Tags: Psychedelic Jazz

Review: Jitwam is an already accomplished, beatmaker who brings even more goodness on this new album. It is a work that fuses totters samples and edits with plenty of live instrumentals and brings to mind plenty of peaceful moments during the busyness of everyday life. The album was years in the making we are told and was inspired by time he spent in London but also his adventures in New York City. There are some guest features from Melanie Charles and Akhtari and a mixture of processed vocals, heady soul sounds and lush jazz moves.

Review: To mark the 20th instalment in their popular and ongoing series of collaborative albums, Jazz Is Dead, Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad have decided to serve up fresh remixes of cuts from the series' bulging back catalogue. Given the series love of fusing jazz's past and present, it's a concept that makes perfect sense. The resultant rubs are uniformly inspired, too, with our picks of a very strong bunch including Shabaka Hutchings' fantastic revision of Henry Franklin hook-up 'African Sun', Mophono's psychedelic, dancefloor-ready tweak of Tony Allen collaboration 'Don't Believe The Dancers' (which comes complete with heavy drums and hazy, Fela-esque horns), Theon Cross's drum & bass style re-imagining of 'Phoenix' (featuring the Midnight Hour), and Bei Ru's duty, head-nodding hip-hop interpretation of Katalyst collab 'Reflections'.

Review: Soyuz follows up their 2022 debut Force Of The Wind with a stark but subdued reissue of their second album, Ii, released three years earlier in 2019. The album captures a pivotal evolution in the band's career, the recordings giving a snapshot of what would become their sound on Force Of The Wind, yet with echoes of avant-psychedelic-pop footprints from yester years. Produced at a time when bandleader Alex Chumak had moved from Minsk to Kyiv, torn between the need to try something new and the homesickness it brought about, Ii nicely captures the slow burn of homesickness extended across a long bouts of travel and transience, through stylistic recollections of Mikita Arlou, Ethiopian jazz and Italian library music.