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And it is all you would hope for. The songs are well chosen, then pared down to their core and aimed at the heart – simple, poignant and spare. From opener, the Carter Family’s Give Me Your Love & I’ll Give You Mine, the tone is set. West’s voice entwines winningly in harmony with the divinely- voiced Dori Freeman – as soul-nourishing as Gram and Emmylou – and the sweet, mel- lifluous electric guitar interplay with Bill Frisell is meltingly lovely. Freeman’s timeless If I Could Make You Mine sees each stepping forward for soaring solo verses over plunky banjo and pedal steel.


The tunes are then rich, mellow-toned mood pieces, allowing for individual instru- mental dexterity to glow, but never showy or unnecessary. Elizabeth Laprelle’s stark harmo- ny vocal on Rainbow Midst Life’s Willows, as affecting as ever, is an even match for the glorious string-ringing instrumental version.


A blueprint for class and style. elidoes.com


Sarah Coxson Damir Imamovic


FELA RANSOME KUTI & HIS KOOLA LOBITOS


Highlife – Jazz And Afro-Soul (1963- 1969) Knitting Factory KFR1134-2


This latest output from Knitting Factory’s Fela reissue campaign is going to delight a lot of enthusiasts. Kuti’s main body of work hasn’t been so hard to find. But these Koola Lobitos recordings – the early days, precursor and lab- oratory to Afrobeat – have been anything but. Now, thanks to the musical archaeology of Mr Toshiya Endo, Professor of Chemistry at Nagoya University, they are. Three albums of seminal Fela reveal the momentous meeting of jazz and highlife. We hear an initially some- what gauche but outstandingly creative force, working his way from dance music to a pow- erful and revolutionary fusion with something deeper and more challenging, his confidence and authority growing from track to track.


The first CD is a collection of singles – good-humoured dance stuff, quite cute, but not the ‘uncommercial’ jazz that Fela wanted to play, even then. Album two is the one that has been released by Stern’s and other labels – six tracks of considerable punch – while the third album is Fela and band playing live at the Afro Spot. It is a statement, an announce- ment of a birth. You can sense the exhilara- tion. The band is up for it. Also you can hear some pretty rough sax work from our hero; he always was a better man on trumpet. But as a band leader he was truly inspirational, and you can hear it here.


www.knittingfactoryrecords.com Rick Sanders


DAMIR IMAMOVIĆ’S SEVDAH TAKHT Dvojka Glitterbeat GBCD033


Damir Imamovi´c has always taken exception to the codi- fying of his beloved sevdah (follow ing the ‘golden age’ of sevdah, half a century ago) and the consequent arbitrary limiting of musical possibilities, and imposition of a nationalist sheen.


So this is serious. Lijepi Meho is a bucolic but deadly violin-led dance into a suddenly locked space. Through the creeping drama and warning, and beyond language, we can hear the lyricism and the storytelling in the music and despairing vocals. When it returns, the violin is darker, deeper, grave. And we are left in that seriousness, the tension unresolved.


Sarajevo, an Imamovi´c original, is his unearthing of an ‘other Sarajevo’, an exami- nation of the nonconformists with whom he identifies in his home city. The song maintains that the city’s children “will be taught with venom and hate, dreaming about a distant, happy fate, [while] at home they will fear their shadow”, disturbing, beneath smooth and seductive real soul singing. Imamovi´c sings profoundly primal sevdah. And it is noted that the word derives from the Turkish word for love, ‘sevda’; which is in turn derived from the Arabic word for black bile, ‘sawda’. The combination of love and black bile may well explain everything. And there is an immediate clarity in the links between classical and contemporary material, and with fado (‘sawda’ and ‘saudade’).


His vision is shared by Nenad Kovaˇ c, aci´


Croatian percussionist who has studied the multifaceted rhythms of both the Balkans and West Africa; by Ivan Mihajlovi´c, from Ser- bia, a bass player of extraordinary daring and originality, who plays a steadily cutting groove; and by Ivana Duri´c, who displays a smoothly dangerous and convoluting set of violin tunes around these darkest of songs. Imamovi´c, meanwhile, enjoys freedom with the tambur, unconstrained by the done thing and seeking out every possible sound to form these deliberate ecstasies of lament.


