heep see 6-27
Jumble-able Jammers, The Paradise Garage in Ghana, Mauritanian Dembow, The Dark Dentist of reggae, A Disco Werewolf
SML - Small Medium Large
Once you get outside of the whole “everything is now made with computers” thing, Karlheinz Stockhausen doesn’t generally spring to mind as a big influence on jazz musicians. Beyond Miles Davis’ On the Corner and the former students of Stockhausen’s who went on to form Can (my mind tells me they’re a jazz band), it’s not so easy to trace a direct lineage these days.
Not to put too huge a burden on LA supergroup (of sorts) SML by likening their debut Small Medium Large to On the Corner, Can, and Stockhausen, but…I guess I just did? A quintet of bassist Anna Butterss, saxophonist Josh Johnson, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann, I’m only familiar with about a third of the names. Chiu has issued some lovely modular synth wormholes on International Anthem already. Butterss intrigues me, both with her wondrous weirdo solo album Activities (which somehow manages to be scattered and crystalline at once) and her holding down the low end on Jeff Parker’s classic-to-me Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy. My admiration of that album has been discussed previously. And then of course, “Josh Johnson, Josh Johnson, Josh Johnson.”
Together, they produced something fully jammable, jumble-able. There’s something about Miles’ observation that “through Stockhausen I understood music as a process of elimination and addition.” Like “yes” only means something after you have said “no.” Or as the lemon head pimps of OtC put it “On” // “Off.”
Just what SML is eliminating and adding might be up for interpretation. Map alerts for every turn and twist? Off. Sour gummy tape measures? On. Homemade soup in a paper bag? Yes. I may not remember much about the album as I go through it, but I love getting wholly lost in its labyrinthian lope-alongs that it works out well. Almost every number starts off tightly locked, only to soon start unspooling into weird new forms. It gets mucky and melty, except you soon realize you’re all the way back on top of a high peak. SML knows another pathway up.
They like to settle into the sort of looping hypnotism that brings to mind (or un-mind as the case may be) Brion Gysin’s dream machine flickers. Those visuals help make the dots dance behind the earlobes. Mix it into a playlist with other albums and you’ll get sideswiped every few minutes. Enter anywhere and get mesmerized by the matrices. Wake up down river in mud, guaranteed.
VA - Ghana Special 2
I’m a sucker for an African music comp. Weaned on handy Hugh Tracey CD reissues from the Other Music shelves and a fortuitous encounter with that Francis Bebey album on John Storm Roberts’ Original Music label in the ‘90s, there’s always wonderment and ebullience to be found in the music. Nigeria 70 remains foundational for me, an instant endorphin flood when I hear King Sunny Ade’s guitar tone or think back to “Agb'oju L'Ogun” being dropped on a boozy boat dancefloor out on the Hudson River. But the rockist mindset that led to the stripmining of anything that drew on the guitars and horn sections of rock, funk and soul became (slightly yet still deeply luxuriously) exhausting in the reissue bin.
I remain fascinated by the dark mirror Africa holds up to America, how the changes wrought by disco and boogie in the US also brought about the end of full bands there as more and more musicians turned to synths and canned claps. Maybe that will be the same fate for dance music fiends now looking for anything emergent from the continent boasting a synth or drum machine, but something like Soundway’s deep dive into the Nigerian scene at the time remains the gold standard for my ears.
Where Soundway’s first exploration of Ghana Special ends, Ghana Special 2: Electronic Highlife & Afro Sounds In The Diaspora, 1980-93 begins, as the electric keys swirl to life on “Ebe Ye Yie Ni.” The whoops and whooshes of Andy Vans’ “Adjoa Amisa” are as bright and bouncy as peak Larry Levan tracks from the era. (I hear a lot of David Joseph in its springs and springs.) “Parallel universe Paradise Garage” is a wonderful metaphor, proof that as Larry was listening across the ocean, the continent was also listening back. It doesn’t always hit quite like that, but there are lots of little gems here. (Bonus: find the track by an artist sharing the same name as my 7 year-old.)
VA - Wagadu Grooves: The Hypnotic Sound of Camara 1987-2016
Did I mention I’m a sucker for an African music comp? I bought this one unheard, just trusting the Hot Mule label to come with the goods. The French imprint favors the slow and steady, sometimes not dropping a new project for so long that you might wonder if they folded up the tent. Their last release was a 10” back in 2022.
Now comes Wagadu Grooves: The Hypnotic Sound of Camara 1987-2016. Fascinated as I am by the cosmopolitan sound that centered around Paris in the early 1980s (as documented on this killer comp and also on this comp that’s sadly not available for downloading), Wagadu zooms in on Camara Production, a French-based company that released music from Mali to the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.
I’m still learning all the little details of the artists and eras covered, but the female vocalists conjure the powerful pleas of the mighty Salif Keita. The usage of electronics reflects the times though. You can hear a digi-reggae groove on one number, then the dembow riddim elsewhere. Better still is when Auto-Tune is re-remembered to killer effect.
Keith Hudson - Playing It Cool & Playing It Right
In another reality, I spent the early ‘00s writing a hallucinatory biography on Keith Hudson, styled after Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, itself an imaginary biography about the phantasmal paterfamilias of jazz, Buddy Bolden. In this boring one, I’ve just been in the game long enough to see reissues of the reissues I wrote about twenty years ago. There’s a recent update on Keith Hudson’s Playing It Cool and Playing It Right that’s in shops now and when I give it my highest recommendation, I’m also giving it my “highest” recommendation.
When I first wrote about the album, I equated it with a painful emergency root canal and its attendant bottle of vicodin: “Taken together, even in normal dosages, the combined effect of pharmaceutical painkiller and the dusted early-eighties dub of Keith Hudson is woozy and disorienting in all the right ways.” In hindsight, I can just make out some of his classic riddims under all the studio madness at play. I remain fascinated with Hudson and his murky backstory, the dentist who let Big Youth drag a motorbike into the studio for “S90 Skank” and gave him his classic grill look. The man who made the murkiest, muddiest dub imaginable. Who else gave Satan his due on the side of a 45? And more pressing matters, what do I have to do to score one of the label’s posh Playing it Cool canvas tote bags?
John Greek And The Limiters - “I’m Hot For Your Body”
Ten years ago or so, on the same weekend that R blew my mind with a Streisand-Gibb silky banger in a DJ set, he then sent me an untagged mp3, saying it was some crazy rare tune on the DJ Harvey tip. It’s been on the fringe of my iTunes library ever since, a truly manic piece of music that clocks in at a “sleaze” tempo yet feels far too psychotic to quite slot into that genre.
Looking up “John Greek” didn’t seem to lead me very far. Surely it couldn’t be the same entry for the guy based in Tacoma who was in that “other” The Wailers and who had writing credits for the likes of The Ventures and The Sonics. But then again, what if you got your first taste of “straight strychnine” back in the 1960s and now it’s the butt end of 1979 and your brain has properly atrophied and your nostrils are still filled with the fumes of the Disco Demolition Night? Could you then snarl out something like “I’m Hot For Your Body”?
Maybe that’s what John Greek did, pressing up a 100 copies of the thing and letting them all fester in the sun. That’s the legend at least. Maybe in some subterranean club his growl “I’m hot for your body” sounds like a steamy come-on, rather than something hissed out by a guy with thirty plastic bags on a park bench. But I’m glad that James Murphy decided the tune was deranged enough to make far more sense in 2024 than at any other point in mankind’s devolution. If you can get to the end of its six melted-asphalt minutes of gnarly urrrgh (or the even more psychotic 9-minute remix) you can transform your entire dancefloor into werewolves.