Friday 16 October 2009

AFMB - Here And There/AFROPTB

Right, well I've no idea when this is coming out; I've also no idea how you'd really categorise it, genre-wise, nor who's behind it. But it's really rather good so it'd be a crime for it to get overlooked.

If I give you the full track titles, Here And There (Sunshine & Rain Live Version) and AFROTB (A Friendly Ride On The Pressure Boat), you'll have more idea what's going on. The former starts as a nice slow, dreamy deep houser, with Latin-influenced percussion (lots of shakers and shuffly riddim), then slowly builds into a live, crowd-singalong version of Maze's classic Joy & Pain. It's got 'Southport closer' written all over it. The latter, meanwhile, is a jazz-inspired cover of Jhelisa's Friendly Pressure, not unlike something that might come from one of those albums of lounge-y covers of club classics (think Bare Foot, Nouvelle Vague, etc), only done in a way that's a little less throwaway - in fact, play it next to the original and it stands up very well indeed, thank you.

With Compost keeping tight-lipped about who's responsible for this release, it's something of an oddity. But a charming and highly playable little oddity nonetheless. In the imaginary laidback Sunday afternoon session in my head, these two intriguing covers are on heavy rotation already.

About the label: Compost is one of the defining nu-jazz labels and as such needs no intro here. Lately I've been feeling a lot of stuff on their Compost Black Label imprint and the affiliated Drumpoet Community - in fact look out soon for a review of the forthcoming DPC compilation - so it's good to cover something on the mothership label. Want to visit their website? Then just click here.

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