Not a list of the best records of 2024
Just things I liked a great deal.
It’s a year almost exactly, since I last posted here and I promised to do so again at some stage. Until now, that didn’t happen, but for the same reason as last year, I decided to write, mostly because I enjoy writing about music rather than any desire to cast myself as a muse or reference.
2024 saw me, as always, buy a lot of records. I was lucky enough to be able to record-hunt from Paris to Bangkok. You soon realise that whether you are in China, Japan or NYC, the new records in every store worldwide now are, more or less, identical. It’s the secondhand digging that makes the difference. My tastes evolve continuously and I get a little obsessive, so I find myself digging for whatever rabbit hole I end up down at the time. Mostly over the past decade, it’s been jazz, moving increasingly in the past few years towards 70s free jazz and indie US and UK labels. The list of Archie Shepp, Sam Rivers, Cecil Taylor and ESP-Disc’ records I’ve bought this decade would fill another page. And recently I’ve taken a swerve back towards early roots reggae and 70s sweet soul. Rarely will I buy a secondhand rock record and if do so, mostly I’m disappointed. This week I also like 80s US swing.
That said, these all represent new records, be they records first released in 2024 or reissued as new records in 2024. The secondhand stuff is another whole blog I suspect. Or maybe not if I get the time.
New releases in 2024 I really liked:
Yaya Bey – Ten Fold (Big Dada)
I know it’s a strange connection – or maybe not given the southern soul inflexions of both – but somehow, I always think of Bobbie Gentry when I play Yaya’s records, although one is white from Mississippi, and the other is black from Brooklyn. Maybe it’s the fuck-you confidence, or perhaps it’s the controlled but sultry, timeless delivery. An album of grief for her father.
SML – Small Medium Large (International Anthem)
The Enfield Tennis Academy (ETA) in Los Angeles was one of those unique bars/venues that organically arrive in cities globally and capture a nascent scene as it flowers. The ETA is no more (It closed a year or so ago), but for a moment, it was an epicentre for LA’s hot new jazz scene, largely tied to the IA label. SML: three Chicago transplants, an Australian and a percussionist from NYC, recorded this exciting live improvisational album there back in 2022 and 2023, taking the results to the studio to chop up and reconstruct into this smorgasbord of challenging sound. If Can had been from summer climes rather than Central Europe they may have sounded like this.
Tom Skinner – Voices of Bishara Live at Mu (International Anthem)
I really liked drummer Tom Skinner’s 2022 album Voices of Bishara, on Gilles Peterson’s always awesome Brownswood label, but it felt a little as if he was holding back. For a start, it was just 30 minutes. Was it an EP or an album? The solution arrived early in 2024 when the live show (from January 2023) that launched the earlier record arrived as a double album. The title track alone had gone from seven minutes to what felt like the almost effortless intensity of a more natural 15 minutes. This video is that track (although not the version herein).
Shabaka – Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace (Impulse)
Nubya Garcia – Odyssey (Concord Jazz)
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think the so-called age of British jazz, mashing the more *spiritual* (for want of a better cliché) side of traditional jazz with urban UK sounds – grime, dub, drum and bass and broken beat – is about the most exciting thing to have emerged from the damp isles this century. And yet, with both these albums, by pioneers of that movement, I can sense an interesting sidestep, almost a reference to an earlier era in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a more pastoral British jazz melded with earlier sounds from the old empire, from Africa and the Caribbean which were then only just starting to change the Empire’s motherland’s soundscape, to produce something unique and very British. It’s intriguing, and it’s wonderful, but equally, in both cases, it’s been shifted to a time and place where – despite the noises made by the right – a fully embracing multicultural Britain has already long arrived and is the mainstream. Shabaka in particular, has echoes of John Surman, Kenny Wheeler, Joe Harriot, Mike Westbrook and Johnny Dankworth meshed in there somewhere.
Alice Coltrane - The Carnegie Hall Concert (Impulse)
I was slow to Alice Coltrane, in large part because I struggled with the posthumous Coltrane releases that also bore her name. I realised my sins in the late 1990s but even then it was very hard to find anything in Aotearoa that carried her name. Now, I’m a completist (as my house foundations would no doubt attest if they could talk, I am with too many musicians). The New York Times said, she "gathered force like a typhoon" on this. That will do.
