praise, the first release chronologically in this spate of reissues (hence disc one in the box set) reflects this shift exceptionally well, while keeping a solid grip on Bonjo’s percussive objectives (as highlighted by the new box set’s title) and Sherwood’s production savvy.

Released in 1990, Songs of Praise is considered by some to be African Head Charge’s creative high-water mark. Now, this might be in part because of its ample running time, with 14 tracks on the original CD (truncated to eight on the first vinyl press) totaling just over an hour. For this edition, the number is expanded by three (and the LP edition is now a double, holding everything). And so, the release offers an abundance, and in any version, it doesn’t run out of gas. Another factor is the record’s concept, as it gathers religious chants from across the globe and infuses them with Jamaican-African-UK vigor.

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While this column focuses on new releases, current events are mentioned only intermittently. As we (meaning, the human race) are in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, this is one of those times. During a sustained crisis, art and its makers often get undervalued or pushed aside, but the nature of this emergency has illuminated the necessity of creativity in our world. Whatcha gonna do when you gotta stay home? Listen to records, maybe. Dearborn, MI’s Windy and Carl have a new one out, and while the terse and humorous motto of their label is “going nowhere slow,” rest assured that dropping needle on Allegiance and Conviction will take you places. It’s available now on LP, CD, and digital via Kranky.

Bassist-vocalist Windy Weber and guitarist Carl Hultgren commenced their musical partnership (they are also married) in the early ’90s as part of that decade’s thriving drone-ambient-experimental-psychedelic-shoegaze underground. At the time, if you were into Roy Montgomery, The Azusa Plane, Jessamine and even the slightly higher-profile outfits Flying Saucer Attack, Bardo Pond, Damon and Naomi, and Low, the odds are good that you’d picked up on at least a percentage of what Windy & Carl had laid down.

That is to say, the pair were fairly prolific across a string of releases, output that unsurprisingly included a long stretch of various artists compilation appearances, with these contributions corralled on one of the three compact discs in the self-released (on the Blue Flea label) Introspection: Singles and Rarities 1993-2000; disc one is devoted to 7-inches and EPs, while disc three holds live and unreleased material.

For those unfamiliar with Windy & Carl’s work, Introspection would deliver a solid, if extensive, introduction to their stuff, though you could begin just as satisfactorily with Portal, their debut full-length from 1994, initially a cassette (on Blue Flea) and shortly thereafter pressed onto CD (via Ba Da Bing!). From there, moving forward chronologically is a safe bet.

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Hank Williams is an icon of early country music, but he recorded before the LP era really took hold, so his legacy is dominated by posthumously assembled compilations. These sets come in various sizes and levels of quality. The latest, Pictures from Life’s Other Side: The Man and his Music in Rare Photos and Recordings, offers 144 transcriptions from Williams’ Mother’s Best radio program on six CDs, all tucked into a magnificent hardcover book loaded with photos, many of them in color, that serve to broaden the life of the artist beyond the still too common reduction of strife and an early death. It’s out now, but if it’s vinyl you require, the 3LP distillation Only Mother’s Best is also currently available from BMG.

When it comes to concise surveys of Hank Williams’ exceptional musical abilities (by which I mean single or double sets), the gold standard remains Polydor’s 40 Greatest Hits. Released in 1978, it was distinguished at the time for its lack of production meddling, as those four vinyl sides weren’t rechanneled into stereo and they lacked additional posthumous meddling such as overdubs and duet fakery.

40 Greatest Hits was just pure Hank, and for those who favored his work, disappointment in the listening was an impossibility. That’s not the same as being fully satisfied however, which is where the box sets enter the picture. Mercury’s 1998 10CD The Complete Hank Williams is an award winner, but amongst the numerous two- and three-disc collections, there’s an even bigger assemblage, Time Life’s The Complete Mother’s Best Recordings…Plus!, which emerged in 2010 as a 15CD behemoth.

As one might’ve deduced, there is a relationship between that release and the one under review here, with the difference being that Time Life simply rounded up the acetates of the original 15-minute broadcasts, which were sponsored by Mother’s Best flour. This left in all the instrumental bits, the guest musicians and the chatting and joking around.

