Otoroku is extremely proud to present the first vinyl reissue of one of the most legendary free jazz records ever produced. Originally released in 1978 on Ogun recordings, Louis Moholo Octet’s Spirits Rejoice! is a high achievement in the movement of the era as it soars beyond oppression with a raucous and spiritually uplifting surge of movement and melody  Featuring Harry Miller, Johnny Dyani, Keith Tippett, Evan Parker, Nick Evans, Radu Malfatti and Kenny Wheeler, this is former Blue Note artist Louis Moholo’s first album under his own name and is a classic example of the cross-pollination between South African and British players. Mongezi Feza’s ‘You Ain’t Gonna Know Me ‘Cos You Think You Know Me’ alone is enough to make your life a better place. From Matthew Wright’s new liner notes:  The South African melodies, now so familiar, were wholeheartedly taken on board by the individual musicians, their unity of purpose mirroring the belief in the strength of the collective. Stunning solos, often close to the edge, feature throughout –  Evan Parker and Keith Tippett on “Shine Wherever You Are”; the contrasting trombone styles of Nick Evans and Radu Malfatti on “You Ain’t Gonna Know Me...”; the octet sounding like a full big band; and behind them, the relentlessly rhythmic urgency of the piano, bass and drums. Add to this Kenny Wheeler’s moving and all-encompassing trumpet on the elegiac “Amaxesha Osizi” and the joyous flamboyancy of “Wedding Hymn” with Parker’s relatively straight-ahead tenor and Tippett’s dextrous piano solo over a bed of riffing horns, (fast) walking bass lines and a supreme sense of swing. Louis’ early hero, Big Sid Catlett, would have loved it! This 2019 re-issue has been made with permission and in association with Ogun records. Features an exact reproduction of the original artwork and liner notes along with new liner notes from Matthew Wright. Remastered by Giuseppe IIelasi and packaged in a high gloss sleeve this is the definitive release of one of the absolute free jazz classics of the 20th Century. Edition of 1000 copies.

A masterclass in nuance, interpretation and the purifying power of the human voice, Standards Vol. V represents another captivating chapter in the career of a singular figure in contemporary music.For his fifth album as the mischievously named National Jazz Trio Of Scotland, the prolific jazz outsider Bill Wells posits yet another collaborator in the diffuse light cast by his tender chord shifts and understated arrangements. Where Standards Vol. IV spun around the vocal talents of Kate Sugden with contributions from Gerard Black and Aby Vulliamy, the voice on Standards Vol. V is that of Black, whose other musical activities include the band Babe, François And The Atlas Mountains, Rozi Plain and Charlotte Gainsbourg.For much of Standards Vol. V, Black’s unstained tenor is the paint with which Wells fills the canvas on songs including four originals – among them the beatific wordless chorale Gradual Inclination and the contrasting So Much Power, an energetic stomp propelled by keyboard brass and drum machine – and versions of songs from the musical Fiddler On The Roof and George and Ira Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing (Sunrise, Sunset and Of Thee I Sing respectively).As ever with Wells’ work, whether under the NJTOS monicker or his own name (which typically appears alongside those of collaborators including Yo La Tengo, Jim O’Rourke and Annette Peacock), the melodic and lyrical elements are embellished with jazz-accented piano, samples and keyboards, with minimal rhythmic accompaniment other than electronic percussion.Adding to the intrigue on Standards Vol. V are a new arrangement of the Scots/Irish ballad I Know Where I’m Going (from which Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger took the title of their 1945 film of the same name), an entirely new musical interpretation of Sigh No More Ladies from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and the album’s appropriately named finale, A Quiet Goodbye, with words by Aidan Moffat, Wells’ partner on Everything’s Getting Older (2011) – winner of the inaugural Scottish Album Of The Year award – and follow-up The Most Important Place In The World (2015).Recorded in bursts over an eight-year period in Loathsome Reels, aka the kitchen in Wells’ Glasgow flat, Standards Vol. V is the multi-instrumentalist and composer’s third long-player in 12 months, following Remixes For Seksound (Seksound, October 2018) under his own name and The Sensory Illusions (Karaoke Kalk, January 2019), the eponymous debut from his duo with tuba player Danielle Price

