Tabla de contenidos para July 2023 en MOJO

MOJO welcomes correspondence for publication. Write to us at: MOJO, Bauer Media Publishing, The Lantern, 75 Hampstead Road, London, NW1 2PL. E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk THERE’S A NICE STORY THE GUITARIST Blake Mills shared with MOJO last year. On a Thursday in July, just before the Newport Folk Festival, he received a text confirming the miracle gig he’d been booked for. “We get a picture of them all buckled up on a plane, including Joni,” Mills remembered. “I thought, Oh my god, this is actually happening.” What happened is now part of musical history: Joni Mitchell’s return to the stage, on a golden throne, at the heart of Newport 2022’s Joni Jam. A communal celebration of single-minded genius, it’s been preserved as a forthcoming live album, and is about to be…

KASSA OVERALL can pinpoint the exact moment he gambled on a solo career. “In January 2017 I stopped drinking and booked some time at Strange Weather Studios,” says the 40-year-old from his garden shed in Seattle, a space rammed with keyboards, drums and recording ephemera. “I wanted to make an album that mixed my jazz background with my production and hip-hop background. I’d never mixed the worlds together – it was almost like my professional thing and my just-for-fun thing. After that session I knew I had something.” The son of an ethnomusicologist mother and saxophonist father, by his teens Overall was drumming professionally at jazz shows, expressing his hip-hop skills on the side by rapping over OutKast instrumentals. After studying jazz drums and music theory at Oberlin Conservatory under…

IT’S A HOT, DRY EVENING OUTSIDE A NIGHTCLUB ON ZAMBIA’S COPPERBELT, SOME TIME in 1974. A hand-decorated truck pulls up and six lanky hippies unfold themselves from its dark interior. Dressed in flares and cheesecloth shirts, their hair unkempt, the sextet distinguish themselves from the curious onlookers milling around by their oversized floppy hats and an air of stoned mischief-making. “Who are you?” asks a bold teen. One of the strangers turns, grinning. “We are The Witch,” he roars, before pointing at the acronymic mission statement painted in large letters on the side of their tour bus, “and We Intend To Cause Havoc!” As a long-awaited new LP by WITCH nears release, Emmanuel ‘Jagari’ Chanda is looking back on heady days when the Zamrock sound his group pioneered exploded from…

Paul Simon ★★★★ Seven Psalms OWL/LEGACY. CD/DL/LP IN A 1972 Rolling Stone cover story – his first as a solo artist – Paul Simon recalled an exchange with his then-boss at Columbia Records, Clive Davis, who warned the singer that whatever success he enjoyed on his own, it would never beat the 1960s hits and glory of his million-selling duo with Art Garfunkel. “How do you know what I’ll do?” Simon countered. “I don’t even know what I’m gonna do in the next decade of my life. It could be maybe my greatest time of work. Maybe I’m finished. Maybe I’m not gonna do my thing until I’m 50.” Simon, who turns 82 in October, was more right – and off in his maths – than he knew. One of…

Alex LoRe & Weirdear ★★★★ Evening Will Find Itself WHIRLWIND. CD/DL/LP Outside-the-box alto saxophonist’s second quartet LP blurs the lines between composition and improvisation. After making his mark with Lucas Pino, Marta Sanchez and his Kind Folk collective, LoRe’s probing, self-assured style shines on his most philosophical outing. Opener Stripes sets out its stall, Glenn Zaleski’s piano phrase offset by its left-hand counterpart before LoRe’s sax embarks on unexpected journeys, while Face Unseen explores a mournful melody with more twists than an Agatha Christie over a sparser, more contained backing. Written after nearly losing his father to Covid-19, Underground And Back’s wide intervals and slippery harmonies nod closely to LoRe’s mentor Bunky Green. Elsewhere, traces of Ambrose Akinmusire (Fauxlosophy) and Paul Motian (Silent Ship) poke through. Throughout, Weirdear flirt with…