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buffering juju is the debut album from dumama + kechou, a duo from Capetown, South Africa who describe their sound as Nomadic Future Folk. It’s an accurate self-assessment that really gets to the music’s blend of new and old, a mix that can also be approached as having a local foundation and a global reach. Where a lot of folk-based stuff derives the largest part of its appeal by simply carrying forth the traditional, dumama + kechou are connected to the past while unreservedly pointing the way forward; there’s no mistaking this music as belong to any other era than the now. An exciting development, the record is out March 20 on LP/ CD through Johannesburg’s Mushroom Hour Half Hour.

By the looks of it, buffering juju is the fourth vinyl offering from Mushroom Hour Half Hour and depending on how you count, either their fifth or sixth release overall. The label commenced operations back in 2016 and, befitting an enterprise with a geographical (one could also say national) focus, they have been in no particular hurry putting releases on the shelves.

It was the self-titled debut from Spaza last year that put Mushroom Hour Half Hour on my radar, a positive connection that found me eager when the existence of dumama + kechou’s LP entered my consciousness a few months back. Time spent left no trace of disappointment. While Spaza is tagged as an Afro-futurist improv collective with no permanent members, and the makers of buffering juju are a solid twosome (although assisted by a handful of guests, which we’ll get to below), the records are ultimately quite complementary.

This is partly due to the vibrant input of women. dumama (Gugulethu Duma) and kechou (Kerim Melik Becker) first met in Cape Town in 2017. kechou is of Algerian-German descent but he was raised in Germany and was studying at the South African College of Music in Cape Town during this period, while dumama, who is from South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, was beginning a mentorship with Madosini, a composer and instrument builder who is celebrated in their country for her skills as a performer and improviser.

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The farther we travel forth in time, the more the belief is encouraged that 20th century music history is set in stone. Upon chiseled tablets, inquisitive minds can ascertain events and achievements that unspooled tidily like fallen lines of dominos leading to the dawn of the 21st and right up to our current moment. But two new releases featuring drummer Rashied Ali, one in duo with saxophonist Frank Lowe, take the idea of a settled music history and explode it to sweet kablooey: First Time Out: Live at Slugs’ 1967 and Duo Exchange: Complete Sessions are out now, each on double vinyl, through Survival Records.

Indeed, music history is far from codified as the progressions that define it were far from neat. One of the niftier byproducts of vinyl’s resurgence (perhaps a better term is physical product’s resurgence, as the phenomenon includes an upsurge in cassettes, multi-format box sets with books, and yes, the against the odds endurance of the compact disc) is the increased spotlight material tangibility has shed upon uncovered works by complete unknowns and of course, entities with varying heights of profile.

The latter is the case with First Time Out: Live at Slugs’ 1967, which offers nearly 92 minutes of live performance by Rashied Ali’s Quintet that would’ve been lost except for the discovery of two 7-inch tape reels in the drummer’s private recording library. In the tersely informative notes for the release, Ben Young and George Schuller, who produced the set along with Patricia Ali, and Joe Lizzi, who mastered the recording, date the shows to May of 1967, just a few months after Ali was captured in duo with John Coltrane for Interstellar Space, though that session wouldn’t be issued until 1974.

If Ali was known in 1967, it was likely due to his role in Coltrane’s band, which he joined in ’65, initially flanking and then replacing Elvin Jones. Ali also played on Archie Shepp’s terrific On This Night from ’65 and was a member of Marion Brown’s quartet for two swell ESP-Disk albums recorded in ’65-’66. Ali’s releases as a leader didn’t begin surfacing until the ’70s, with this new, early vantage point a major facet in First Time Out’s allure.

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Upon the dissolution of the band Women, Toronto’s Patrick Flegel began recording solo as Cindy Lee, with results that blended classic pop motifs with wonderfully chilly late-night ambience and a bold defiance of gender norms. What’s Tonight to Eternity finds them back with an often-captivating set of songs and an undiminished love of guitar textures, including feedback. An abundant serving of alternately piercing, lilting and ethereal subterranean pop, it’s out now on W.25th, the contempo music subsidiary of the always interesting San Francisco-based reissue label Superior Viaduct.

For a lot of music past and present, the biographical info is pretty standard stuff. It’s the story of bands forming and maturing, of lone artists honing their skills, and additionally of individuals transitioning from groups into solo mode, which is the case with Cindy Lee, though with Patrick Flegel the change is deeper than it is for most, being aptly described as an evolution.