Please note - each 7" and artwork is completely individual and numbered Satin Made of Triggers - Hummings is the result of collaboration between Antonina Nowacka, Teoniki Rożynek, Mila Nowacka, Kamil Szuszkiewicz, and Sebastian Buczek (Altanova Press). In 2018, Kamil, Antonina and Teoniki took up the subject of the ASMR phenomenon (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) as part of the Unsound festival during SMOT concerts at the Alchemia club in Krakow. A year later, an idea arose to extend the project to include other media. A fragment of the recording from the festival was released on the lathe cut album in a limited series of 10 copies, each of them as a unique artifact, prepared by Mila Nowacka and Sebastian Buczek. Altanova Press is an analog record label run by Sebastian Buczek. The sound is recorded in real time using the Polish cutter for sound postcards from the 1960s, improved by Buczek, each disc is made by hand. The covers of Satin Made of Triggers Hummings were framed with original drawings and the plates were engraved with a diamond needle by Mila Nowacka. As part of the premiere, there was a premiere exhibition of records and a concert performed by Antonina Nowacka, Teonika Rożynek and Kamil Szuszkiewicz in the space of the Pracownia Wschodnia gallery. Satin Made of Triggers - Hummings is only available at the Sklep-Galeria Karowa in Warsaw and the Cafe OTO store in London. --- Composition: Kamil Szuszkiewicz Execution:  Antonina Nowacka Teoniki Rożynek  Kamil Szuszkiewicz Lathe cuts and covers: Mila Nowacka, Sebastian Buczek / Altanova Press Material recorded at the Unsound Festival in 2018

For the time being we are unable to get to the post but if you order now your item will be posted as soon as things return to normal. Thank you for your support. "Ears Are Filled With Wonder, the debut release from the duo of pedal steel player Heather Leigh and reedist Peter Brötzmann, blows the old adage about improvised music somehow not being best appreciated via the recordings to beautiful pieces. This is a music that demands re-visiting, that seems to alter, slightly, every time it is played, with new details emerging, new relationships of tone and style, new romance, even. Recorded during a mammoth stint in Kraków, Poland, where Brötzmann and Leigh played as part of big bands, trios, quartets, and duos, this duo performance represents the diamond heart of the sessions, an improvised set that bears little relation to what either of the players has achieved outside of its prodigious gravity. We mentioned romance and really Ears Are Filled With Wonder, a play on a line from the poet Kenneth Patchen, showcases the full reach of Brötzmann's rebel lyricism, his lover man style, now smoky, seductive, late night, now roaring and vibrating with energy. Leigh plays it extremely subtly, sometimes fixing on the most suggestive detail and from there spinning luscious webs of repeat-time bliss that make for some of the most psychedelic and otherworldly settings of strings and horn. Elsewhere the two of them tear the roof off with tactile fuzz and horn ascensions. It's a music of organic depth, of endlessly evocative unfolding, as themes bloom and sigh and disappear and arise and it feels curiously out of time, even as both players push their instruments into futuristic configurations. As such it doesn't sit neatly in either players' extensive catalogs. . . . Ears Are Filled With Wonder is a coming together of two of the most original voices on their respective instruments and the title reflects the joyful uncovering of a whole new way of listening and relating. Indeed, it might well be the first ever freely improvised electric pedal steel and saxophone duet ever put to tape. Either way it is one of the most startlingly beautiful combinations of players and temperaments to orbit the European jazz scene in years. And this is only the beginning. So hold tight." --Moshe Idel, Ronda, Spain, February 2016 Heather Leigh: pedal steel guitar. Peter Brötzmann: tenor saxophone, bass and B-flat clarinet, tárogató. Recorded November 8, 2015, in Kraków, Poland.

Available as 320k MP3 or 24 bit FLAC Tracklisting: Side A - 20:16 Side B - 18:05   New music from XT (saxophone player Seymour Wright and percussionist Paul Abbott) in the form of an exhilarating, super compressed, reflective re-assembling of a dozen years working together. Re-animating free improvisation with a Chicago house palette, Deorlaf X is made up of frenetic slabs of mutated multiphonics and triggered percussion, suspended in bouts of possessed reflexive quiet. Where the duo’s 2019 release Palina'tufa on Empty Editions focused primarily on a response to the real (and imagined) landscapes of Hong Kong, Deorlaf X is located in Dalston, and specifically at OTO. Wrung through Shuan Crook’s studio over three nights, the recordings dug from XT’s archive aren’t simply ‘duo’ - instead they actively draw on their public and social contexts, involving the influence of audience, engineers and other visiting musicians - Ghédalia Tazartès, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Senyawa, RP Boo and others. “A changing cast of OTO guests, audience and emotions hosted each time in a new London. XT structures sound an ongoing attempt to listen and learn about the rich and transformative affordances of the situations we occupy.” The resulting record puts a pin through a dialogue between Abbott and Wright, between histories, potentials, fact, fiction, ideas, friends, audiences, and spaces. The heavy use of referencing recalls the footwork or house traditions of sampling across all manner of influences; what’s recalled is primarily the structures of jazz - Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker, Anthony Braxton - but also Ann Quin, Clarice Lispector, Anna Halprin. What’s created in recall is a kind of diary, a hyper re-membering - a blisteringly warped kind of future music. --- Recorded by James Dunn, Shaun Crook and Paul Skinner. Assembled, mixed and re-recorded 19, 20 and 21 January, 2020 by XT at Lockdown Studio, Cable Street. Engineer Shaun Crook. Sounds/design by XT. Cover painting Leon Kossoff 'Dalston Junction No.3, June 1973' oil on board, 20.5 x 25 cm. © The Estate of Leon Kossoff. ROKU026