Jeff Parker ETA IVtet – The Way Out Of Easy (International Anthem)
Another from the Enfield Tennis Academy, where Jeff’s quartet held a three-year residency, but a far more mellow affair than the aforesaid mentioned SML. The latest record in a string of extraordinary genre-defining records by veteran Chicago guitarist Parker (if you want somewhere to start, try 2020’s Suite For Max Brown; Malib and Dilla meet an orchestra of jazz and experimental sounds). This time, these extended works offer up shades of the great Miles Davis Quintet from the pre-Bitches Brew era, albeit slightly more relaxed, more dubby (something Miles didn’t get to until the 70s) and less pressured. Confident and joyous. Probably my favourite brand-new record of 2024.
Christoph el' truento – Dubs From The Neighbourhood (El Truento's 1 Stop Record Shop)
Chris Martin’s record has the best label name of the year. And as one review said, it’s “rich, warm, and wobbly”. It is. And it sounds like it rose from the land it came from. It couldn't be from anywhere else. Or this might be my favourite record of 2024.
Ezra Collective – Dance, No One's Watching (Partisan)
It’s funny how a record dedicated to the dancefloor mostly works best in the slower, more introspective moments. Then we have the title track, which could have been a hit on London pirate radio or a Carnival scorcher anytime in the past 40 years.
Cannonball Adderley – Burning in Bordeaux (Live In France 1969) (Elemental)
A Record Store Day thingy, on the forever neat Spanish Elemental label. Amongst its wonders it has the most sublime take of the much-recorded ‘Manhã De Carnaval’ I’ve ever heard.
I guess – like Alice above – this sits on the cusp of a reissue although it’s never been issued before. There’s also no video or links so here’s the same band later in the year in Norway.
Reissues:
Woody Shaw – Blackstone Legacy (Contemporary)
Woody’s debut from 1971 has wrapped itself in a vast reputation over the years, aided by the fact it was almost impossible to find, at least on vinyl. The only CD versions, from 1999, were notoriously awful mastering disasters just to add to that. Late 2023 delivered a remastered reissue and this moody, light and dark record is everything it promised to be.
The video is some fella in the USA telling you why this is one of the greatest albums ever recorded.
Joe Henderson – Power to the People (Milestone)
Another lost recording, only available since its 1971 issue was deleted, as a shoddy quick lo-fi CD unless you could find the rare Japanese edition. As with Woody above, Concord’s ongoing reissue program (via their great Jazz Dispensary series) has made an art of lifting lost records straight from the analogue tapes and then lovingly repackaging them in the so-called tip-on sleeves (something I’d never heard of until major label marketing kicked in).
A review:
Fuemana - New Urban Polynesian (Urban Pacifica/Gazebo)
Dr Tree (EMI)
Dam Native – Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted (Tangata)
Three of the most in-demand New Zealand records ever, all make their welcome reissue this year. The Dr Tree, in particular, is an extraordinary package, lovingly remastered and documented in a luxurious gatefold sleeve with a second record by an English fan who seems to have spared no love or time to do it properly. Each one of these made my year as they arrived.
Miles Davis – Miles in France 1963 & 1964 (Columbia)
The Davis official Bootleg series gets better and better (and much of this does exist on lo-fi unofficial bootlegs). This eight-record box of Miles (with Shorter, Hancock, Carter, Coleman, and Williams) in France in the early to mid-1960s sets a new standard of both packaging and audio for this deep dive thematic series, one that’s invaluable to follow Miles’ evolutionary pathway. The transformations live of some of the earlier Davis tunes (originally found on Kind Of Blue, Seven Steps, Workin' and elsewhere, some with no studio recording), driven by Herbie and Tony, justify the (not insubstantial) entry price, as do the images in the book inside.
2024 saw the reissue of the extraordinary Miles At Newport 1955-1975 box, too.
Here’s Miles not really wanting to do this very odd interview:
John Cale – Paris 1919 (Domino)
Desert island disc arrives newly remastered with (possibly unneeded) bonus tracks on a second disc, but in a sleeve and with inserts that its status as Cale’s greatest record deserves.
Here’s a video of John doing ‘A Child's Christmas In Wales’ in Germany in the early 1980s:
And another of the majestic ‘Antarctica Starts Here’ a decade or so ago:
Let’s finish with an appreciation of the International Anthem Recording Company from the same guy who nailed the Woody Shaw above: