Memories in Flight
Jazz meets hip-hop w/ MF DOOM x Tatsuro Yamashita, Sampology, Mndsgn, Alfa Mist, Armand Hammer, Derdiyoklar & Yoshi Wada RIP, Sons of Kemet, Emo makes a comeback..
“Hip hop’s foundation and evolution owe itself to jazz” says PBS Soundfields short-docu How Jazz and Hip-Hop Harmonize. It also harmonizes pretty well with City Pop, as per this EP which mashes up the late MF DOOM with Tatsuro Yamashita. Some recent hip-hop & jazz releases featured on this new edition of Mondo Times, enjoy!
“An alternate universe where DOOM discovered city pop — the cosmopolitan, yet definitely cheesy Japanese pop music from the ’80s that’s lately been the focus of oh-so-chic vinyl compilations” reports Lars Gotrich on my fave newsletter Viking’s Choice.
Two upcoming releases on LA’s premiere Jazz meets hip-hop label Stones Throw. Local beatmaker Mndsgn ventures further into jazz on his upcoming LP and John Carroll Kirby makes us time travel to 1981 on new single.
London jazzmaker Alfa Mist presents his latest album completely Live from the Metropolis Studios.
Brisbane producer Sampology makes a collaboration through time, editing this video from his Grandad Merv's video archival footage from the 70s.
Major news, and an album of the year contender, NY’s finest Armand Hammer meet beatmaker The Alchemist. This isn’t really a hip-hop meets jazz kind of hip-hop, it’s brooding, it’s brutal, and it’s a poetic testament to our times.
New edition of UDW delves into a similar territory of jazz & hip-hop, from oldschool acts like Freestyle Fellowship to new material from Hiatus Kaiyote, Sven Wunder and Emma-Jean Thackray. Enjoy and share with your like minded friends!
ARTICLES
Quantum Music; [Aeon Magazine]: Physics has long looked to harmony to explain the beauty of the Universe. But what if dissonance yields better insights?
Harmonices Mundi wasn’t all about the planets, though. In one chapter, Kepler discussed a Turkish style of music that he’d heard earlier in his life while in Prague. He clearly didn’t like the music, calling it ‘grating’ and ‘abhorrent’. He said: ‘it seems that nobody could with proper guidance from nature and voluntarily of his own accord ever regularly contemplate anything like it.’ According to the US music scholar Peter Pesic, one particular featureof this Turkish style that Kepler disliked was the glissando, a smooth glide from one note to another – think of the beginning of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) or the slowly changing pitch of an ambulance’s siren. While it’s common in more contemporary music, in Kepler’s time the glissando wasn’t used at all in Western music.
Gen Z is bringing emo back; [Buzzfeed]: But This Time It’s Not Just A Bunch Of White Dudes..
Barcelona provides grants for Summer 2021; [IQ-Mag]: Half a million euros will be made available for shows of up to 3,000 people in the Catalan capital from May to September. The grants aim to help the city “regain [its] leadership as the capital of live music in southern Europe”.
BLACK TO THE FUTURE
"Black to the Future" album announce single from Sons Of Kemet is nothing short of stars such as Moor Mother and Angel Bat Dawid, but the real star might be the dancer, Laura Lucious. Available now, the follow up to 2018’s Mercury Prize nominated 3rd album.
'M'berra' is the sound, the story, of a collective of Malian musicians from the M’berra Refugee Camp in southeast Mauritania and Italian producer and electro-shaman Khalab. Raffaele Constantino a.k.a. Khalab is a producer with a psychedelic perspective and deep love of African music and indeed, Afro-futurism.
In a sprawling tent city rising out of the desert, out of nothingness, at the border with Mali in West Africa, brought together by spirit and circumstance, the group’s Arab and Tuareg members — some unknown, some who have previously toured Europe — find solace and beauty in music and song.
LIVES LIVED
Turco/German musical innovator/anomaly Derdiyoklar Ali is no more. He and his companion İhsan Güvercin, had in the 80’s created a synthetic combo of Alevi (Anatolian folk/Islam religion) folk music, protest & political lyrics and the energy of lo-fi punk and disco, named diskofolk. They were from the 1st generations of Turkish guestworkers in Germany, had played a lot of Turkish weddings for a lack of stage, and had been revived and honored in the 2000s in Istanbul, by a group of music lovers, that I’m proud to be a part of. RIP!
Japanese composer Yoshi Wada has died, aged 77. Wada studied music and composition with the likes of La Monte Young and Hindustani vocalist Pandit Pran Nath.
STORY BEHIND
Plastic Dreams
The name of this song refers to Donald Trump I read in the book 'Dutch Dance 1988-2018 How the Netherlands Took the Lead in Electronic Music Culture by Mark van Bergen. According to Robin Albers (Jaydee): "I owe the title to my then girlfriend. She was a stewardess and encountered Donald Trump on board of a flight. Trump paid, she recalls, with a platinum credit card, or in any case the most expensive card tere was, which was really something in those days. She showed it to the pilots, who were very impresses with it. A plastic card which let you realise your dreams." [discogs] // The Story Behind Plastic Dreams
Cya next week, and as always if you liked it, please share it with your friends!
