This week’s round-up of newish releases from Healer Oran, Sisonke Xonti, A Cool Affair, Jay Bones, Matthew Mole, and vuyo viwe.
for the time being | Healer Oran | Bandcamp | RY
Healer Oran’s for the time being is disappointingly good. Excellent even. Fuck.
I have resisted listening to Healer Oran for the longest time because I always imagined a long hair Healer dude on a stage with some kind of a bow instrument and an 808, a trance Guy Buttery. I was obviously wrong.
Lesser reviewers will resort to the adjective “meditative” to describe this album, mostly because they’ll find it hard to pin down. Being hard to pin down is the whole experience.
In a house four blocks away someone is playing the True Romance score, but you can’t hear it over the neighbour’s broken, yet strangely rhythmic air conditioner. You are trying to nap but thoughts intrude.
You can easily forget that you are listening to for the time being at all, and then when it stops, you feel its absence.
One question here, why are ambient album titles always in lower case? Chill Out!
uKholo | Sisonke Xonti | Voom Voom Records | HE
Saxophonist Xonti’s new release on Voom Voom Records comes after a six-year interval since his previous album, uGaba the Migration.
Those years have clearly been spent honing his craft to a place where he is confidently among South Africa’s very best jazz players and songwriters. For fans who’ve kept the faith, uKholo rewards with gospel flavours, bebop-adjacent dexterity, traditional vocal elements, forays into free jazz and primal grooves of easy abandon.
It’s all tied together with a layered, but irresistible theme that evokes Zanzibari sea breezes, as much as the wee hours at Sankayi in Jozi; Coltrane, as much as Abdullah Ibrahim and Zim Ngqawana; then Barney Rachabane; a motif fresh and nuanced each time it resurfaces.
It’s a powerful, cohesive, statement album from an artist in the full flow of his creative and performing abilities. Xonti’s impeccable jazz credentials are clear from the quality of the personnel on this project: Yonela Mnana, Ayanda Sikade, Keenan Ahrends, Shane Cooper, Gontse Makhene and Mandisi Dyantyis… this is the sound of a man passionately expressing his grounded understanding of now, both ancient and futuristic; so current, but also timeless.
Life Hacks | Jay Bones | Bandcamp | RY
Life Hacks is nine tracks of acoustic melodic punk written for dads who don’t understand how technology works. It is the musical equivalent of getting trapped at a Christmas dinner with Uncle Alasdair, who was once in a band. Does it matter that it was a good band? Not while he’s misunderstanding influencer “YouTubes”, no.
When the music isn’t doing “you kids get off my lawn” in an inherited punk accent, it settles into a sort of explainer about the boredom of being a suburban stoner with a second-screen addiction, laying out, in excruciating detail, the minutiae of settling down, set to once-angry punk rock chords. The album states the territory but does not explore it. Life Hacks at times almost becomes cynical, then retreats into vacillating between resisting death and wishing for it.
Well-crafted comfort music for people who remember Jonathan Richman but are now just frustrated by yoga.
Love Me | Matthew Mole | Sony | LMN
Not a fan of this style of lame, Jeremy Poops-esque generic ass SA Sony band “indie pop” – this is folk, and the kinda folk that makes me want to cut a dreadlock off a white boy’s head, tell him ma se fake rasta poes, and hope he swings at me.
Mole is the kinda SA musician that makes it overseas, naaaaai man, is what I might have to compete with when I start my indie rap/hardcore band? Do I need to write the simplest riffs and sing like a white tief?
Snore.
there are mirrors everywhere | vuyo viwe | Apple Music | RY
Jazz flourishes make me uncomfortable with how much I love them. And on there are mirrors everywhere flourishes proliferate like frangipani flowers falling at a windy picnic in some secret garden.
Brass, tricksy piano, the flute comes in lone and high and taunting; all so complexly entwined and deceptively simple; the whole album feels like time. It’s a wild ride; full of stabs and ebbs, pianos that threaten. viwe’s voice sneaks in through to crescendo. Much of there are mirrors everywhere is old school jazz, the rest of it is older.
Choral progressions climb the stairs holding hands with brass that splays its fingers gently. And yes, this kind of music has been made before, and it must be made again and again and again until humans have perished from this earth.
Sonic Alchemy: Musicommunication | A Cool Affair | Cool Affair Records/Bandcamp | LMN
Jazz has, for as long as I can remember, been a genre my father has loved, at least before the early-onset dementia started fucking his brain a year back.
A Cool Affair’s, aka Sonic Alchemist’s, latest “smooth as Brylcreem” release: Sonic Alchemy: Musicommunication is a potjie-kos style blend of jazz and house, with heavy hip-hop undertones. I think. I guess. I’m fucking new to this genre, so jou poes if you’re going to tune me about my facts about genres.
Driven by groovy, heavy, and melodic basslines that feel as if he’s influenced by the likes of Kaytranada, but also the kinda old-school “JEZZ BIETS” (coloured Joe Barber accent) that your toppie listened to back in Quay4’s jazz-only era.
The drumming is impeccable, almost Dilla-style timing, with different parts of the drum set or drum machine pulling slightly ahead, or trailing slightly behind one another, oftentimes combining straight and swung rhythms, and this creates a beautifully wonky, almost stumbling head-bopping groove that had me jamming while waiting in a casting studio surrounded by children yesterday in Woodstock. Woe is me. The Casting Co boys’ staffie teasing me with his rope-chew-toy, JP Sebastian reading Hunter S. Thompson’s collection of essays, plus this “jazz-inflected broken-beat drumming” had me smiling ear to ear despite having had a near-death experience two days prior.
In a nutshell – I know, I fucking hate cliché sayings too – but this is good shit, good ish, fucking na’ nu-soul, coloured/African adjacent COOL JEZZ.
Play it for your kindtjie, or jou berk, before you naai.
Reviewers: RY – Roger Young | HE – Hagen Engler | LMN – Lloyd Martinez Newkirk
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