Miles Davis - Rubberband
(Rhino / Warner, since 6th of September)
Miles Davis has often irritated his critics, but mostly history has proved him right. This is true even after his five-year hole, when he returned to music in 1980 and actually released a milestone with the 1982 live album "We Want Miles". It was proof of how open fusion jazz could be. His records from the eighties to "Tutu" (1986) have a maximum medium good reputation - wrongly. Davis is there, again in his fifties, again breathtaking developments. He finds his tone again, developing fantastic bands with musicians like Marcus Miller, Al Foster, Mike Stern, Marilyn Mazur, Darryl Jones, John Scofield, who, though many of them had matured, came to Miles' championship.
Therefore, the tension was even greater, as now a "lost" Miles album from the end of 1985 should be published. Fusion is back today and the time is right. But an album can hardly be more wrong than "Rubberband".
Worst of all are the belated recordings and mixes of musicians Randy Hall, Zane Giles, and Vince Wilburn Jr., nephew of Davis. You have this album to answer for. At least in the case of the title track, you can compare the original with the new version. In 2019, it sounds like copyright-free music that you hear in the cinema before advertising. An exiting idea of generic R & B with reverberated trumpet blasts and a female voice. The original sounded a bit like the album "Tutu" at the end of 1985 , but without the sublime production of Marcus Miller.
Andreas Borcholte's playlist KW 37
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Playlist on Spotify
1. Iggy Pop: Glow In The Dark
2. Grimes: Violence
3. FKA Twigs: Holy Terrain
4th Sampa The Great: Final Form
5. Danny Brown: Dirty Laundry
6. LIUN + The Science Fiction Band: Kiddo
7. Fieh: Samurai / When The Summer Is Through
8. Barker: Posmean
9. Celeste: Strange
10. The White Screen: Mommy
"Rubberband " tries to make an act out of the dead, which should also reach out to the US mainstream. Although this was the dream of Miles Davis, he succeeded only in Europe and Japan. "Paradise", the worst track ever, presents this longing for radio as a horror of mediocrity: lame groove, steeldrums, huh and hah in the choir and an acoustic guitar that makes "world music", as one has not said for a while. Grotesque.
To make matters worse, the historic sessions also took place in a time of weakness. The old band split then, Darryl Jones went on tour with Sting (today he has been playing with the Rolling Stones for 25 years), John Scofield started his solo career. The record company Columbia got on the nerves of Miles after decades of loyalty because she cared for the very young Wynton Marsalis better than the master. Marsalis sold more units with his museum jazz and attacked Davis' electric fusion in interviews aggressively. On his last album for Columbia, "You're Under Arrest," Miles covered Michael Jackson and Cindy Lauper in a cool way. At "Rubberband" you hear the daring game of how Prince sounded (did not work). The estate administrators distort the failed attempt now to a ridiculous parody.
When reading Ian Carr's Miles biography, it's striking: At "Rubberband", then as now, those people sit at the governor, who was always the B band at Miles. It was young musicians around his nephew from Chicago who helped Miles get back on his feet at the beginning of the decade, but replaced it when the first concerts followed. This album looks like the revenge of the second guard, the result beyond any classification. (without rating) Tobi Müller
Price query time:
10.09.2019, 12:45 clock
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Miles Davis
Rubberband
label:
Rhino (Warner)
Price:
EUR 11.07
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Sampa The Great - "The Return"
(Ninja Tune / Rough Trade, from 13th September)
"I found myself again", Sampa Tembo sings in the first episode of her epic new album. The leisurely but steadily impulsive rhythm of "Mwana" ("Child") is reminiscent of a pop classic whose influence has still not been adequately acknowledged: "State Of Independence" in the Donna-Summer version of 1982, by Quincy Jones produced, with Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Lionel Richie in the background choir. "Spiritual High" was an alternate title of this original Vangelis-numbered song, and in such a high of inspiration was the only 26-year-old singer and rapper Tembo, after a long time she finally dared to return to her native Zambia. She grew up in Botswana, went to Los Angeles and San Francisco at the age of 19, to study music production in Sydney in 2013 and perform in rap clubs.
"The Return" is about their return from the Diaspora, the reappropriation of their African identity while preserving and processing all appropriated cultural influences. The album is a Declaration of Independence that makes Sampa The Great one of the most important voices of a spiritually and identity-politically awakened R & B scene. But as is often the case with important proclamations: it is far too long.
With around 70 minutes to play, "The Return" is another 20 minutes longer than Sampa's latest album "Birds And The Bee9", which caught the attention of Kendrick Lamar and Lauryn Hill two years ago - and the Australian equivalent of the British Mercury Prize won. The exciting thing about it was how musically sovereign and relentlessly political the young artist gave herself - and, for example, in "Black Girl Magik", she was always arrested by a very serene gentleness, generated from soul, jazz and G-Funk.
Also on "The Return" it only needs the pep-talk of a girlfriend in the answering machine interlude "Wake Up", until the rap-battle with the African hip-hop Krown about misogyny and discrimination in the music business sets a certain urgency.
In the middle of the chronological self-discovery album are the strongest pieces: the feminist G-Funk "Any Day" (with soul singer Whosane), the nervous Jungle-Stomp "OMG" and the central "Final Form", the Sampas Emanzipations- Claim with fanfares and funk grooves impressively asserted: "Black Power" calls a choir again and again: 2019 merges with 1969.
The glittering, bubbling (synth) strings garnished rap ballad "Heaven" closes a gap between the heritage R & B of Jamila Woods and the Space Funk of Solange. Unfortunately, "Diamond In The Ruff" is just that with its nineties vibe, and "Leading Us Home" snows midway in the overly relaxed jazz guitar twang. If "The Return" were tighter and more compact, it would be a masterpiece.