Calexico ★★★★ Feast Of Wire CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP THE TARAHUMARA, a group of indigenous people in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, are renowned for their prodigious ability to run long distances. It’s a skill that gives them a remarkable power to hunt down birds and deer, exhausting their prey long before their own legs tired of the chase. Yet there are some things that they haven’t been able to outpace – not least the opium trade that has crept across their land, the cartels using them to transport their goods, turning them into grimly literal drug runners. Singer and multi-instrumentalist Joey Burns, one half of Calexico’s core duo along with drummer John Convertino, was thinking of the Tarahumara when he was writing Quattro (World Drifts In), a track from 2003’s…

TO MAKE headway in the predominantly white music business of Philadelphia – having been effectively excluded from outlets like the Cameo-Parkway label (home of The Twist and other dancecraze smashes) – Kenny Gamble & Leon Huff had to create their own business, setting up labels Neptune and Gamble, finding studio Sigma Sound and its brilliant engineer Joe Tarsia, and hiring a team of gifted arrangers, Thom Bell, Bobby Martin, Lenny Pakula, plus musicians who could cut hits with efficient regularity. It took years to perfect – they’d struggled partly because they weren’t natural businessmen, simply wanting to write and record music – but suddenly fell into place when, in 1968, they mined gold on Gamble with the sixth single by their first signings, The Intruders’ Cowboys To Girls, going Number…

Deliver Me From Nowhere ★★★★ Warren Zanes PENGUIN/RANDOM HOUSE. £23 ACCORDING TO himself, Bruce Springsteen is “a conceptual optimist yet a personal pessimist”. The duality has defined his entire career, and more often than not the light has prevailed. Only a supreme conceptual optimist could turn a song about depression into a glitter ball-friendly hit single. Yet there would have been no Dancing In The Dark without the preceding Nebraska, the one record where Bruce Springsteen admitted no light whatsoever. “I wanted to know where Nebraska came from, [and] what it led to,” declares author Warren Zanes. In BruceWorld, Nebraska is both Holy Grail and Death Star, still resolutely elusive even after 40 years, an album recorded alone in a bedroom onto a cassette, its skeletal, other worldly songs thwarting…

JUNE 7 Just eight months earlier he’d declared on 45, “My name is Prince and I am funky.” A Number 7 hit, it came from an LP that went straight into the UK charts at Number 1. Curiously, no one knew quite how to name it, its title being an unpronounceable symbol featuring the male and female signs combined, seemingly enhanced with a trumpet. The symbol also, it was said, echoed the alchemical sign for soapstone. There was transformation in the air. MTV had reported Prince was to release a new EP called Papa on his 35th birthday this June 7. Instead he announced that he would no longer go by his long-standing name. From now on he was . Afloppy disc was duly mailed out from his Paisley Park…

1 SBT 13th St. #2 Sarabeth Tucek’s return to action as SBT, 11 years after her last album, is one of the low-key musical events of 2023 thus far. On this highlight of her Joan Of All LP, the former Bill Callahan collaborator hymns her old New York neighbourhood – and, implicitly, Patti Smith and the Velvets too. Written by Sarabeth Tucek. Published by Darkthing Music, ASCAP and ©2022. From double A-side single The Gift/13th St. #2 (Ocean Omen) & also an alternate version of a track from the double LP Joan Of All (Ocean Omen) 2 MEG BAIRD Cross Bay Meg Baird has been perfecting her filigreed take on acid-folk since singing with Espers in the early 2000s (you might also recognise her from heavier psych types Heron Oblivion).…

“DANCEABLE FOR a group of northern Minnesota folk,” is how Damien – a band featuring Low’s Alan Sparhawk on guitar, his son Cyrus on bass, Duluth musician Marc Gartman on vocals and songwriting duties and Owen Mahon on drums – wryly advertised a show last summer. “We’re in dire need of dance here,” explains Sparhawk from Duluth. “There’s still snow on the ground. It’s brutal here. And I mean, who doesn’t secretly love the idea of invoking someone to dance?” Named by Sparhawk after the title of their first The Omen-influenced single, Damien have coalesced over the past 18 months around the friendship between Sparhawk and Gartman. They first met when Gartman came to Minnesota to make 2004’s Closer Than That, a documentary about Low, the band Sparhawk formed with…

ANGELINE MORRISON knew she was on to something when, in the months before the release of her pioneering collection The Sorrow Songs, she sang Slave No More at her local folk club in Cornwall. “People joined in the chorus,” she tells MOJO as she rests her back against the heater at home. “And afterwards somebody came up to me and said, ‘What was that traditional song about the black man who’s buried with his former master?’ And I said, Well, I have to tell you that wasn’t a traditional song.” One of the most feted ‘folk’ releases of the last decade, subtitled Folk Songs Of The Black British Experience, The Sorrow Songs is a masterful piece of wish-fulfilment, Morrison short-circuiting the folk process to tell the true stories of Britain’s…

Fatoumata Diawara ★★★★ London KO WAGRAM. CD/DL/LP “WHEN YOU know where your roots are, you know where you are,” Diawara told MOJO in 2018, in advance of her second album, Fenfo – her discography is extensive, but London KO is only the third album to feature her name front, centre and solo. “You can go to different countries, visit different cultures, but you have to know where your roots are.” Bamako may be a long way from a recording studio in the shadow of London’s Westway, then, but it’s never been more obvious that the Malian singer knows exactly where she is. A brief recap: Diawara came to our attention as a stage-stealing backing singer/dancer with Oumou Sangaré but had a histor y in street theatre and film; her debut…

Jim Ghedi & Toby Hay ★★★★ Jim Ghedi & Toby Hay TOPIC. CD/DL/LP Fine second outing from UK primitive guitar power couple. The handsome, windswept Poldark of modern folk, Sheffield’s Jim Ghedi mixes traditional song, righteous polemic and ruminative instrumental pieces while ‘giving’ revival hunk Barry Dransfield. 2021’s excellent In The Furrows Of Common Place was fated to come into the world at around the same time as the Delta variant, but if Covid put careers on hold, it gave Ghedi time to make a second collaborative piece with Welsh guitarist Toby Hay, following 2018’s The Hawksworth Grove Sessions. With Ghedi on six strings and Hay on 12, this new outing sidesteps Bert Jansch-ish fingerbusters for elegant mood pieces – the twinkly Moss Flower, ersatz reel Bog Cotton Jig and…

Bob Dylan ★★★★ Shadow Kingdom COLUMBIA/LEGACY. CD/DL/LP AS THE credits rolled at the end of Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom livestream on July 18, 2021, thanks were given to a venue called the Bon Bon Club in Marseille – aplace, Dylanologists swiftly deduced, that had never existed. In 1962, however, a Bon Bon “supper club” in Philadelphia was the subject of a court case with Pat Lynn Hackett, a folk singer, accusing the owners of racketeering. Hackett’s right leg had to be amputated after Eddie Nace, the Bon Bon Club operator, pushed her down the staircase. Her error, according to the New York Daily News, was being “sympathetic about a customer who had been relieved of $700 by a B-girl”. A real-life noir thriller from the dawn of Dylan’s career. A…

What The Hell Happened To Blood, Sweat & Tears? ★★★★ Dir: John Scheinfeld JESSE JAMES FILMS/CREWNECK PRODUCTIONS. C/ST “The war of un-hip attrition cost them dearly.” DID NIXON’S State Department cause Blood, Sweat & Tears to bleed out prematurely? That’s the implicit premise of What The Hell Happened To Blood, Sweat & Tears?, John Scheinfeld’s fascinating investigation about the sudden implosion of what was, at least momentarily, the United States’ most popular rock band. For half a century, their seven-show trek as rock’n’roll diplomats through three Eastern Bloc strongholds during the summer of 1970 was seen as a spectacular sell-out blunder, the nonet’s mighty horns and singer David Clayton-Thomas’s ceaseless swagger brandished as a megaphone of the state. But their continued existence, Scheinfeld’s Cold War excavation suggests, was simply a…

