Week of April 1: This week, music from a Ghanaian musician/film maker, a Belgian singer/model, and a California rocker/NPR fan.
Blitz The Ambassador Is Now Blitz The Film Maker
The Ghanaian-born, New York-based rapper, writer, and bandleader known as Blitz The Ambassador has been remaking hip hop in his own image for the past ten years or so. He’s brought his horn-heavy band several times to our studio for live performances, and has developed a sound that owes as much to Afrobeat pioneers like Fela Kuti as to American rap groups like Public Enemy. His latest effort is a soundtrack, to a film that he wrote and directed himself. It’s called The Burial Of Kojo, which the New York Times just called “a dazzling modern-day fable” set in Ghana. (“A near-virtuoso work,” the review goes on; “and a startling feature directing debut.”) A tale of intergenerational family conflict in a world where the modern and the ancient collide, the film is credited to Blitz Bazawule, which is almost his birth name (he was born Samuel Bazawule). Blitz’s soundtrack also represents a collision of the traditional and the contemporary, the Western and the West African, and a good example is this song called “Fire,” featuring Blitz’s fellow Ghanaian rapper Akan. The song is in both English and Twi, like the film. The rest of the soundtrack includes a Spanish-language song from Pistolero, a remix of an earlier Blitz song done with Seun Kuti, one of Fela’s sons, and some more orchestral film-score type cues, although even the latter are colored by sounds like a traditional flute or percussion.
Tamino Releases Stunning Live Performance with Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood
With a voice that spans three octaves, Tamino seems poised to have a breakout year in 2019. Born Tamino Moharram Fouad, he’s a 22-year old Belgian singer and songwriter of Egyptian and Lebanese descent (his grandfather was the famous Egyptian film star and singer Muharram Fouad, nicknamed “The Sound Of The Nile”). He’s also had some recent success as a model, working with Gisele Bündchen, among others. Tamino has just released a live version of a song called “Indigo Night,” recorded live in Belgium with a band that included Radiohead’s bassist Colin Greenwood. It’s a moody tune, with a harmonic sensibility that might owe a slight debt to Greenwood’s band. Appropriately for a man named after one of the major characters in Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, Tamino has an amazing voice, and in the three-plus minutes of “Indigo Night,” he shows off his plaintive croon, before letting the emotional floodgates open a bit in the middle of the song, and then spiraling into the stratosphere on the wings of an impressive falsetto register.
Tamino’s new EP, Live At Ancienne Belgique, comes out on May 10.
The Return Of Apex Manor, Eight Years Later
Apex Manor is an LA-based project led by Ross Flournoy, who made a single record in 2011 after his previous band, The Broken West, broke up. And he only did that because of a songwriting contest on NPR’s show Monitor Mix. I’m not sure what spurred his long-delayed return, but the sophomore Apex Manor album, Heartbreak City, will be out on May 31, and the first taste of it is the full-throttle single called “Asked & Answered.” The crunchy guitar chords are nothing new, but it’s nice to hear this sort of thing being done so well, and the hazy, elegant vocal harmonies neatly offset the buzzing guitars and the insistent drums. Apparently, the album was recorded with the band playing live in the studio, meaning this is not an edited-together performance from different takes, but a straight shot from its abstract, noisy opening to its satisfyingly ambiguous end.
Jon Batiste Covers Tupac Shakur Sampling Bruce Hornsby
Pianist and leader of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert band Jon Batiste received wide acclaim for his solo album Hollywood Africans last year – an album that showed his range of musical interests and abilities, from Chopin to New Orleans jazz to his own original works. Now he’s released a pair of singles on Spotify: one is a new remix of his song “Don’t Stop,” and the other is his version of “Changes,” the Tupac Shakur song that was based on the earlier hit “The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby and the Range. Batiste knows better than to try to rap like Tupac, so he offers more an incantation, speaking quietly but urgently as he recites Tupac’s lines about racism, mistrust, war, and, at the end, a kind of premonition of his own demise. Batiste’s version won’t make you forget the Tupac original. Quite the opposite: it may remind you of what a fine bit of songwriting “Changes” was.
Loma Couldn’t Wait To Release Their New Song
Loma consists of Jonathan Meiburg, leader of the band Shearwater, and the two members of Cross Record, Emily Cross and Dan Duszynksi. They met when Cross Record was opening for Shearwater a few years back, and in 2018 they released their first album as Loma. That album included the song “Black Willow,” which Brian Eno described in an email earlier this year as “one of those songs that makes you a bit angry because you didn't write it yourself.” (We were emailing because Jonathan had led an expanded version of Shearwater in performing all three of the Bowie/Eno albums of the so-called Berlin Trilogy in a New Sounds Live concert series this past fall.) Anyway, Loma is now deep into the process of recording their follow-up album, but they just had to get this song out there right now. It’s called “Half Silences,” and features a slinky vocal melody over a steady chugging rhythm that leads to some neat little dance moves by the three band members, and apparently enticed a cat to wander through the proceedings.
By the way, if you happened to attend our Shearwater/Bowie Trilogy concerts at Brookfield Place, you’ll recognize the lighting fixtures used in this video…
Debut Album Sounds Like Philly Soul From 50 Years Ago – Because That’s What It Is
On Thursday, the debut album by Philadelphia’s Nat Turner Rebellion was released. It’s called Laugh To Keep From Crying, and it has the sound of the protest soul music of the late 60s/early 70s. This is not because it’s a group of neo-something hipsters evoking a bygone era. It’s because these recordings were actually made in Philadelphia between 1969 and 1972. Nat Turner Rebellion was a vocal quartet that recorded for the popular Philly Groove label; but the band and the label had a falling out and the tapes were never released. In 2005, thousands of master tapes were donated to Drexel University’s Music Industry program, and eventually, someone found the NTR tapes and realized their importance. Now those 14 songs have made their long-delayed debut. This one, “Tribute To A Slave,” features bandleader Joe Jefferson – the only surviving member of the group – calling out to the original Nat Turner, whose ferocious rebellion in 1831 ended with his own hanging. You’ll hear that classic Philly soul sound in the arrangement and the midtempo funk groove.