So this is an international sevdah album in its base notes and grace notes and lyrical thinking. It mines a collection of songs cen- turies-lost in a German library, revives songs collected in Bosnia between the two World Wars, and composes anew, accompanied by solid black bass tones. “Is it day yet?” Imamovi´c asks, in conclusion. “No,” he answers.


www.glitterbeat.com John Pheby


PETE MORTON WITH FULL HOUSE Game Of Life Fellside FECD271


Weird how Pete Morton always seems to dis- appear under the radar. Consistently one of Britain’s finest songwriters over the last three decades or so, he never seems to be invited on those multi-artist gigs or themed song- writing retreats or even get mentioned in despatches whenever it’s awards time.


An independent spirit, an old-school troubadour if you like, he continues his own merry niche and, following hard on the heels of his excellent last album The Land Of Time, he teams up with Chester band Full House to


re-visit some of his own’ greatest hits’. Sensi- tive and not remotely overbearing, they bring plenty of tea and sympathy to lovely old songs like Another Train, Disobedience (“Ghandi taught us disobedience, so let’s not let him down…”), Shores Of Italy, Listening To My Boots, The Luckiest Man and the festi- val anthem to end them all, When We Sing Together. The vocal harmonies and fiddle playing of Clare Smith merit particular praise, offering temperate balance to the torrent of words in which Morton habitually deals.


You can certainly question the over-sim-


plification of Two Brothers, reducing the Palestinian question to a bad-tempered spat between two little boys is uncomfortable; but elsewhere the weight of wit, words and scatter-gun delivery on tracks like Battle Of Trafalgar, Sock On The Line and Seven Billion Eccentrics is irresistible.


“Nothing was ever planned,” Morton tells us in his sleeve notes. “I played the game to try and change the world but everything was always a gamble from the start in the hope that the words and tunes could give a message worth telling.” Always, Pete, always.


www.fellside.com Colin Irwin VARIOUS ARTISTS


Zydeco – Black Creole French Music and Blues 1929-1972 Frémeaux & Associés FA 5616


This two-CD release from prolific and eclectic French label Frémeaux & Associés contains much which is available elsewhere, but is compiled here in a well thought-out, roughly chronological order.


The album opens with the first commer- cial recordings from superb accordeonist Amedé Ardoin, with Dennis McGee on fiddle, including the astonishing One Step d’Oberlin – an object lesson in improvised one-chord hypnotic blues, and two later solo tracks that have been rather nicely sonically restored.


Oakdale Carriere’s Catin, Prie Donc Pour


Ton Nègre, recorded by John Lomax in Ango- la State Penitentiary in 1934 is another high- light. His strong singing and dextrous accordeon playing make you wonder if he would have been commercially recorded if he hadn’t been in prison.


Several cuts recorded at beer joints and parties in Houston and Lafayette by Chris Strachwitz in the early ’60s are also included, and document the music moving from a rural to a more urban setting with the likes of Willie Green, Paul McZiel and Albert Cheva- lier. Songs like Allons A Lafayette and Zydeco Sont Pas Salés, still popular dance hall favourites today, feel so vital and intense played with just accordeon and rub-board, giving an idea of what was to come as the music evolved.


Disc One finishes with four tracks from Fremont and Bee Fontenot, brothers record- ed at home in 1972 playing spellbinding old French dances and bluesy songs learned early in the century which testify to old forms of Afro-Louisianan expression never commer- cially recorded.


Disc Two deals mainly with the develop- ment of Zydeco into a more urban style, through early studio recordings of Clarence Garlow, Boozoo Chavis and of course Clifton Chenier. Boozoo’s signature song Paper In My Shoe features a pick-up band with a some- what entertaining guitar chord all the way through. Some also say that Boozoo was so drunk at one of his early sessions that he had to be strapped to a chair as he played. The music still stands though, particularly his great Forty One Days. The first commercial Zydeco record is here too, featuring Lightnin’ Hopkins on the organ!


Photo: Amer Kapetanovic


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