I’ve always liked The Yardbirds’ logo. I remember going to see them in the ’60s and seeing it on Jim McCarty’s bass drum. One thing I’ve always wondered is, are they the first band to have their own logo? Rick Burton, via e-mail MOJO says: Rick, you may well be right. The distinctive, loopy Yardbirds logo – suitable for being reproduced on any nearby surface by the artful fan – was designed in 1963 by the band’s managerial assistant and live compère Hamish Grimes (who was also the man Eric Clapton believes graffiti’d the words ‘Clapton Is God’ around London in the mid-’60s). Other big groups of the moment had logos: think The Kinks’ ‘Kinky Boots’ visual created by Mick Avory’s father in 1964, The Who’s ‘vertical arrow’ insignia designed…

EVER SINCE bassist Dave Allen left Gang Of Four in 1980, Leeds’ incendiary punk-funk agitators have endured stages of birth, death and rebirth. The saga continues with news of a UK tour in October 2023, having previously toured the US in March ’22. But this is not the Gang Of Four headed by guitarist Andy Gill since 2012, but his fellow founders Jon King (vocals) and Hugo Burnham (drums) taking back control after Gill’s untimely death in 2020. They’re joined by Sara Lee – Gang bassist from 1981 to 1984 – and guitarist David Pajo (Slint, Zwan, Interpol). “Andy’s are really big boots to fill,” avers King. “But David is playing with great reverence and attention to detail. And since Dave [Allen] didn’t want to tour, Sara was the obvious…

I was 13, living in San Fernando Valley. I’d heard the Me Myself And I single, and I bought the cassette of 3 Feet High And Rising the week it came out at the local SamGoody on Van Nuys Boulevard. Just from the opening bars, I was just in love with it. In my room I had a little pink tape player, and I’d listen to the cassette over and over and look at the artwork, and it completely changed me. It made me want to be a poet, and introduced me to so many artists through the samples. The first time I heard George Clinton, Steely Dan, The Animals, Johnny Cash, all of those moments came through this record. There’s a French sample which prepped me for getting into…

Turn on! For the month’s best rock romance, jazz and ghost songs. 1 P.J. HARVEY A CHILD’S QUESTION, AUGUST The first taste of a new LP, a static reverberation of guitar and thudding tom-toms ground a haunting, delicate melody, with olde worlde imagery of rooks and corn spinning an ancient, ghostly love song. Find it: streaming services 2 GARTH HUDSON SOPHISTICATED LADY The Band’s keyboard genius plays a Duke Ellington tune at a private show in upstate New York. Not a dry eye in the house. Find it: Twitter 3 ARTHUR RUSSELL THE BOY WITH A SMILE An etheric cello-wobbler from upcoming set Picture Of Bunny Rabbit, which collects unreleased World Of Echo-period material. Find it: BandCamp 4 GRIAN CHATTEN THE SCORE Fontaines D.C.’s frontman Grian Chatten opens with…

Julian Cope: The first time we did Top Of The Pops [for Reward, on February 19, 1981] it was everything we’d ever dreamed of since we were kids. And we had to take acid on Top Of The Pops, and be in the middle of a trip, because who the fuck wants to be on Top Of The Pops? Fuck that! But we desperately wanted to be on it. That’s the great duality of human beings, isn’t it? David Balfe: I had a very complicated relationship with The Teardrop Explodes. I started out as the [Zoo] record label head with Bill Drummond, then I arranged gigs, I was the manager, and eventually stepped in as keyboard player. We’d got a guy called Alan Gill in on guitar, and one day…

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds ★★★★ Council Skies SOUR MASH. CD/DL/LP FOR A GOOD while now, Noel Gallagher seems to have been keen to leave his acoustic guitar locked in its case. Arguably the highlight of his last album, 2017’s Who Built The Moon?, was strummy ballad Dead In The Water, recorded live in a Dublin radio studio and hidden away as a bonus track, like a slightly shameful secret, after his experiments with glammy stomp and trip-hop. Gallagher’s subsequent three EPs released between 2019-20 seemed to reinforce the point that he was determined to push back against what he was best at. The disco rock moves of Black Star Dancing and This Is The Place were a bit like someone deciding to put on a Hawaiian shirt that didn’t…

