FEBRUARY 2024 ISSUE
A sneaky peek of just some of what is in the February 2024 issue – OUT NOW!
BELLA BROWN
The story of Carol Hatchett, the real-life singer, dancer and performer behind Bella Brown, the persona at the focal point of funky soul band Bella Brown & The Jealous Lovers, is one of dreams allied to determination. A childhood filled with music turned into a teenage that put it all to movement and then life as a young adult where taking a chance – like thousands before her, Carol moved to California looking for a break – would shape her entire future. And when you scan down a CV that now includes years-long spells as one of Bette Midler’s legendary Harlettes – if you missed her on tour then you can see her in Midler’s Emmy Award-winning Diva Las Vegas HBO Special – appearances in movies like Ali, Legally Blonde and the Tom Hanks vehicle That Thing You Do, not to mention a whole host of music videos throughout a very busy 1990s, then you catch a glimpse of the calibre we’re talking here. So, it’s no surprise that when Ms. Hatchett transforms into Bella Brown and decides to form a band with musical partner/bassist/producer Daniel Pearson, designed to merge her various strands of interest into something she herself has creative control over, it’s going to come with a quality guarantee…
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MILLION SELLER
You can judge an album by its cover. Or at least the artist can make a meaningful statement through a well-chosen image.
The sleeve of Million Seller’s eponymous debut album features a west African sabar drum, with knitted ropes dangling from the outer edge of its conic wooden body, stood next to the plastic, snake-like leads and switches of a rectangular drum machine. Two cultures collide to eye-catching effect.
“I wanted to juxtapose acoustic and electric, modern and old… just trying to bridge those worlds,” says the group’s multi-instrumentalist and producer Matt Calvert.
He founded Million Seller in order to explore a revered source in modern music, the early ‘70s recordings of Herbie Hancock. His albums, Mwandishi, Crossings and Sextant were vehicles that took jazz into uncharted territory. Their skulking, shadowy, mysterioso riffs blended with the strangest of avant-garde textures and new technology to create a prescient blueprint for as yet unborn beatmakers in the digital age. ”The most electronic records you’d find from a jazz artist!” states Calvert. “There’s Rhodes solos, but there’s also just jamming with various synths. Is that a jazz record? It’s a really amazing sound unfurling over odd grooves. It’s so unique.”
PRINCE FATTY
I first met Prince Fatty – or Mike Pelancoli, to give him his real name – 15 years ago, in 2008, after visiting him and Little Roy at the producer’s home studio in Brighton. He’d just released a vocal and dub set called Survival Of The Fattest, which he’d recorded using vintage analogue equipment and no little imagination. Whilst that debut album was largely inspired by the spirit and also the sound of early ‘70s Jamaica, what I loved about it was that Fatty wasn’t trying to relive the past, but just pay homage to it whilst skilfully referencing other influences coming from soul, funk and hip-hop. Right from the start, he showed an aptitude for creative thinking and this – allied to a ferocious work rate, a deep-seated love of the music and wry sense of humour – has provided the blueprint for all of Prince Fatty’s own projects ever since…
DANCEHALL V AFROBEATS
The most heated debate in dancehall circles for some time flared up in mid-January, roared like a wildfire for all of two weeks and then subsided as quickly as it started. The flashpoint was an interview with Jamaican producer Rvssian, posted on World Music Views. In it he claimed that Afrobeats would be in trouble if dancehall artists put up a unified front and attacked the music market with tours and quality output, along with support from Caribbean fans. Speaking on the Let’s Be Honest podcast, he remarked how the problem with dancehall is that those representing it – as he put it – “always want to pick one person to lead.”
“That’s actually mashing up the whole genre,” he said. “One man can’t push a genre, no matter how big you are. One man is not pushing hip-hop, one man is not pushing Latin music, one man is not pushing Afro, one man is not pushing pop. The music can’t be that big with one man; it has to be eight hot artists pushing at one time, so the world can say ‘What is this movement?’ Because, trust me, it’s 20 hot Afrobeats artists, not just Burna Boy – it’s Rema, it’s so much… I tell you, if we have 15 man running the thing, Afrobeats in a problem.”