Category: FEATURED RELEASES
One of the records that completely missed my radar when it was released back in the summer of 2019 was Los Angeles producer Jason McGuiness brilliant cosmic jazz album Empyrean Tones.
Influenced by the musical traditions of the African Great Lakes, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, the Taraab sound is rooted out of Zanzibar, and was made popular beginning in the late 20s by Tanzanian vocalist Siti binti Saad. London’s On The Corner label has recently released a brilliant new single featuring Taraab’s next star, which is none other than Siti’s great granddaughter Siti Muharam.
The London-based quartet Ruby Rushton, led by flautist Ed Cawthorne aka Tenderlonious and featuring trumpeter Nick Walters, keyboardist Aidan Shepherd, and drummer Tim Carnegie kick off 2020 with a great new limited-edition 7inch single on 22a.
The German-based Analog Africa label helped shed light in 2018 on the Somalian funk group Dur-Dur Band with an incredible triple LP featuring the band’s first two albums. This past month, the label released a brand new twelve-track compilation that continues to deeply explore the Somalian funk scene of the seventies through the early nineties.
Before we look ahead to the New Year, it’s important that we look back at some of the best EP releases of 2019, often featuring debut recordings from some of the most rising artists and groups, which this year included KOKOROKO, Neue Grafik, Ebi Soda, Still Moving, Nejrup, Rōnin Arkestra, IG Culture’s Likwid Continual Space Motion project, and many others.
With six incredible releases across multiple projects, and numerous collaborations with some of the most-forward thinking artists in the world, as well as ongoing performances that touched just about every corner of the globe, BeatCaffeine’s 2019 Artist of the Year is Los Angeles-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Mark de Clive-Lowe.
This was an incredible year for new album releases that spanned a wide range of genres. I even felt at times it was hard to keep track of all the great new music that was being released on weekly basis. Selecting my favorite albums was extremely challenging, yet still very enjoyable. I’m sure in weeks or even days from now, I will realize that I forgotten to include a worthy release, or discover an album that might of slipped by me.
As with just about every year, 2019 featured numerous great tracks from all corners of the globe. More and more it feels that artists are bluring the lines between these things we call “genres”, and I think that’s a good thing. In which was an almost impossible task, I have compiled my favorite 125 tracks from the past twelve months and have dived deeper into the top 25.
With so many incredible reissues in 2019, I decided to break-up this year’s “best of” into two sections, full length albums and singles. Out of all the lists I put together for these year-end posts, both reissue lists were probably the most challenging to compile.
Just as we’ve seen over the past few years, there continues to be many high quality reissues released on an annual basis, even to the point that this has become the main focus for some labels. With prices for original copies of many records continuing to become more and more pricey, the actual need for affordable reissued releases seems to be more an more necessary.
