Recent Music

There are musical seasons where I re-listen to the old faves, the kind of stuff you can read about in my half-year of “Song of the Day” essays from 2018. This autumn I find myself listening to new music by living people. Here’s some of it.

The musical influx is directly related to my adoption of Qobuz, whose weekly editors’-picks are always worth a look and have led me to more than half of the tunes in this post. Qobuz, like me, still believes in the album as a useful unit of music and thus I’ll cover a few of those. And live-performance YouTubes of course. You’ll spot a pattern: A lot of this stuff is African or African-adjacent with Euro angles and jazz flavors.

Ghana Downtown · The Kwashibu Area Band, founded in Accra, have been around for a few years and played in a few styles, sometimes as Pat Thomas’ band.

What happened was, Qobuz offered up their recent Love Warrior’s Anthem and there isn’t a weak spot on it. Their record label says something about mixing Highlife and jazz; OK I guess. Here’s their YouTube channel but it doesn’t seem to have anything live from the Love-Warrior material. It isn’t often that I listen to an entire album end-to-end