Brother May’s debut album, Aura Type Orange, comes produced with Mica Levi and fuses May’s tendencies for commercial and experimental rap with esoteric production and structures. His debut release reflects on the realisation of inner potential, exploring concepts of growth and evolution while clearly exhibiting May’s own development as a lyricist, producer and creative talent. --- Aura Type Orange is a realisation of coming from without into within. It’s accepting the past blue areas of your life and moving forward into the orange glow of positivity. Also being confident enough to use that energy for the enhancement of others, just as the sun gives energy to the world. I realise that ‘Aura Type Orange’ wouldn’t have happened without this realisation of self. Pure GRATITUDE, for the positive and negative alike. - Brother May --- Written and performed by Brother May All produced by Mica 'Micachu' Levi and Brother May Except 'Backpack Melody' instrumental produced by Coby Sey; Additional production by Micachu 'Reppin' produced by Micachu and Rob 'Mack' McCormack Mixed by Dilip Harris Mastered by Amir Shoat Photography by Amber Felix Artwork by Mr Innu --- Self Released; 2019

For nearly two decades Oliver Peters has been working as Evapori, with releases on Entr'acte, Walter Ulbricht Schallfolien, 1000füssler as well on his own now defunct Antiinformation imprint he used to run with his close collaborator Nicolas Wiese since the early 2000's. Following his highly acclaimed Kárka LP (Walter Ulbricht, 2018), Dia-Logos... marks Evapori's 4th full-length album, on which Peters explores and busts the boundaries between concrete music, sound poetry and contemporary classical music. Involved in the creation of this album were his fellow artists Martin Lau, Peter Schlewinski, Markus Wettstein as well as his longtime co-conspirator Ditterich von Euler Donnersperg. Oliver Peters is living and working north of Hamburg. --- All music written by Oliver Peters 2014-2019 Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi Artwork by Nicolas Wiese. --- Released in an edition of 300 copies Fragment Factory, 2020

Limited 3LP box, gold embossed print on linen, booklet Hermann Nitsch's String Quartet No. 2 in six movements for two violins, viola, and violoncello, was performed by the Viennese Koehne Quartet. Recorded during the exhibition Nitsch. Spaces of Color at the Albertina Museum, Vienna on the May 29th, 2019. The music is played by The Koehne Quartett:  Joanna Lewis - 1. Violine; Anne Harvey-Nagl - 2. Violine; Lena Fankhauser - Viola; Mara Achleitner - Violoncello. Recording and Mastering by Christoph Amann. Hermann Nitsch does not write his music in regular musical notation, but divides the individual movements into time segments of one minute duration and precisely defines sound events, durations, dynamics and actions with words or signs. His instructions are e.g.: deep sound, whole tone cluster, D minor, F major or noise.