Bobby Lee ★★★★ Endless Skyways TOMPKINS SQUARE. DL/LP/MC BOBBY LEE’s riveting new album unfolds like a geographic guessing game – that is, exactly what part of the American South does the guitarist call home, at least right now? For 42 minutes, Lee seems to zig, zag, and zip across the faded blacktop byways of the United States’ fabled musical Eden, stopping only when the jam looks ripe. Think of him as a modern Lomax descendant, showing up in tiny towns not to record the locals but instead to riff with them on the porch. On the ner vy handclap gambit Reds For A Blue Planet, for instance, Lee appears to crawl from the same Mississippi mud as Fred McDowell or the Dickinson boys who started the Allstars. But the impression…

Various ★★★★ Yo! Boombox: Early Independent Hip Hop, Electro And Disco Rap 1979-83 SOUL JAZZ. CD/DL/LP THE HIP-HOP floodgates truly opened after Rapper’s Delight. The untamed rhyming bliss of Sugarhill Gang’s 15-minute anthem democratised a genre already over half a decade old, but with no cultural imprint beyond the South Bronx block parties that spawned it. As a string of indie labels sprung up in Harlem, the majors were the only conspicuous party poopers, dismissing hip-hop as the next fly-by-night black craze. As wrong as they were, their disinterest provided a fertile proving ground. Just as Sugarhill’s Sylvia Robinson employed musicians to replay a break from Chic’s Good Times to let her MCs loose, the surge of goodtimes jams that followed fast in its wake invariably built upon a popular…

“Jarrett transforms the technically complex into the emotionally resonant.” TAKE A QUICK glance at the 10 records opposite and one best-seller will be noticeable by its absence. Recorded at the Cologne Opera House on 24 January, 1975, Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert is the best-selling solo album in jazz histor y with sales now well over 4 million. It’s a record of undeniable hypnotic beauty and the story of its creation, concerning an exhausted and sleep-deprived Jarrett working with an imperfectly tuned Bösendorfer piano, yet summoning glistening meditative melodies and urgent patterns of repetition out of such adversity, only adds to the record’s myth and allure. But what this sui generis recording has arguably never been is a gateway into Jarrett’s back catalogue. You buy The Köln Concert (and statistically…

My Lord, What A Livin’ Harry Belafonte, who used the stage to help reshape his country, left us on April 25. IN FEBRUARY 1968, Harry Belafonte stepped in front of the camera and into the United States’ tumultuous breach. Johnny Carson asked Belafonte to take a turn as guest host for his popular Tonight Show, but the singer, actor, and activist was not content with being merely late-night’s first black host. His interviewees, he demanded, needed to be integrated, too, a rarity in those days of the seemingly immortal Jim Crow. Belafonte succeeded, cajoling longtime confidant Martin Luther King Jr. into cracking a joke, marvelling at Buffy Sainte-Marie, and gabbing with the likes of Dionne Warwick and Sidney Poitier. These were the heady days just after the Tet Offensive, Richard…

HELLO AUTUMN 1968 Brian [May, guitar] and me had played in [band] 1984 when we were at [Hampton] school, and when we left we decided we wanted to carry on and be a heavy rock band, with harmonies. I was at Ealing Art College, where I met Freddie [Bulsara, AKA Mercury], and Brian was at Imperial College. We advertised on the Imperial College notice board for a drummer, and who should turn up but Roger [Taylor], who was at dental college. It was less of a serious audition, just a knockabout really, in the basement of a student friend’s flat in Addison Gardens in Shepherd’s Bush. Old threadbare Persian carpets, magnolia walls. It was the era of Portobello Road and bohemian fashion – hair down our backs, crushed velvet flares,…