But when Sampa's journey nears its end with the title track, it's almost too exhausted for a nine-minute, musically multi-layered meditation on Blackness conditions in Africa, Australia and America with four feature guests in total. And then it continues with two equally long pieces. One of them is called "Do not Give Up" with unintentional irony. But tension breaks or not: You will often find your way back to this majestic "return", which is actually an arrival. (8.0) Andreas Borcholte
Price query time:
10.09.2019, 12:41 clock
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Sampa the Great
The Return (Digipack)
label:
Ninja Tune (Rough Trade)
Price:
EUR 14,99
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Iggy Pop - "Free"
(Loma Vista / Caroline / Universal, since September 6th)
What's the big advantage of being Iggy Pop? You can just let an album "pass" like that. After his surprisingly high chart entry with the beautiful retro-noisy "Post Pop Depression" (2016) and the accompanying tour, James Osterberg felt confirmed again late. And why not? Pop is one of the few survivors from the rock'n'roll Hello of Fame who is not content to push old classics over the stage again. The 72-year-old is even in the sinew old age for every new fun to have. Whether he appears as a coffee-addicted zombie in Jim Jarmusch's "The Dead Do not Die", or is now releasing a kind of jazz album, the man lives what the rock'n'rollers of all decades have always dreamed of: outrageous freedom.
"Free" is therefore a fitting title for this entertaining half hour of new pop music. The artist says about the ten pieces that he had instrumented mainly by the jazz trumpeter Leron Thomas and the guitarist Sarah Lipstate (Noveller) "This album just happened to be, and I let it happen". Pop lends its ambient dimming soundscapes only the lowered, rumbling voice.
Listened to on the radio
Wednesdays at 23 o'clock there is the Hamburger Web-Radio ByteFM an intercepted mixtape with many songs from the discussed records and highlights from the personal playlist of Andreas Borcholte.
Especially in the second half of "Free" this has quite nice effects, when in "Glow In The Dark" he lets himself be staged to atmospheric strumming, sounding and guitars as a levitating, glowing alternative guru who puts together pamphlet-like phrases : "Positive thoughts make a brighter you" for example. In the spoken word track "We Are The People" he recalls the fragile Johnny Cash of the "American Recordings" era and tells of free-spirited jesters like himself, who look for homeland and togetherness in the "berzerk nation" USA.
In the almost to death quoted Dylan Thomas poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into The Good Night", which he then recited on space sounds, the Gravitas in his voice but then slipped a little into the involuntary comedic William Shatner terrain but in the sleepless moon month "The Dawn" he caught himself again.
The "Rage", the rage to which poet Thomas admonished his dying father to face death, can be found here less often than in the "Post Pop Depression", but Pop crows pretty kregel by the Mariachi punk number " Dirty Sanchez "and with" Love's Missing "also has a classic groovy rock song on offer, fan-baiting stop.
But the highlight is the mighty Nick-cave-like "James Bond", in which pop anticipates a female 007 charmingly. A Bond hymn that actually serves as the title song of a new movie would be, after Stooges fame, Bowie collabos, French chansons, and jazz experiments, truly the culmination of this unlikely free-think career. Never going to happen? As you know, Iggy Pop never knows. (7.5) Andreas Borcholte
Price query time:
10.09.2019, 12:37 clock
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Iggy pop
Free (Mint Pack)
label:
Caroline (Universal Music)
Price:
EUR 8.56
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Barker - "Utility"
(Ostgut clay, since 6th of September)
A techno album is interesting because it has little to do with the practice of hanging up in the club. It wants (and must) tell a new story. At night the kick-drum and the four-four-act rule, but in the studio the dance regime falls. Sam Barker, a Brit in Berlin, regularly takes up residence in the Berghain, the city hall of metropolitan nightlife. He is organizing a party series there called the "Leisure System". In the British term Leisure swing more style and elegance than in the German free time, especially in the working class. And that's exactly what Barker's first solo album sounds like: The album "Utility" offers nine tracks that look at the club from the proletarian salon as a psychedelic, but wordless conversation afterwards, with exquisite machines, outstanding engineers and expensive speakers.
"Paradise Engineering" takes us gently by the hand to the other side of the horizon, where the sounds tumble like pearls and much smells of trance. Is there sweet poison or a cleansing ritual waiting on the dancefloor? Already with "Posmean", the second track, the big feathers starts: Precise delay effects punch a slight funk into the synth-mids, but everything stays warm-shaded. You hear the British hardcore continuum that seeks the funk in the breakbeats and finds the deepness in analog sounds. "Experience Machines" glides from initial stumbling into a Future Funk, but still can do without a quarter in the bass - a promise from the future.
"Gradients of Bliss" flies down to space, where the hall is long and the sounds are dull. All at once, rattle-like orchestras float past, their tracks rhythmically asynchronous to the observer. In the "Hedonic Treadmill" the global hamster wheel starts again gently. It is the loveliest track of all, which is also due to the unusually many chord changes that are all too predictable here for the genre. But every track tells something: The principle of modular synthesizers, which is also used on "Utility", is the constant development of the sound, not the clean repetition of a loop. The title track, "Utility", poses the urgent question: dancing again or going home? Oh, first a smoke. (8.8) Tobi Müller (8.3)
Price query time:
02.09.2019, 09:16 clock
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Barker
Utility
label:
Ostgut Ton (Rough Trade)
Price:
EUR 16.99
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