The recordings presented here are continuous excerpts taken from the heavyweight, high volume duo sets that topped off each night of their two day residency at Cafe OTO in September 2012. Mats mostly plays a selection of amplified table-top electronics as well as some knotty soprano saxophone at the beginning of the second side whilst Thurston offers a fine example of the kind of liminal intensity he is capable of generating from his guitar complete with the low frequency/octave doubling dive-bombs that have had us replace the speakers in our fender twin twice since he relocated to London last year. The title 'Vi Är Alla Guds Slavar' translates as 'We Are All Slaves Under God' and is taken from the painting by Edward Jarvis that also serves as the three colour screenprint for the LP sleeve. Printing by Patrick Wells at Heavyrock on archival quality card stock. Mixed by Robert Harder. Mastered by Andreas 'LUPO' Lubich @ Calyx. Pressed on high quality 180g vinyl at Record Industry in The Netherlands. First pressing of 1000. Also available as a digital download in MP3, FLAC and AAC formats. "Mats is the most modern of players where the genre tags of jazz, noise, experimental, avant-whatever are finally transcended to a new millennium – where compositional concepts are at once in check with open improvisation and a super-postmodernism becomes what we always wanted: rock & roll!" -Thurston Moore Digital download available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC.Vi Är Alla Guds Slavar is the latest missive from the long-running duo pairing of Mats Gustafsson (The Thing, Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, etc) and Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth, Chelsea Light Moving, Dream/Aktion Unit, etc). Thurston had first come across Mats' playing on a duo disc with Barry Guy and had assumed he was one of those older beardy European improv guys - Remember this was before the internet and everyone knew everything. Their first actual meeting goes back to the early 90s at Blue Tower Records in Stockholm (now Andra Jazz - arguably the greatest jazz record store in the world) on one of Thurston's frequent soundcheck-skipping discaholic binges. The young guy behind the counter was blowing his mind with side after side of crazy rare jazz, test pressings, acetates and more. Running late, he offered Thurston a lift to the gig and en route asked if there was any particular records he was looking for. "There is this sax player - Mats Gustafsson - I'm looking for some of his stuff" "That's me" says the young guy - and there started an intense friendship that has manifested intself in music through their discaholics anonymous trio (with Jim O'Rourke), Gustafsson's large scale HIDROS 3 composition for Sonic Youth and much more besides… You can watch a video interview with Thurston where he tells the story of their first meeting here:

Available as 320k MP3 or 24bit FLAC  Tracklisting: Part I - 12:33Part II - 12:33Recorded live at Cafe OTO in March 2009 during Otomo Yoshihide's first residency here. This was one of only a handful of solo piano performances Otomo has given where he uses the instrument as a control matrix for harmonically rich feedback tones and devastating clusters of complex noise. Vinyl sold out long ago, so pleased to share this as a download finally! "For Otomo, the piano is a big box of potential sound. But since he’s an obsessive sort, he really digs into certain of its corners, and dig he does; when this record doesn’t sound like a gonzo feedback extravaganza, it sounds like he’s cutting through the side of the instrument with a hand-held saw. Whatever the means he used to make the piano sound like that, he’s laid utter waste to the instrument’s conventional sonic associations. There are plenty of people out there making pianos sound like something other than pianos, but I can’t think of anyone else doing it with so much punk spirit and so little reference to any familiar piano vocabulary." - Bill Meyer, Still Single --- Otomo Yoshihide / piano  --- Recorded at Cafe OTO by Shane Brown. Mixed by John Chantler. Mastered by LUPO at Calyx Mastering.

"... The rigor on display puts this music on a footing with Mitchell’s heaviest solo and ensemble dates ... A fitting tribute to the late Tony Marsh as well as an extraordinary meeting between English and American originals, these bare bones Improvisations are among the essential recent works in Roscoe Mitchell’s catalog." –Clifford Allen, Our Point of Departure   Pressing Information First pressing: 630 copies Two colour screen-print sleeve designed by Oliver Pitt and printed on archival quality card stock by Heavyrock Screenprinting. High quality 180g vinyl pressing at Record Industry, The Netherlands. Recorded by James Dunn & John Chantler at Cafe OTO, 9th March 2012. Mixed by John Chantler. Mastered by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Digital Download available as 320k MP3 or 16bit FLAC.Dedicated to the memory of Tony Marsh The recordings on this double LP are taken from the first night of Roscoe Mitchell's inaugural two day residency at Cafe OTO in 2012 and his first time playing with drummer Tony Marsh and double bassist John Edwards. It was one of those nights where the music electrifies the room. Everyone on edge. Everything alive with the possibilities. Although there was much talk after the concert of the group playing together again this would sadly be the first and last time the trio would play. Tony passed away unexpectedly just a few weeks later making this his last documented performance and a fitting tribute to a truly great drummer and percussionist. Roscoe Mitchell is one of the most important saxophonists and composers of the 20th Century. Active since the 1960s as a bandleader, mentor, collaborator and teacher. Mitchell was a founding member of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and the legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago. He has been a pivotal figure in the collective re-imagining of what is possible in jazz, improvisation and beyond combining an instantly recognisable sound on the saxophone with staggering technique (check the lengthy stretch of sustained circular breathing on SIDE C) and an arresting, fractured melodic sensibility. On this date he quickly realised he was in the company of two musicians who could match his vision and create music that is more than the sum of its parts. John Edwards is a vital presence in London's creative music community. A true virtuoso, his staggering range of techniques and boundless musical imagination have redefined the possibility of the double bass and dramatically expanded its role. No one else played or plays drums like Tony Marsh. Richard Williams had previously described Tony's "marvelous ability to erase the boundary between time and no-time" and here, on the jerry-rigged suspended percussion set-up he'd developed (no kick or hi-hats) he opens up a beautifully resonant space, quietly directing the pulse whilst allowing you to fully hear the upper-register harmonic detail and flickering pizzicato of John Edward's bass. You'd be hard pressed to hear anything in the playing that would hint at his shock passing only a month later.
 "Listen closely, take a chance, keep going even if money's tight, and you'll find the real reward – that's why Tony was hip in the most meaningful sense … And he didn't need to play loud, or be loud, to get that intensity. It's like splitting diamonds or something. If you know exactly the right place to make the impact, you don't need to hit anything hard." - Evan Parker 

