BCUC - WOMEX 23 Artist Award

First published in the WOMEX – World Music Expo 2023 delegate guide.



Based in Soweto, Johannesburg, Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness (BCUC for short) don’t limit themselves to the music of any single culture group. They epitomise the plurality of South Africa: their music reflects all the people around them, and they sing in all eleven of the country’s official languages. And from that, they make a big, big sound. Drums, percussion, bass guitar, whistles, horns and vocals – it all combines into a powerful driving force that becomes unstoppable. Their explosive live energy takes influence from hip-hop, rock, funk, gospel and Afrobeat, but also indigenous spiritual practices and magic. It’s no wonder they’re firm festival favourites across the globe.

With their all-embracing musical philosophy, BCUC are inherently political. Their songs are shot through with political messages and lessons. They hold high their values and social responsibilities, while being unafraid to criticise the wrongs around them. Like their music, their political perspective is uniquely South African while sharing a solidarity that encompasses the African continent and world as a whole. Even their organisation is utopian – the seven-piece collective is leaderless, each member contributing equally to the passion of the music.

BCUC represent the roots, trunk and branches of South African traditional music. This is cultural preservation in a way that isn’t frozen in time like a museum, but in a way that is living and breathing and growing and dancing. For their dedication to their music, their people and their country; for embodying the strength, unity and progress of their band name; and for their sheer ability to raise any roof, it is with pleasure that BCUC are the recipients of the WOMEX 23 Artist Award.


Photo: BCUC perform at WOMEX 23, by Jacob Crawfurd

On The Move - WOMEX 23 Professional Excellence Award

First published in the WOMEX – World Music Expo 2023 delegate guide.



The world music scene is built on a foundation of international cultural and artistic mobility. Our industry simply could not exist without thousands of artists and arts professionals navigating the channels of international travel and expansion, but those channels are many, complex, confusing and ever-changing. On The Move has spent the last 21 years helping artists along those channels, and opening up the artistic world in the process.

On The Move is a network and online platform that connects cultural workers of all disciplines with support, information and avenues to international mobility. This takes many forms: extensive guides to institutions and opportunities in territories across the world; global listings of open project calls; mentoring schemes; data-driven research and analysis; and events, including their annual forum. No single way of working is appropriate for all, and the key is in the recognition that mobility exists in many forms – including funding, fellowships, residencies, training and more.

Importantly, all of these resources are free to access and regularly updated to keep atop the latest developments. The heart of On The Move’s mission is the democratisation of international art: by sharing knowledge and tools, it ensures that arts do not become the sole reserve of the powerful and privileged. By giving more artists access to international mobility, the global arts community becomes fairer, more transparent and more sustainable. It also allows for specific help for artists who are disadvantaged within wider cultural spheres, such as disabled, minority ethnic or refugee artists.

For the world music scene and the wider arts ecosystem, mobility is not a luxury, but a necessity. In their commitment to providing this invaluable resource for artists and cultural professionals, On The Move opens the world to artists of all stripes. For this reason, we are delighted that On The Move is the recipient of the WOMEX 23 Award for Professional Excellence.

Nihiloxica - Source of Denial

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 192, November 2023.

Nihiloxica
Source of Denial
Crammed Discs (40 mins)

Nihiloxica were one of the highlights of this year’s WOMAD festival, after their scheduled appearance in 2022 was stymied by visa problems. The life of a band isn’t the simplest when half of you are based in Uganda and the other half are based in the UK. These experiences have fed directly into the overarching theme of the group’s second full-length album: it is a stinging critique of the UK’s draconian visa and immigration process.

The pounding Bugandan polyrhythms of the engalabi, namunjoloba and empuunyi drums meet the abrasive, overdriven synths of industrial trance. Extreme metal influence is heard throughout, from harsh noisescapes to doom-laden detuned bass-synth chugs. Across the whole album, computer-generated voices stand in for the monolithic state machine. It all serves to communicate the evil banality of bureaucracy, not just impersonal but anti-personal, reducing people’s rich lives and complex stories to a phone-tree, where injustices are in-baked as part of a system meticulously rigged to avoid even the merest suggestion of accountability. It sounds oppressive, because it is; it feels dystopian because it is – the reality of anyone without a powerful passport.

