The always-excellent Tompkins Square is back with a new compilation entitled Aimer et Perdre: To Love & To Lose Songs, 1917-1934. Here's the 'title track' from Cleoma & Joe Falcon as a sample. The whole thing comes on two impeccably-packaged discs with R Crumb cover art (!) and a 60-page booklet with unpublished images and comprehensive lyrical translation. Basically, no one does the reissue game like this.
If you're sick of a sterile digital world and want something more raw and time tested, Tompkins Square is a label that has you covered. One of the best reissue imprints around, their new set This May Be My Last Time Singing: Raw African-American Gospel On 45RPM 1957-1982 is an engrossing hodgepodge of little-known soulful gospel singles compiled by Yeti Magazine founder/editor Mike McGonigal. Check this cut "Peace In The Valley" by Rev. Lonnie Farris. It's otherworldly yet so natural, with dry, clopping drums, spiritual torch song vocals and a steel guitar part that sounds like it could have been played with a piece of broken glass.
Yes. This is absolutely 100% as rad as it looks. And let's get it said right away, before the sweaty histrionics get underway, that you'd be a fool to pass up this deep slice of pristinely soulful African folk jazz. Also, come to think of it, let's skip the histrionics. Because even when this ultimate, nylon-plucked smoothness devolves temporarily into frenzied screams and crosswalk whistle-blowing, histrionics are ill-suited for the float away ease of its effortless grooviness.
Birigwa, at the time of "Njabala," was a 23-year-old studying jazz at the New England Conservatory. The self-titled stunner that resulted from his time at the conservatory stands up tall and hustles as sweet as any Veloso, Joao or Jobim. Brazilian bossa nova at its honey-thickest and mellow-yellowest, informed by the energy and rhythm of African folk. Total treasure. Definitely pick up the full-length, reissued on Porter Records.
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