A strange and wonderful moment: the standing area at the rear of The Lantern, the smaller venue at Bristol’s Colston Hall, is suddenly transformed into a corner of Southern Albania.
This fourth studio album from pianist, vocalist, songwriter and producer Oli Rockberger highlights his remarkable knack of marrying instantly memorable chorus hooks with captivating harmonies steeped in jazz, soul, gospel and R&B.
In a sense, the air of tedium that surrounds Sam Smith is a wonderful thing. This is a person who can talk about having fluid gender identity and make it sound as if he's simply unsure whether he prefers boiled or mashed potatoes: that is, he's somehow able to dip into one of the spiciest political topics of the age without scaring your gran. It doesn't, though, make him a great pop star.
Singer Jessie Ware has long been considered a bastion of grown-up pop. A natural heir to the estate once tended by Sade; a scenic artist providing the background to relaxed conversations with good company; the eventual recipient of a recurring spot on Jools' Hootenanny in perpetuity.
Anyone who finds Eric Clapton and The Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb stepping up to offer their services as their producer is obviously special. It’s a view reinforced by knowing Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham and Small Faces were already their champions. Only one person fits this unique bill.
It was this album's good fortune to arrive on a miserable rainy afternoon. At other times my first impressions might be a bit harsher about its comfortable, retro dad-grooves and easily flowing sax solos, but instead I let it wrap me like a blanket, and by three tracks in it was absolutely impossible to dislike it.
One of the more interesting developments of this decade is a blurring around the edges of modern soul music: almost a complete dissolution, in fact, of the boundaries of R&B. From the hyper-mainstream – Drake, The Weeknd, Future – via Solange, Frank Ocean, Blood Orange and Sampha, to fringe experimentalists like Atlanta's Awful Records, international Afro-diasporic collective NON and UK one-off Dean Blunt, R&B is being remade as dark, unpredictable and unsettling.
We are living, I think it’s fair to say, in troubled times. That is, if we’re living at all by the time of publication. Putting aside, for a second, the sabre-rattling of two monstrous egos, there is a need, in such dark days, of some light. Thankfully, Hard Lines, the third album from British pop act Lucky Soul shines with the force and intensity of the Sun – admittedly still not as hot as an exploding thermonuclear warhead, but let’s work with what we have.
Between them, Marylebone Beat Girls and Milk of the Tree cover the years 1964 to 1973. Each collects tracks recorded by female singers: whether credited as solo acts, fronting a band or singer-songwriters performing self-penned material. That the two compilations dovetail is coincidental – they were released by different labels on the same day – but they embrace the period when the singer-songwriter was codified and when, as the liner notes of Milk of the Tree put it, “female voices began to be widely heard in the [music] industry.”
In media coverage of Woodstock, Santana always seems to be overshadowed by the oft-mentioned cultural significance of Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner”. However, go check their performances, side by side, for pure visceral thrills, and it’s Santana’s amped Latin explosion that comes up trumps. If he hadn’t spent the better part of the Seventies and Eighties turning out tedious jazz-fusion (as Hendrix might well have done, had he lived), Santana would be on many more 21st century posters and T-shirts.
1999’s collaborative Supernatural album famously rehabilitated him as a commercial entity and last year’s Santana IV, his fieriest effort in aeons, showed there’s still petrol in the tank. However, Power of Peace sounds like it was more fun to make than it is to listen to. Carlos Santana and his percussive powerhouse of a wife, Cindy Blackman, join Ronnie and Ernie Isley and their spouses, Kandy and Tracey (who sing backing vocals) for a church-scented family jam. They cover a range of classic soul, the predominant style an uninspired, often insipid wander in the footsteps of Marvin Gaye’s early Seventies output (“Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” is even covered).
The Isley Brothers are themselves no slouches in the guitar department, and even once had a young Hendrix in their band, but things seldom catch alight, despite much fret-wrangling. The opening tracks get things off to a decent start. A version of “Are You Ready”, originally by psychedelic Sixties soul dudes The Chambers’ Brothers, bodes well, working up a groove, even if a rap section for Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground” doesn’t bear close inspection (“Crossing the River Jordan/Like spending time with Michael Jordan”). Unfortunately, after the passable opening trio, things slump into a bland string of slowies, including the only original song, “I Remember”.
There are other passable moments, such as a feisty take on Muddy Waters’ “I Just Want to Make Love to You”, and an impeccable pure jazz version of Leon Thomas’s “Let the Rain Fall on Me” – the album’s best number – but Power of Peace is certainly not going to end up among the essential back catalogue of any of those involved.
Overleaf: listen to The Isley Brothers & Santana "Are You Ready"