No Categories: A Ubiquity Compilation (URCD032 40:54, 54:08), draws heavily on the drum-n-bass side of the abstract funk galaxy. Which makes the forays into other areas even more enjoyable. Both discs feature modern dance oriented turns from Slide Five, DJ’s Wally and Swingsett and Skyjuice, among others. But The Automator Featuring Kool Keith’s “A Better World,” and the Bugs and Joefinite the I.S.’s “Midnight Session” steals the show from the rest of the sequenced-beat stuff here. The live-funk-oriented offerings are the real highlights, though: Trumpeter Longineu Parsons, a former member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, weighs in with the deadly Afrocentric groover “Funkin’ Around” (which features a nice recorder solo). And Scruff’s two remixes of Bobby Matos’ version of “The Creator has a Master Plan” are afternoon-chillout-friendly cuts.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro