MAY 2023 ISSUE
A sneaky peek of just some of what is in the May 2023 issue – OUT NOW!
Natasha Watts
UK soulstress Natasha Watts has just recorded the best album of her career so far. Music Is My Life is currently available as a very slinky USB disguised as an old-fashioned cassette tape and features production by A-graders like Mike Patto and Tony Economides – think Tony Momrelle – soulful house don Ziggy Funk, and Dave Doyle [at his studio in sunny Marbella]; it contains co-writes with such as Nick Cohen and Chris Cole, plus Nat’s own version of Goodbye, a ballad she originally intended for [but was never recorded by] Leona Lewis more than a decade ago. The tune now impressively closes out the set, backed by a 15-piece string section, part of Japan’s A Hundred Birds Orchestra.
That opening paragraph includes the kind of information you might expect and/or hope for on the arrival of a new Natasha Watts album: we all know how high her standards are. This next one, however, does not.
The personable Natasha has managed all this while based in – and I don’t mean this disrespectfully – the arse-end of nowhere…
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RAY GREENE
When Ray Greene replaced Larry Braggs as lead vocalist in Tower Of Power back in 2013, not only was he taking over from a guy who’d been in the famous funk and soul band for 13 years, in his own mind he was stepping into shoes once filled by one of his heroes, Lenny Williams. Ray was old enough to remember those mid-seventies hits with Lenny at the helm so knew how high the band’s standards had always been. The question on his mind was, should he try to be like Lenny, or instead follow Larry’s path… or, option three, do neither and look to carve out his own route forward? And then what of all those T.O.P. fans out there, perhaps expecting to hear the hits as they’d always been delivered?
“Ha! That’s a good question, man,” he chortles back down the Zoom link. “And you’re right, those were all big shoes to fill…
MORGAN HERITAGE
News travels fast in reggae circles and as soon as Afrobeats became popular, there was a stampede of Jamaican artists looking to collaborate with their African counterparts. Some felt the pull of ancestral identity, whereas others liked the idea of sharing tracks with artists whose streaming figures could regularly be measured by the hundreds of millions, instead of just a fraction of that.
Morgan Heritage’s latest album, The Homeland, is shared with many talented Jamaican artists as well as those from over a dozen African countries and yet their reason for the latter has nothing to do with bandwagon jumping, but rather having arrived at a point in the group’s evolution where embarking on such a project makes perfect sense. After all, they’ve been travelling and performing throughout Africa since the nineties, they have toured and produced up-and-coming African artists in the past and aligned themselves with various charitable organisations in countries such as Kenya [where they hosted the 2019 Tomorrow’s Leaders Festival]…
MICAH SHEMAIAH
To call Micah Shemaiah an unsung hero of Jamaican music is to do him a disservice. That’s because he’s widely respected among today’s roots reggae audiences and his every release is greeted with enthusiasm – latest album Jamaica Jamaica included. The only thing missing is mainstream exposure, although we’re keeping our fingers crossed.
Unlike his last album Still, which he co-produced with Zion I Kings, Jamaica Jamaica has been put together using tracks from different producers, the majority of whom are affiliated with Swiss label Evidence Music. Micah has worked with the Evidence team for quite some time, ever since being invited to perform at one of their dances in Geneva. Jay Unity, Derrick and Nico had been recording an album using Simmonds drum patterns with Wayne Smith, who passed away before they could finish it. Micah expressed interest in what they were doing and his 2018 album Roots I Vision came out of the resulting sessions…