A Cindy Lee performance will reliably find Flegel in drag as their music explores queer identity and gender freedom. Like much queer art, it is deeply attached to prior touchstones while eluding the standard modes of homage. Simultaneously, while inextricably attached to the past, Cindy Lee isn’t camp; instead, their music is reminiscent of what an earlier era would have categorized as subversive. In the current moment, this is a total compliment.

Flegel’s influences include Nico, ’60s girl-group pop a la The Ronettes and The Crystals, the work of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and Karen Carpenter. The impact of the last name listed relates as much to the soft-pop icon’s personal struggles as it does musically, but don’t discount the Carpenters’ recordings in the Cindy Lee scheme of things. Still, Flegel’s post-Women oeuvre is generally lo-fi and occasionally severe in a manner that a typical fan of Karen and Richard would likely find off-putting.

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For many music fans, 1991 is defined by the arrival of the second album from a certain Pacific-Northwest band, its emergence precipitating a significant convulsion in the decade’s rock mainstream. But for a smaller percentage of listeners, the studio debut by Japan’s White Heaven delivered a far greater impact, specifically due to an approach to heavy psychedelia that embraced a bevy of classic rock archetypes without blatantly replicating those examples’ auras and occasional missteps. Simultaneously, White Heaven brandished intensity and edge (and avant tendencies) that placed them on the timeline securely After Punk. Black Editions’ gorgeous vinyl reissue of Out is available now.

The comparison in the intro above, specifically between Nirvana and White Heaven, may resonate to some like ye olde underground elitism, but it really just underscores that for those plugged into the subterranean scene at the dawn of the 1990s, Nevermind was no great revelation. This was directly due to numerous bands having already reached back before (and more generally, beyond) punk rock for inspiration, and with the expected varying degrees of success.

This is why the analogy to White Heaven is so proper, as the band, who at the point of Out’s recording featured founding singer You Ishihara, guitarist Michio Kurihara, drummer Ken Ishihara, and bassist Naohiro Yoshimoto, basically perfected a strain of hard psych that was neither gonzo a la the Butthole Surfers nor overly reverent either in form, like those populating the trippy end of neo-garage spectrum, or in spirit, which was to be largely the case with the rise of the Jam Band scene.

Instead of just copping a series of moves, White Heaven registered as if they’d truly absorbed the expansive lessons of their inspirations. There were surely points of reference, with an early comparison likening Kurihara’s guitar to that of Quicksilver Messenger Service’s John Cipollina. I’d read of this similarity long prior to hearing Out (which didn’t happen until it was reissued on CD in the mid-’90s, as the vinyl press was an edition of 500), bit after soaking up the disc’s five tracks the observation was right on the money, though White Heaven was striving for different sonic ends.

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With the release of Mind Hive, Wire reinforce their status as the quintessential post-punk band who, in the sheer unlikelihood of their tenacity, simply refuse to settle into obsolescence, or appealing predictability, even. Utterly disinterested in nostalgia, their new record is sharply focused on the ominousness of the current moment. Powerfully terse, it’s out now on vinyl, compact disc, and digital through Pinkflag. They are also currently touring the USA, with a stop on March 9 at Union Stage in Washington, DC.

The worthiness of Wire’s longevity finds them essentially without peer in the realms of punk’s class of 1977, though it’s well-established by now that the band were never a tidy fit with that style in its baseline form. Art-punk specialists before that subgenre was articulated, they were also one of the foundational acts in the whole post-punk shebang.

By extension, they have been often (brazenly) imitated. These approximations, even when likeable, do sit in stark contrast to Wire’s resistance to the regurgitation of formula. Where the vast majority of outfits who persevere across decades thrive by delivering a well-practiced sameness to an audience eager for slight variations on the same pattern, Wire seem to exist in a state of perpetual growth while always being identifiable as themselves.

This recognizability factor is crucial in reinforcing a trajectory of coherence throughout the group’s history. Each Wire album is quickly identifiable as a byproduct of the band, an experience not at all like meeting a succession of strangers but rather akin to consistently reconnecting with a tight pool of individuals who maintain a fine equilibrium of restlessness and tenacity.

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A beautiful eccentric residing in mid-20th century NYC, Louis Thomas Hardin aka Moondog also possessed extraordinary musical vision. An associate of Leonard Bernstein, Arturo Toscanini, and Charlie Parker, a collaborator with Julie Andrews and the Brooklyn Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, a key influence on the minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, covered by Janis Joplin, Kronos Quartet, and Antony and the Johnsons; there was truly nobody else like him. After a handful of singles and EPs his long-playing debut arrived with 1956’s Moondog.