 (Quoted in John Fordham's Obituary for Marsh)

First time reissue of JP / US free jazz rarity. Old-style Gatefold LP with rare photographs & liner notes by Ed Hazell. The 1970s were Marion Brown’s most searching decade, a period during which he sought to move beyond the free jazz of the previous era and find more personal approaches to structuring improvisation and composition. After leaving New York for Europe in 1967, Brown began reshaping his music into what he described as “a more deliberate kind of music that had more structure to it,” pacing it so that moods and modes could develop over time. Albums such as In Sommerhausen, Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, Geechee Recollections, and Sweet Earth Flying trace this evolution: rhythmic structures moved to the foreground, harmony receded, and composition became a matter of orchestrating interlocking rhythmic parts as one would polyphonic lines. Released in 1976, Awofofora is an overlooked but crucial entry in that sequence. At the time, its use of funk and reggae beats, electric guitars, and grooves drawn from contemporary Black popular music led some to misread it as a jazz-rock detour. In retrospect, it is entirely consistent with Brown’s methodology. As he admired in the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the stimulus comes from within the community. Here Brown filters Afro-Caribbean rhythms and funk through his own sensibility, abstracting their structural qualities rather than adopting surface style. “La Placita,” making its first recorded appearance, layers distinct rhythmic phrases in a manner reminiscent of African drum ensembles, over which Brown and trumpeter Ambrose Jackson spin extended improvisations. The standard “Flamingo” is reshaped through diasporic rhythm and lyrical soloing, while “Pepi’s Tempo” and “Mangoes” harness crisp funk and reggae grooves to generate what Brown called a “manifestation of community” through collective improvisation. Even the overdubbed solo feature “And Then They Danced” reflects his structural thinking, ingeniously re-voicing a duet composition for two alto saxophones performed by one player. This was the only recording by a short-lived band that briefly polarized audiences during festival appearances in 1976. Yet Brown consistently sought unity across change: different sounds, same principles — rhythm as structure, melody as architecture, collective improvisation, and above all, the primacy of tone. Awofofora stands not as a departure, but as a vivid synthesis of the elements he had been refining since the late 1960s, its grooves and golden alto lines conveying a sound drawn, in his words, “from life and from the world of experience.”

First Official Reissue of Conspiracy. NOT TO BE MISSED!! (due to a slight delay at the pressing plant, this release has been put back to the end of July) Jeanne Lee (1939-2000) was an African-American vocalist, poet, composer, improvisor, activist and educator. In her 40 year career she performed with Archie Shep, Marion Brown, Gunter Hampel, Frank Lowe, William Parker, Andrew Cyrille, Anthony Braxton, Ran Blake, Billy Bang, Cecil Taylor, John Cage, Rashsaan Roland Kirk, Pauline Oliveros, Reggie Workman, and many others. "jazz is a music that combines so many opposites...you have to fined that balance, then you have a guideline between freedom and discipline, between rhythm and melody, between body and spirit, between mind and instinct" (Jeanne Lee) This is the first official reissue of "Conspiracy" since its limited release in 1975, it was her first record under her own name as a solo artist. It is a true lost gem, with a unique and beautiful sound. Musician Elaine Mitchener describes "Conspiracy" as "one of greatest free-form albums of the1970s". "i feel the music like a dance, I think it's an important part of the music, it has to be felt like a dance" (Jeanne Lee) --- Jeanne Lee - vocal Gunter Hampel - flute, piano, vibraphone, alto clarinet, bass clarinet Sam Rivers - soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone, flute Steve McCall - drums Alan Praskin - clarinet Perry Robinson - clarinet Jack Gregg - Bass Mark Whitecage - alto clarinet Marty Cook -trombone Recorded in New York, 1974 Originally released in 1975 on "Seeds records" and Jeanne Lee's own "Earth-forms records"

