APRIL 2015 ISSUE
A sneaky peek of just some of what is in the April 2015 issue – READ NOW!
David Sanborn
The revitalized Okeh label has been making a habit of bagging our spring covers. Last year the season saw both Robin McKelle and Somi afforded the privilege and now, 12 months on, we finally see the redoubtable saxophonist and bandleader David Sanborn esconced on our front page for the very first time…
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TheeSatisfaction
Seattle duo THEESatisfaction don’t do things nice and easy. They don’t want you to get them straight away. Luckily, that’s unlikely to be the case. Over the course of two albums, awE naturalE and this year’s EarthEE, Stasia “Stas” Irons and Catherine “Cat” Harris-White have made sure that anyone expecting their songs to follow convention will be disappointed. They don’t draw attention to this, it just is. Making their freeform rap, neo-soul and poetry into something that’s tricky to put your finger on, well, it’s probably why when asked to elaborate, all they come up with is, “it’s a feeling”, the phrase favoured by ally Palaceer Lazaro of Shabazz Palaces, the group who introduced THEESatisfaction on their confrontational Black Up…
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Saun & Starr
Starr Duncan Lowe is at Newark airport, waiting in the lounge for her call to board a flight back home to Atlanta, Georgia. Musical partner Saundra Williams, meanwhile, is at the very same time lying on her bed at home in New Jersey in considerably more comfort. Brought together by conference telephony for a chat with Echoes ahead of the May release of their debut album as the duo Saun & Starr, the erstwhile background singers for Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings [otherwise known as The Dapettes], they are quickly into their stride…
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Eska
At the best of times the genre question is tedious. To music makers and music lovers who are sufficiently open-minded to think first and foremost in terms of a song’s quality rather than market place identity, the business of categorization is not high on any list of priorities. Eska’s eponymous debut album is a case in point. It is an idiosyncratic piece of work, which should be enjoyed on its own terms.
And yet. Even this esteemed magazine has to put her somewhere, by dint of the age-old organization of our pages. So here she is in jazz, which makes a certain amount of sense given her work with the likes of Soweto Kinch, Jason Yarde and Robert Mitchell, among others. Eska’s own songs are definitely something else, but they loosely connect with the spirit of experimentation and risk of the aforesaid genre…
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