A simply fantastic photograph of Moondog is used for the jacket of the 2LP compilation The Viking of Sixth Avenue; it finds him on a ‘50s Gotham street corner standing in front of a lamppost and decked out in full regalia. He cuts quite an appealing figure, but what makes the snap such a kick is the older couple passing by on his left side.

For other than Dwight and Mamie, one would be hard-pressed to find a better, or perhaps I should say more stereotypical, representation of Eisenhower-era America. The contrast between Moondog and this strolling pair is so sharp that the cynic in me has occasionally suspected the pic was staged in an attempt to play-up the legendary composer’s unconventionality.

This is not to insinuate that Moondog’s image was some sort of con. To the contrary, the legit uniqueness of the man’s background rivals that of sui generis American boho-hobo Harry Partch. Born in 1916, Hardin lived in Kansas, Wyoming, Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, and Tennessee, with exposure to Native American tribal ceremonies having a profound effect on his art. After moving to NYC in 1943 he lived as a street musician and sporadic recording artist until the early ‘70s.

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Today we remember Mazzy Star’s David Roback who passed away yesterday, February 25 with a look back from our archives. —Ed.

If it seems like the nonce is very ripe for ‘90s-era comebacks, Mazzy Star’s Seasons Of Your Day easily transcends the predictability of this phenomenon. Rather than shaping up like a quickly conceived money-grab or a time-filler for middle-aged bored dudes, its ten tracks are sourced from across the group’s long sojourn from the public eye, and it’s a very strong inclusion into their already significant body of work.

She Hangs Brightly, Mazzy Star’s debut album from way in back in 1990, has stood the test of time exceptionally well, but as a very good disc it also didn’t register as the inaugural offering from an act that was going to be sticking around for a while. This was partially due to vocalist Hope Sandoval having replaced Kendra Smith in Opal, the locale from whence Mazzy Star had sprung. While the resemblance between She Hangs Brightly and Opal was surely distinct, the record’s pleasures also gave no indication that it would differ from guitarist David Roback’s prior background.

To elaborate, Roback’s tenure in his previous outfits, specifically Paisley Underground cornerstone Rain Parade and the all-star cover-song project Rainy Day, wasn’t exactly noted for longevity. His involvement with the former ended after one LP, ‘83’s terrific Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, and the latter’s sole self-titled ’84 effort was by design a very sweet one-off. Likewise Opal, while having subsequently amassed a fairly hefty posthumous discography, only released one full-length, ‘87’s excellent Happy Nightmare Baby, before Smith up and quit the band.

While it may seem odd from this distance, when Mazzy Star first announced their presence, they were widely considered as simply being the latest incarnation of Roback’s estimable thing. This is not to belittle Sandoval’s contribution, which on She Hangs Brightly is of course immediately striking, but only to underline that Roback had acquired a substantial rep as a major participant in the whole Paisley Underground scenario. And by 1990, this movement seemed to be winding down.

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The short description of Herbie Hancock’s gorgeous 1965 LP Maiden Voyage, is that it’s the ’63-’64 Miles Davis Quintet with Freddie Hubbard subbing on trumpet. But as nicely as that reads, it’s actually much more. Hancock’s fifth and best record as leader, to this point it was also his most ambitious, and was additionally something of a rarity in jazz terms; a wildly successful and delightfully peaceful concept album.

Herbie Hancock has had a long and illustrious career, and in tandem with his contribution to the groups of Miles Davis, Maiden Voyage is probably his finest moment. As a look at the personnel relates, the disc is closely tied to Miles’ ‘60’s work, but as a standalone document Hancock’s masterful session equals anything Davis produced in the decade with the exception of the live material from the Plugged Nickel.

Some will disagree and a few will downright scoff at the notion of Maiden Voyage being rated so highly, in part because of its lack of edginess and decidedly refined sensibility. This circumstance extends to the considerable influence Hancock’s record wielded upon subsequent endeavors in the jazz and rock fields, byproducts that span in quality from mediocre to flat-out awful.

But that’s okay. What Maiden Voyage lacks in bluesy grit or fiery abstraction is greatly made up for by boldness of aspiration and a beautifully sustained mood, and as the title track and “Dolphin Dance” have both become late-period jazz standards, a certain percentage of underwhelming interpretations is basically inevitable.

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