Zulu Guitar's Pioneering Tricksters But for this compilation of rescued songs masterfully restored from rare 78 rpm shellacs, few could imagine the diversely beautiful roots of Zulu Guitar Music emerging during the period 1950 – 1965. Story-tellers and master musicians appropriate outlaw personae, re-purpose country and western, Hawaiian and other styles, to stretch and challenge our notion of “the Zulu guitar”. Twenty-five songs (18 on vinyl) plunge us into the depths of the migrant experience. Translations in the liner notes offer us glimpses of pugnacity, melancholy and heartache, all coloured by the paternalism that circumscribed the singers’ apartheid-dominated lives. The early mbaqanga undertow in many of the songs subverts the wanderlust of Country and Western music into a fugitivity burdened by nostalgia. Something irretrievable has been lost, prompting a blending of ideas and cultures to make sense through thankless acts of musical divination. Inadvertently they have been thrust into the role of the antihero, where outwitting competition for lovers is as important as evading the Black Jacks (apartheid’s municipal cops) and their informants. Considering the politically repressive period that this music emerges from, we can surmise that the specificity in the storytelling went a long way towards evading censure. But even when words are absent, there is a narrative arc suggested by the musical expression. With most of the master tapes wilfully destroyed or lost, modern transcription and restoration techniques from the original shellac discs present the original sound most likely more clearly than ever heard before.

‘Since the 16th century, the Ecuadorian province of Esmeraldas has been home to a unique Afro-Indigenous culture originating in the integration of the Indigenous Chachi and Nigua peoples with African Maroon communities. Juyungo documents significant Esmeraldan artists and bands playing the Afro-Ecuadorian folklore of the province, as well as including some older field recordings. Based mostly on the marimba, whose origins lie partly in the African balafon, partly in Indigenous percussion instruments, the music is laced with call and response chants, ambient insect and bird noise, the filigree finger-styles of the Andean guitar tradition and the panpipes of the mountains. This is resonant insider roots music at its headiest — the mystic revelation of Esmeraldas, gully deep and lustral.’ Francis Gooding, The Wire. The fifth in our series of LPs compiling classic music from Ecuador. Customary Honest Jons runnings: a beautiful gatefold sleeve; superior pressing, with vivid, intimate sound; full-size, sixteen-page booklet, in colour throughout, with detailed, fascinating, bi-lingual notes, and stunning photographs. The music is transfixing, magical; not like anything else. From start to finish, this album is continuously, profoundly immersive; a kind of journeying, trippy meditation about slavery and cultural resistance, identity and mix, places and spaces, futures and pasts. It’s inscrutable to net-surfing, algorithms, Shuffle. But for a taste try the insurgent marimba roller Agua Largo, jet-propelled by Rosa Huila’s rapturous blend of African spiritualist and Christian chant. ‘Healing music,’ Zakia called it on Gilles Peterson’s BBC show recently. And the ravishing pasillo Kasilla Shungulla — ‘calm your heart’ in the Quichua language — a duet between the Peruvian master-guitarist Raúl García Zárate and viola da gamba by Juan Luis Restrepo from Medellin, recorded in a baroque church in Buzbanza, Colombia.

Another killer comp of African gems from Honest Jons

There is no doubting the importance of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Pieces Of A Man” LP. It was a landmark album with its bold, poetic lyrical content allied to progressive and melodic music, and it saw producer Bob Thiele help Gil and his musical partner Brian Jackson paint the picture they needed to get their message across. Thiele put Gil and Brian together with Ron Carter, Hubert Laws and Bernard Purdie, giving them the musical heft they wanted.

Joyful rug-cutters and sweet soul-uplifters from the town of Morogoro, in early-1960s Tanzania: muziki wa dansi, inspired by Cuban 78s, and dance crazes like the twist and cha cha cha, but making them its own. Here is the cream of over a hundred recordings by Salum, mostly for Mzuri Records of Kenya; pretty much lost till now. In an old-school tip-on cover, with lyrics in Swahili and English on the inner sleeve. Lovely stuff.