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viewing 1 To 11 of 11 items
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M3H 009CD
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Operating from the fringes of the South African jazz scene, the enigmatic yet charismatic trombonist and pianist Malcolm Jiyane delivers a major contribution to the canon -- one shaped around dedications to key figures in his personal and professional life. Several years ago, Jiyane was dealing with the death of a band member, the birth of a daughter and the passing of his beloved mentor Johnny Mekoa, founder of the Music Academy of Gauteng, which Jiyane attended from a young age. These life-altering events give shape to the music's emotional register and its thematic concerns. In Black Music, his book of essays and critiques, Amiri Baraka makes the point that jazz musicians, be it in the construction of solos or in other aspects of composition, always draw on the works of their contemporaries or elders. How much outsiders pick up on that is really dependent on how au fait they are with the music. In this album, Jiyane finds comfort in this well-trodden path. Two songs make for great examples. "Umkhumbi kaMa", a jazz-funk track celebrating the creative force as inhabited by women, the motif to Herbie Hancock's "Ostinato (Suite for Angela)" is a clear reference, connecting in one swift move, not only the musical traditions of the Black Atlantic but also the struggles and triumphs of women across space and time. On the same note, the free-form "Solomon, Tsietsi & Khotso", conjured in the same jam session that yielded SPAZA's Uprize! (M3H 007LP), appears here in a more fleshed out form as "Senzo seNkosi"; a tender dedication to Malcolm Jiyane Tree-O bass player Senzo Nxumalo. Jiyane's path to the realization of his debut album as frontman is more than merely one individual's breakthrough. Workshopped and recorded within two days in Johannesburg, UMDALI, not unlike Miles Davis's landmark Kind of Blue, stretches our idea of what it means to improvise within the context of jazz.
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M3H 010CD
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Group Theory: Black Music is a stunning new statement from South African drummer and composer Tumi Mogorosi. Standing in the lineage of South African greats such as Louis Moholo-Moholo, Makaya Ntshoko, and Ayanda Sikade, Mogorosi is one of the foremost drummers working anywhere in the world, with a flexible, powerful style that brings a distinctive South African inflection to the polyrhythmic tradition of Elvin Jones, Max Roach, and Art Blakey. Since his international debut on Jazzman Records in 2014 with Project ELO, Mogorosi has been in the vanguard of the South African creative music scene's burgeoning outer-national dimension, taking the drummer's chair in both Shabaka Hutchings' Shabaka and The Ancestors formation and with avant-garde noiseniks The Wretched, who featured on Brownswood's acclaimed South African showcase, Indaba Is. Where Group Theory: Black Music moves an established format dramatically forward is in the addition of a nine-person choir. Their massed voices soar powerfully above every track as a collective instrument of human breath and body, and enter the album into the small but significant number of radical recordings to have used the voice in this way, such as Max Roach's It's Time (1962), Andrew Hill's Lift Every Voice (1970), Billy Harper's Capra Black (1973), and Donald Byrd's I'm Trying To Get Home. Features a cross-generational line-up of celebrated South African musicians including guitarist Reza Khota, pianist Andile Yenana, and vocalists Gabi Motuba and Siyabonga Mthembu. Also features Lesego Rampolokeng. For fans of: Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim), Shabaka Hutchings, John Coltrane, Max Roach, Donald Byrd, Abbey Lincoln, Art Blakey. CD version comes in bespoke tip-on CD jacket.
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M3H 010LP
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LP version. Gatefold sleeve. Group Theory: Black Music is a stunning new statement from South African drummer and composer Tumi Mogorosi. Standing in the lineage of South African greats such as Louis Moholo-Moholo, Makaya Ntshoko, and Ayanda Sikade, Mogorosi is one of the foremost drummers working anywhere in the world, with a flexible, powerful style that brings a distinctive South African inflection to the polyrhythmic tradition of Elvin Jones, Max Roach, and Art Blakey. Since his international debut on Jazzman Records in 2014 with Project ELO, Mogorosi has been in the vanguard of the South African creative music scene's burgeoning outer-national dimension, taking the drummer's chair in both Shabaka Hutchings' Shabaka and The Ancestors formation and with avant-garde noiseniks The Wretched, who featured on Brownswood's acclaimed South African showcase, Indaba Is. Where Group Theory: Black Music moves an established format dramatically forward is in the addition of a nine-person choir. Their massed voices soar powerfully above every track as a collective instrument of human breath and body, and enter the album into the small but significant number of radical recordings to have used the voice in this way, such as Max Roach's It's Time (1962), Andrew Hill's Lift Every Voice (1970), Billy Harper's Capra Black (1973), and Donald Byrd's I'm Trying To Get Home. Features a cross-generational line-up of celebrated South African musicians including guitarist Reza Khota, pianist Andile Yenana, and vocalists Gabi Motuba and Siyabonga Mthembu. Also features Lesego Rampolokeng. For fans of: Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim), Shabaka Hutchings, John Coltrane, Max Roach, Donald Byrd, Abbey Lincoln, Art Blakey.