It’s heavy stuff, and rightly so. It is political protest, yes, but make no mistake, this is dance music. And you will dance: movement is forced from you by the sheer power of aggressive musical passion. Source of Denial is an impactful album, and its music is absolutely brilliant.

Chief Adjuah - Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 192, November 2023.

Chief Adjuah
Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning
Ropeadope (56 mins)

Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott) has foregone his usual jazz trumpet, relying instead on his amazing voice and invented instruments to explore his heritage as an Afro-New Orleanian, back through the Afro-Indigenous Maroons and to the ultimate roots, in Africa.

This is an album of two shades, and two complementary vibes. Some of the songs are sounded with voice and percussion only, the most reflective of the traditional Afro-New Orleanian music. These songs resonate with Adjuah’s pride in heritage and lineage, filled with remembrance and joyous reverence of the strength of the elders who came before. Other songs are darker and funkier, their sound based around Chief Adjuah’s Bow, an instrument of his own design that resembles a minimalist electric kora or kamalengoni. These tracks are heavier, channelling centuries of righteous anger against still on-going subjugation. The epitome of these is the title track and centrepiece of the album, a 15-minute Gil Scott-Heron-like poetic meditation on Black liberation and white supremacy.

Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning is a powerful album of African music, culture, language and religion, filtered through generations of ancestral memory, obscured and revived over and over into something that could only come from 21st century New Orleans.

Sawa Sawa - Sawa Sawa

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 192, November 2023.

Sawa Sawa
Sawa Sawa
Jinn Records (33 mins)

Sawa Sawa (‘All Together’ in Sudanese Arabic) is a project that unites artists from across Sudan to make a statement for peace and togetherness within the country. This debut release spreads that message as a multi-discipline, multimedia concept album made up of eight artworks, eight short stories and eight pieces of music, all specially commissioned from a diverse range of artists.

The musical side of things takes in almost as many stylistic influences as performers – of whom there are 19. The main sounds are Afro soul, reggae and lightly funky rock, with Sudanese and pan-African scales, rhythms and timbres sprinkled throughout. Unfortunately, it’s all a bit thin. The reggae is bland, the soul feels obvious and the rock guitar solos are often cheesy. Perhaps it’s a symptom of over-fusion. Sudanese music can be so exciting and spicy! It’s a shame that this album doesn’t showcase that to its fullest.

But really, that’s all less important than the project’s noble goal of unity and celebration, made all the more poignant by the recent conflict in Sudan. Millions of civilians have been displaced by the war, including members of the Sawa Sawa family. All credit to those involved in this worthy endeavour – the positive, human impact of art should always be celebrated.

Unlocking Our Hidden Collections: Sue Steward and Edmundo Ros

First published on the British Library Sound and Vision blog.



The Unlocking Our Hidden Collections initiative is the British Library challenging itself. With over 170 million items in the Library’s collections and an average of over 8,000 new items added every day, it is impossible to keep up – processing and cataloguing backlogs mean that there are so many treasures that are ‘hidden’ from view and unable to be searched in any of the Library’s catalogues. Unlocking Our Hidden Collections is a concerted effort to bring some of these to light, by targeting specific collections across the Library’s many curatorial areas for detailed cataloguing where previously there was none at all. Collections in this initiative include manuscripts from the medieval to contemporary periods, charters, censuses, photographs, correspondences and music manuscripts. They also include recordings from the British Library sound archive. The project that I work on within Unlocking Our Hidden Collections is entitled ‘Rare and Unpublished World and Traditional Music’, which catalogues and ultimately makes publically available collections of sound recordings that would otherwise remain obscure.

