Mouthwatering Records Blog

Taking up on a comment by Poppa Sparling I add this record - as it is definitely also one of my all time favorites. Bought it in a nice record shop - Alliance I think it was called - in a freezing cold winter in 2003 in Glasgow. The record is available and out on Honest Jon's Records from where I copied the following text:

Watch How The People Dancing
Unity Sounds From The London Dancehall 1986 - 1989
HONEST JON'S RECORDS

Brilliant, haughty Jamaican avant-gardism, inspired by Jammy's Sleng Teng explosion, rearing up at a Hackney crossroads opposite techno, hiphop, breakbeat and rave.

Presented as a next-generation companion to London Is The Place For Me: the mood is more defiant — a Jamaican secession from London — with themes of inner-city sufferation running alongside hymns to the dancehall and the herb superb.

With a forty-page booklet including a long interview with soundsystem- and label-boss Ribs, and many photographs. Brilliantly mastered by Moritz from Basic Channel.

'There’s a whole heap of stuff that we did at that time, different even to the music, that we didn’t really know what we were doing, we just done it. This feeling on the records, we did that with everything we did, it was just the vibes that we were carrying then, it was all about one massive vibes. Even with the sound, we weren’t going to choose something that somebody else did, we definitely was going to choose something that somebody else didn’t use. We wanted to go out there and say, Yeah, this is the wickedest thing, everyone has to know, and nobody else can’t tell we no different. We pushed it that way, we carried on that way.'

Cedric Im Brooks & The Light of Saba
One wicked Jazz Reggae Album with a lovely cover again out on Honest Jon's Records.

«LONDON IS THE PLACE FOR ME - Trinidad Calypso in London 1950 - 1956» is four double record album's out on Honest Jon's Records, London. These are beautifully made records, by the label that brought us the outstanding «WATCH HOW THE PEOPLE DANCING - Unity Sounds from the London Dancehall, 1986 - 1989». The Calypso sound is not heard all that often today and it is heartwarming to hear this uplifting and often funny Jazz music from them Caribbean Londoners. The series gets a «ten out of ten» I'm so happy to own those records ;)

From the liner notes (- classy layout by the way!):
«When the Empire Windrush, an old troop-carrier, arrived at Tilbury on June 21, 1948, and inaugurated modern Caribbean immigration to Britain, it also supplied calypso with its best-known image — on Pathe newsreel, Lord Kitchener singing his new composition London Is The Place For Me.

Kitch had boarded with Lord Beginner at Kingston docks, Jamaica, on Empire Day, May 24. In London they joined a milieu of fine band musicians familiar with Caribbean musical forms, and already represented on numerous recordings crucial to the development of British swing and jazz music.

Travelling with their own core audience, the Trinidadian calypsonians brought with them the vocal music of Carnival. Traditionally this ranges from social satire to sexual double-entendre, from voodoo to the most pressing issues of the day, from sporting events to competitive insult. The experiences of Britain’s growing Caribbean population were to be fabulously rich in raw material.

In many ways Trinidad calypso prefigured the rise of the Jamaican recording industry, by which it was eclipsed as the fifties ended. During that decade, certainly, it was the enthralling soundtrack of Black Britain.»

«MALI MUSIC» a double-vinyl project album with Damon Albarn compositions played by musicians in Mali, recorded on location, brought to London, more music added, tapes sent back to Mali, more music added... Out comes an intercontinental music collaboration that turns out to be an incredibly beautiful and unique trouvaille. Contemporary world music... weird, great.

Release notes from Honest Jon's website:
Damon Albarn, Afel Bocoum, Toumani Diabate And Friends
Mali Music
In August 2000, Damon Albarn travelled to Mali for Oxfam’s On The Line project (about people living along the Greenwich Meridian), intent on getting together with his favourite musicians there. In the capital Bamako and its surrounding villages, he sat in on club and private jam sessions, playing concerts and streetcorners, bars and boats.

Back home in London, more than forty hours of tapes were opened to other influences - reggae, dance, rock - and then the work in progress was returned to Mali, for further contributions from the musicians there: immersive and open, back and forth.

www.honestjons.com