kagablog

11. Andy Palacio & the Garifuna Collective – Wátina (Cumbancha)

- Andy Palacio, who died suddenly in January this year, lived just long enough to see the effect of his Garifuna Collective’s highly attractive and widely well-regarded debut album on publicising not only his native culture to the world at large, but the very existence at all of his people, a Caribbean race partially descended from shipwrecked West African slaves and living in the Central American country of Belize – on “Wátina”, Palacio, already a veteran of several albums, concentrated deliberately, in the company of other leading Garifuna musicians, on his own traditional music and language, and the results, which reflect both their West African and Caribbean influences in a way that adds to both, were among the year’s most agreeable unanticipated pleasures

12. Mary Gauthier – Between Daylight And Dark (Lost Highway) / Lucinda Williams – West (Lost Highway)

- ten years ago Lucinda Williams finally made, in “Car Wheels On A Gravel Road”, the album that her supporters had hoped she might have in her, and her life was changed forever, along with the attitude of quite a large audience towards Southern songwriting women, but she seemed to lose her artistic way a little as mainstream acceptance grew – “West”, reflecting her geographical move in that direction (it might have been equally appropriate to have twinned it with Steve Earle’s Nashville to New York offering) is a wonderful return to form under a Hal Willner production hand that allows emotional rawness to infiltrate the sound again, and gets exactly the right amount out of a band in which guitarist Bill Frisell and Tin Hat Trio keyboard man Rob Burger are just perfect – Gauthier, also Louisiana born and Southern raised and sounding not unlike Williams, might have been at about the same place in her career before “Between Daylight And Dark” and, while it doesn’t seem to have attracted quite the public attention that “Car Wheels” did, it strikes me that the Joe Henry produced album, with significant musical contributions by a couple of Frisellian associates Greg Leisz and David Piltch and superb songwriting by Gauthier who shines her lyrical torch both outwards and inwards with penetrating observation and unflinching honesty, ought, in a fairer world, to have a similar effect on her profile

13. Levon Helm – Dirt Farmer (Vanguard)

- that Helm still sings like he does, after throat cancer, 28 radiation treatments and, he says, plenty of prayer, seems like a miracle – he’s 67 years old now, so it’s not quite the majesty of the Band anymore but, with added experience, resonance and even deeper immersion into the old time folk and blues traditions that inform the hard core of this acoustic album produced by Dylan bandsman Larry Campbell and featuring Levon’s daughter Amy, it’s much more than the next best thing

14. The Imagined Village – The Imagined Village (Real World)

- an ambitious project in which Simon Emmerson, best known for his cross-cultural work with the Afro-Celt Sound System, revisits old English folk song with an intriguing mix of the English and inter-generational traditional (Martin & Eliza Carthy, the vocal Young Coppers, the instrumental Gloworms), the English but not so traditional (Paul Weller, Billy Bragg, poet Benjamin Zephaniah who totally re-imagines the story of Tam Lyn), the English and somewhere in between (Chris Wood, Tunng, Sheila Chandra) and his own (and the Trans-Global Underground’s) electro-acoustic and wonderfully eclectic inspiration

15. Carlo Mombelli & the Prisoners Of Strange (Instinct Africaine) / Dan Wilson/Mark Huggett Project – Max Roach Park (Musketeer)

- there’s an indication in the dates at the back of Mombelli’s CD digipak of just how difficult it is to get unusual South African music into the public eye (or ear): the recording took place early in 2005, yet it was only released in 2007 – then, to get hold of a copy, I eventually approached the artist and label owner directly, record stores and Internet sites having proved a waste of time – despite this, it’s been nominated for a South African Music Award in one of the few categories that can be taken seriously by anyone not part of the mainstream industry and media’s fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong approach (they can, of course, if you play them nothing but Elvis) - experimental bass playing composer Carlo Mombelli’s exceptional group features trumpeter Marcus Wyatt, tenorist Sydney Mnisi and drummer Lloyd Martin, with Jessica Bailey’s cello and Siya Makuzeni’s extraordinary, largely wordless vocals contributing sonic, harmonic and textural elements that make it highly unusual, if not unique, in a South African context - arresting, challenging, exquisitely off-kilter and sometimes even oddly funky, the group’s spontaneous freestyle chamber music (Mombelli’s description) is everything the musically adventurous would like to see more of around these parts – the Wilson/Huggett group is here again (their album featured in last year’s list) because they now have a proper release, and a thoroughly deserved SAMA nomination to go with it