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M3H 009LP
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Operating from the fringes of the South African jazz scene, the enigmatic yet charismatic trombonist and pianist Malcolm Jiyane delivers a major contribution to the canon -- one shaped around dedications to key figures in his personal and professional life. Several years ago, Jiyane was dealing with the death of a band member, the birth of a daughter and the passing of his beloved mentor Johnny Mekoa, founder of the Music Academy of Gauteng, which Jiyane attended from a young age. These life-altering events give shape to the music's emotional register and its thematic concerns. In Black Music, his book of essays and critiques, Amiri Baraka makes the point that jazz musicians, be it in the construction of solos or in other aspects of composition, always draw on the works of their contemporaries or elders. How much outsiders pick up on that is really dependent on how au fait they are with the music. In this album, Jiyane finds comfort in this well-trodden path. Two songs make for great examples. "Umkhumbi kaMa", a jazz-funk track celebrating the creative force as inhabited by women, the motif to Herbie Hancock's "Ostinato (Suite for Angela)" is a clear reference, connecting in one swift move, not only the musical traditions of the Black Atlantic but also the struggles and triumphs of women across space and time. On the same note, the free-form "Solomon, Tsietsi & Khotso", conjured in the same jam session that yielded SPAZA's Uprize! (M3H 007LP), appears here in a more fleshed out form as "Senzo seNkosi"; a tender dedication to Malcolm Jiyane Tree-O bass player Senzo Nxumalo. Jiyane's path to the realization of his debut album as frontman is more than merely one individual's breakthrough. Workshopped and recorded within two days in Johannesburg, UMDALI, not unlike Miles Davis's landmark Kind of Blue, stretches our idea of what it means to improvise within the context of jazz.
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M3H 008LP
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Pre-pandemic, there was a plan. The plan was for musicians from South Africa and Senegal to travel to London's influential Total Refreshment Centre to make an album with musical kindred spirits in the UK. Like so many plans, it had to be adapted. During the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns, groups of heavy-hitting musicians met for a day of intense recording in their home cities then sent the music to their compadres across the oceans. They returned to the studio a month later to respond to the music they'd been sent. The result is On Our Own Clock, a sonic testament to trenchant and collaborative creativity which digs into layers of South African jazz, traditional Senegalese instrumental music and London's rich diaspora-informed musicality. Individually these are powerful strands of music. Collectively, they are super-sized. The 14 players are individually stellar and include tuba don Theon Cross; Alabaster dePlume, whose album To Cy & Lee has been a pandemic panacea to so many people (including Bon Iver, who sampled it); top South African players including Siya Makuzeni (SPAZA), Zoe Molelekwa and Asher Gamedze, who appears on Angel Bat Dawid's critically-acclaimed The Oracle and whose debut album, Dialectic Soul, received universal acclaim upon its release in 2020; The Comet Is Coming's Danalogue; Senegal's highly-respected Kora player, Tarang Cissoko as well as Balimaya Project's Yahael Camara Onono. Collectively they've ascended their individual brilliance into an album that is variously warm and layered, full of tuff grooves, and steeped in moments of reflective transcendence.
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M3H 007LP
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2023 limited restock. In South Africa, June 16, 1976 is unanimously recognized as the definitive turning point in the tenor and intensity of the fight against apartheid. It comes as the internal capacity of the major liberation movements such as the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress is nearly depleted; with many of its leaders in jail or in exile. Black Consciousness (BC) arises from these ashes and the apartheid regime scrambles to contain it in the form of assassinations, banning orders and trials. High school youths in Soweto, having already imbibed BC from their teachers (a group of newly-recruited university radicals), begin planning protests that would attain an incredible kinetic thrust. These demonstrations were supposedly to rally against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, but as student leader Tsietsi Mashinini says in the documentary film UPRIZE!, the situation in South Africa had been explosive for a long time and any issue could have delivered the shift in momentum that June 16th would symbolize. This new SPAZA release is the original motion picture soundtrack of the film UPRIZE!, but it serves a parallel function. Recorded in Yeoville, Johannesburg, during a three-day improvised scoring workshop in 2016, the recording is almost the underside of the film, which strikes a defiant pose both in the selection of speakers and in the tone of much of the archival footage. The June 16th protests stretched over several weeks in a countrywide blaze that turned out to be a sustained show of solidarity among students and an unbridled display of brutality by the state. The recording process mirrors that protraction, working out a new language with which to commemorate the death, darkness and defiance of those days.