As a cataloguer in this process, I have the absolute pleasure of listening to wonderful recordings of some of the most interesting musical cultures in the world, researching their context and diving into the recordists’ own experiences through their documentation and other material. So far, I’ve worked with collections of recorded music from Thailand, Malaysia, India, Nepal and Kenya from the 1960s to the 2000s, but today I want to highlight one specific collection, the Sue Steward Collection (C1984 in our catalogues).

To read the full blog post and to read more about Sue Steward's wonderful collection and her recordings of Edmundo Ros (that him in the photo up at the top), head over to the British Library Sound and Vision blog.


Photo: Edmundo Ros in Amsterdam, 1957, by Harry Pot.

Jazz Fusion Review Round-Up

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 191, October 2023.

Nowadays, the line separating jazz from instrumental hip-hop can be incredibly fine, given the amount of influence that has passed back and forth over the past 50 years. Budapest-based trio Jazzbois embrace this permeability with their third album, Higher Dimension Waiting Room (Blunt Shelter Records, 34 mins). Here, the hip-hop and jazz are completely entwined, from the dreamy, lo-fi synths and fluttery piano to the broken beats and funky bass. It’s light and fun with a sci-fi edge, chilled-out but with enough groove to keep you dancing. Special props to Tamás Czirják, whose drumming consistently brings the fireworks.

Production duo Abderraouf B. Grissa & Dan Drohan also sail the jazz-hip-hop continuum with their first collaboration RBGxDD (Uno Loop, 41 mins). Together they make a dance-oriented jazz that isn’t afraid of venturing ‘out there’. Live instruments and samples merge seamlessly, guiding us through different zones – from rolling blues grooves to dubwise spacescapes to Latin psychedelia to a sound effects record – without ever losing the carefully-curated unifying vibe based on those two home styles. This musical journey hits more like an exploratory mixtape than your usual jazz album, and is none the worse for it.

Another album that hops between genres at will is the reissue of Ambiance II Fusion’s 1985 record Come Touch Tomorrow (Freestyle Records, 39 mins). The ensemble revolves around Nigerian-born saxophonist Daoud Abubakar Balewa, whose classic instrumental soul-funk absolutely oozes 80s production, with its heavy reverb, gated snares and ultra-smooth sax. Strangely enough, this album sounds like tracks from several different albums stitched together. Some tracks are live (or live-sounding) and others are studio recordings; some tracks seem to bear little stylistic resemblance to those around them – sometimes there’s reggae, or bossa, or even pure synthwave with no saxophone to be heard. It’s as if the album itself is a little unsure of what it wants to be.

New York-based Greek vibraphonist, electronicist and drummer Christos Rafalides makes an ode to lockdown in Home (Emarel Music, 50 mins), recorded in improvised home studios across the world in the spring of 2021. Each of the seven tracks features a guest musician, and each bring their own slant on Rafalides’ malleable jazz, whether that’s Middle Eastern from outi (Greek oud) player Thomas Konstantinou, light Latin from pianist Giovanni Mirabassi or space-age Caribbean from steelpan player Victor Provost. The latter is a particular highlight, providing a real complement to the vibraphone. Not all the collaborations work as well as that, but Rafalides’ musicianship shines throughout.

But if you only have enough space in your ears for one jazz fusion album this month, make it Peter Somuah’s Letter to the Universe (ACT Music, 41 mins). The young Ghanaian trumpeter’s second album takes a celestial, spiritual approach, creating a cosmic jazz with elements of bebop and post-bop, big band, jazz-rock, highlife and, of course, hip-hop. Miles Davis is an ever-present reference, and there are guest turns from Ghanaian stars such as highlife legend Gyedu-Bley Ambolley and up-and-coming Frafra kologo player and singer Stevo Atambire of Alostmen. From the superb trumpet playing to the intelligent compositions and arrangements, this is a brilliant album – there’s surely more great things to come from Peter Somuah.