Juno Recommends Brokenbeat / Nu Jazz: March 2023

Review: Presto (who you might recognise from Names You Can Trust and Plug Research) is in the spotlight again, not long after Mukatsuku dropped two highlights from his unreleased album Basement Beats, which was recorded in 2020 while he lived in New York. The 7" collects two more essential tracks that first surfaced in 2002 on Concrete Grooves and sticks the excellently jazzy hip-hop instruments on a limited edition 7". 'Trip To Brazil' is as sweet as sugar with heat damaged chords and excellent jazzy melodies over a lazy beat. 'Pianoscape' is a more traditional hip hop sound with some dusty piano keys and nice vocal stabs that keep it deep.

Review: Playful Italian club cuts from Gerardo Frisina on his astutely named LP Joyful Sound. Taking influence from well-trodden sounds, perhaps each describable (at least by genre pedants) as Afro-Latin music, broken beat, jazzdance and minimal house - whatever the symbiotic result, it sounds great. We're caught off-guard as low-end scraping pulsers like 'Almost Free' blend surprisingly brilliantly with dreamy piano-minimal bits such as 'Kilig'.

Review: For its last few outings, Gamm has rather been heading back to its roots. But now the label reverts away from hip-hop and back towards the Latin and disco sounds it has become best known for. And that's no bad thing as Koichi Toyama turns on his machines and gets the scalpel out to serve up some distinctive edits of four fiery broken beat and nu jazz gems. There are playful sax leads on the opener, muted vibes on the shuffling samba stylings of 'Santa Monica' and busier Rhodes chords on 'Grama Grass' before the jazz dancer that is 'Samba Chimba' offers another golden moment to close.

Review: African Spirits is the coming together of musician and producer Nicola Conte with his friend and colleague Gianluca Petrella, who is an ECM and Blue Note associate and internationally renowned talent who emerged from the Italian jazz scene. Their recent album found them exploring a wide range of music in our globalised world with nods to Detroit, disco, house, and jazz. Now Berlin-based New York don Fred P offers up two of his reinterpretations. They are of course long, deep, spiritual and moving in both physical and emotional ways.

Review: Alfa Mist started out as a teen music maker by dabbling in hip-hop and grime and then went to college and taught himself piano. He self-released an album digitally that was picked up by YouTube's algorithm and rightfully suggested to millions of people who hadn't previously heard of it. Thankfully his newfound audience encouraged him to press his debut to wax and since then he has gone from strength to strength on multiple fronts. Nocturne followed and now gets repressed due to popular demand - it's a gorgeous mix of jazzy, hip-hop and broken beat.

Review: Turobjazz marks 20 years in the game with new album Whateverism on Last Forever. It draws on all of those years of experiences and takes in deep house, broken beat, lashings of jazz and soul influences and plenty of superb electronic production. It is also jacked with top collabs such as acclaimed MC Dave Giles II as well as frequent Moodymann vocal collaborator and Detroit talent Nikki O and Japan's Brisa from Bastard Jazz family. The lush arrangements and life-affirming melodies of this record all warm your heart whether the beats are deep, driving or downtempo.

Review: On paper, this may seem an unlikely collaboration - Japanese ambient and deep acid stalwart meets eccentric Finnish lounge, jazz and exotica veteran - but it's a genuinely brilliant EP. 'Big City Takes' genuinely makes the best of both Calm and Jimi Tenor's talents, with the latter's eyes-closed vocals, evocative flutes and shuffling exotica rhythms fitting perfectly with the former's stirring strings and immersive ambient electronics. Tapes remixes, first delivering a jazzy hip-hop informed head-nodder before serving up some ambient dub/digi-dub fusion, before Calm delivers his version of a second Tenor collaboration, 'Time and Space' - an ambient jazz masterpiece. Vendetta Suite's warming, subtly tropical Balearic rework of that track is also brilliant. Tip!

Review: Pete Cunningham's hybrid electronic/acoustic jazz collective Ishmael Ensemble has been right at the forefront of innovation when it comes to those sounds. For his latest project he links up with lyricist and MC Rider Shafique. They first met some six years ago when Cunningham was struck by "his powerful way with words." As such they got in the studio, Cunningham embraced a more bass heavy sound to his style and drew on his love of the likes of dub kings King Tubby and Adrian Sherwood. Coupled with Rider's voice and you have a superb new record.

Review: For those with intimate knowledge of the original West London broken beat scene of the late '90s and early 2000s, the return of IG Culture's New Sector Movements project is big news. Remarkably, 'These Times' contains the first new 'NSM' material in 15 years and sees IG Culture joined by a swathe of guest vocalists and musicians including Allysha Joy, Mike City, Natalie May, Wonky Logic and Alex Phountzi. Musically, it's as on-point as you'd expect, with IG Culture and his merry band confidently striding between rolling, horn-sporting future R&B ('These Times'), jazz-funk-flavoured breakbeat soul (the incredible 'Stand'), head-nodding, Latin-tinged 21st century street soul ('Hope'), Kaidi and Dego style business ('H.E.A.T') and hard-wired, sub-heavy, peak-time ready broken beat (the infectious 'Bless').

Review: Total Refreshment Centre was a fabled jazz spot for London's urgent wave of young jazz artists bringing fresh vigour to the genre - so fabled in fact its legacy rings out way past the time the doors were closed. This compilation on Blue Note cements this idea by capturing just a little of the electricity buzzing round the place, with a vital spectrum of sounds which ping the very idea of jazz into new, exciting and crucially modern directions, with the likes of Soccer96, Byron Wallen, Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange and Neue Grafik all bringing the heat.

Review: London artist cktrl teased this new album with a great EP earlier in October. He has been on a fine run of form ever since his 2017 mixtape, and last year dropped his 'Robyn' EP and also made an appearance with a cameo in Beyonce's 'Black Is King' film. This full length on Touching Bass finds the producer and multi-instrumentalist once more fusing contemporary-classical and electronic R&B across a magical set of tunes, one of which features a collaboration with GRAMMY Award-nominated singer-songwriter Mereba. This is a new school jazz sound that will appeal to genre newcomers and old-heads alike.

Review: Japanese jazz trio Nautilus (named of course after Bob James' 1974 fusion classic) are also high-quality rare groove merchants and super sweet and smooth fusion sounds. They have been prolific again this year with somewhere around six new releases and now this welcome Revival album. It comes on both CD and vinyl and is a fine showcase of their sounds which manages to be both timeless and classic as well as contemporary in execution. Many of this year's singles feature here alongside some other treats.

Review: The mad-prolific Sam Gendel follows up his 2021 52-song Fresh Bread with a 36-track album Superstore. It races by, and so is perfect for those with a short attention span and is packed with loads more off the cuff and off the wall sounds from the man. These are the sort of inventions that baffle purists by mixing up what they know and serving it back to this in a recognisable yet wholly different fashion. These lo-fi skits have plenty of energy and a lounge in cheek vibe especially on the brilliant 'Alors.'