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M3H 006CD
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Buffering Juju, the title of Dumama + Kechou's debut album, relates to the process of "excavating spiritually charged content from within." The duo's textural sound, driven by cyclical song structures and chant making, not only captures the angst of the modern world but mines this state of affairs for regenerative potential. Dumama (vocalist and uhadi player) + Kechou (multi-instrumentalist with a focus on indigenous African instruments and handmade instruments) met in Cape Town in 2017. There was an instinctive pulse to the initial clutch of shows they played together, blowing open vast sonic and conceptual possibilities. "I guess we were in similar places with our music processes in trying to push healing music to the edges and be more experimental with it," says Dumama. The narrative of the album unravels as a piece of magical realism informed by South African folklore and reality, detailing a woman's liberation story where the characters shift shape and traverse multiple realms, deploying various iterations of their power or lack thereof. "It has an organic, natural, cyber and modern kind of energy -- all rooted in African aesthetics of sound and storytelling," says Kechou. All of this sits on a bed of the duo's unique musical language, one that, although applied electronically in the form of looping and soundscaping, is founded on approaches to string, vocal and percussion tones that reflect a merger between Northern and Southern African heritage. Recorded primarily in Cape Town and Johannesburg over the first quarter of 2019, Buffering Juju is a conduit to a past we were not necessarily present for, and a future where threatened indigenous technologies thrive in an increasingly digitized world. RIYL: Meshell Ndegeocello, Moses Boyd, Sudan Archives, Sampa the Great, Erykah Badu, FKA Twigs, Moses Sumney.
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M3H 006LP
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LP version. Buffering Juju, the title of Dumama + Kechou's debut album, relates to the process of "excavating spiritually charged content from within." The duo's textural sound, driven by cyclical song structures and chant making, not only captures the angst of the modern world but mines this state of affairs for regenerative potential. Dumama (vocalist and uhadi player) + Kechou (multi-instrumentalist with a focus on indigenous African instruments and handmade instruments) met in Cape Town in 2017. There was an instinctive pulse to the initial clutch of shows they played together, blowing open vast sonic and conceptual possibilities. "I guess we were in similar places with our music processes in trying to push healing music to the edges and be more experimental with it," says Dumama. The narrative of the album unravels as a piece of magical realism informed by South African folklore and reality, detailing a woman's liberation story where the characters shift shape and traverse multiple realms, deploying various iterations of their power or lack thereof. "It has an organic, natural, cyber and modern kind of energy -- all rooted in African aesthetics of sound and storytelling," says Kechou. All of this sits on a bed of the duo's unique musical language, one that, although applied electronically in the form of looping and soundscaping, is founded on approaches to string, vocal and percussion tones that reflect a merger between Northern and Southern African heritage. Recorded primarily in Cape Town and Johannesburg over the first quarter of 2019, Buffering Juju is a conduit to a past we were not necessarily present for, and a future where threatened indigenous technologies thrive in an increasingly digitized world. RIYL: Meshell Ndegeocello, Moses Boyd, Sudan Archives, Sampa the Great, Erykah Badu, FKA Twigs, Moses Sumney.
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M3H 004LP
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2021 restock. An entirely improvised live album recorded in one take in the inner city of Johannesburg, featuring some of the city's finest experimental musicians, namely Siya Makuzeni (vocals, FX, trombone), Nosisi Ngakane (vocals), Joao Orecchia (synthesizers, electronics), Waldo Alexander (electric violin with FX pedal), Gontse Makene (percussion), and Ariel Zamonsky (upright bass). In the context of this improvised album, the term "spaza" not only refers to the name of the outdoor gallery in Troyeville, Johannesburg where this project was recorded in the autumn of 2015. No way. In South Africa, "spaza" comes heavy with meaning. It could refer to an informal neighborhood store usually attached to someone's house, operating out of a shack or a repurposed shipping container. It has come to signify an entrepreneurship spirit, especially in South Africa's black townships where restrictions to business ownership meant that only a few could attain that privileged societal status of legitimate business owner. But in contemporary South Africa, spazas are also contested territories, given continental migratory patterns that have seen the country attract millions of political migrants against the backdrop of the remaining economic and spatial legacy of apartheid. Spazas have emerged as sites of war, bloodshed, wailing, and despair as financially disempowered South Africans routinely mete out their frustrations on those spaza store owners that they consider "foreigners" and "outsiders". But spaza can mean something else entirely. Perhaps obliquely, there are musical references to be grasped at. Spaza, the term, the recording, and the location, evokes a spirit of musical independence, a looseness, a jam session, a collaboration, a coming together of great minds at the corner to shoot the breeze, or let off a seriously considered prognosis. In this sense, Spaza, the album, is a conceptual coalescence of space, the body politic and an approach to music making. Helmed by the arbiters of spontaneity, Mushroom Hour Half Hour, this loping, expansive recording brings together musicians already adept at creating on the fly and playing in unlikely set-ups with their instruments of choice. Spaza is at once opaque, direct and an unyielding morass of joy melding with pain, furtiveness caressing boldness. This could be the sound of the city turned inside out, ruminating on its troubled history and uncertain future, the sound of celebration and pensiveness. The results, while shaped in the milieu that is Johannesburg, are that of continental astral travel, a sonic reading of the city's dreamscape.
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M3HART 002LP
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LP version. The independent, South African record label Mushroom Hour Half Hour present Open Letter To Adoniah, a moving album by talented guitarist and songwriter Sibusile Xaba, who improvises the musical legacy of KwaZulu-Natal into an exciting, genreless future. A lynchpin in South Africa's new generation of jazz musicians, KwaZulu-Natal born guitarist and vocalist Sibusile Xaba has all the makings of an acoustic guitar master. With a vocal style that is part dreamscaping and part ancestral invocation, Xaba divines as opposed to plainly singing. Combined with a guitar style that is rooted in expressive picking, Xaba's music shatters the confines of genre, taking only the fundamentals from mentors such as Madala Kunene and Dr. Philip Tabane and imbuing these with a mythology and improvisational intensity all of his own. Open Letter to Adoniah is an album reverent of life and its connectedness to a higher source. The music emanates from dreams revealed to guitarist Sibusile Xaba over consecutive days. With percussionists Thabang Tabane and Moahanganai Magagula, the trio coalesces both geographic and spiritual influences, hinting at Maskandi (a music style dominant in Xaba's native KwaZulu-Natal) and the improvisational culture of South Africa's jazz avant-garde. Collectively, the musicians remold these influences, situating them within rhythms that span the continent. Thabang Tabane's influence over the project gives it a spiritual sensibility allusive to Malombo which his father Dr. Philip Tabane originated in the late 1960s. Mushroom Hour Half Hour is a Johannesburg based, independent record label and a mobile recording studio that unearths and records unique music from the African continent. Xaba's debut project is Mushroom Hour's first international release. Produced by Thabang Tabane.
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2CD
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M3HART 001-2CD
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The independent, South African record label Mushroom Hour Half Hour present Open Letter To Adoniah, a moving album by talented guitarist and songwriter Sibusile Xaba, who improvises the musical legacy of KwaZulu-Natal into an exciting, genreless future. A lynchpin in South Africa's new generation of jazz musicians, KwaZulu-Natal born guitarist and vocalist Sibusile Xaba has all the makings of an acoustic guitar master. With a vocal style that is part dreamscaping and part ancestral invocation, Xaba divines as opposed to plainly singing. Combined with a guitar style that is rooted in expressive picking, Xaba's music shatters the confines of genre, taking only the fundamentals from mentors such as Madala Kunene and Dr. Philip Tabane and imbuing these with a mythology and improvisational intensity all of his own. Open Letter to Adoniah is an album reverent of life and its connectedness to a higher source. The music emanates from dreams revealed to guitarist Sibusile Xaba over consecutive days. With percussionists Thabang Tabane and Moahanganai Magagula, the trio coalesces both geographic and spiritual influences, hinting at Maskandi (a music style dominant in Xaba's native KwaZulu-Natal) and the improvisational culture of South Africa's jazz avant-garde. Collectively, the musicians remold these influences, situating them within rhythms that span the continent. Thabang Tabane's influence over the project gives it a spiritual sensibility allusive to Malombo which his father Dr. Philip Tabane originated in the late 1960s. Mushroom Hour Half Hour is a Johannesburg based, independent record label and a mobile recording studio that unearths and records unique music from the African continent. Xaba's debut project is Mushroom Hour's first international release. Produced by Thabang Tabane. Double CD version includes the album Unlearning as disc one.
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