HONEST JONS RECORDS - LONDON, ENGLAND

The Honest Jons label is a creative partnership between the London's legendary
Honest Jons record shop and Blur frontman Damon Albarn, dedicated to releasing an exceptional range of music to the wide audience it deserves.

"The hippest world-music label going" - Entertainment Weekly

Tony Allen - Lagos No Shaking

The Afrobeat sound owns its very existence to its creators Fela Kuti and Tony Allen. Regarded as one of the most distinctive and in-demand drummers on the planet, Tony Allen is responsible for Afrobeat’s propulsive and melodic rhythms.

Since leaving Fela Kuti in the late ‘70s, Tony Allen has created a distinctive name for himself acting as bandleader, composer, and husky, rapping vocalist on a string of groundbreaking albums by pushing at the boundaries of African, rock, jazz and hip hop music, recording with the likes of Manu Dibango, King Sunny Ade and Blur/Gorillaz leader Damon Albarn. Now with his brand new album for Honest Jons, Tony Allen returns to Lagos, one of the world’s steamiest capitals of rhythm for his most powerful, personal, and all-African album to date, Lagos No Shaking.

Lobi Traore

Listening to Lobi Traore is as one critic noted, like listening to "what Stax might have sounded like had it set up shop in Mali rather than Memphis." Traore plays electric guitar with deep, emotion-drenched passions that recall the music coming out of the 1950’s juke joints on Chicago’s South Side while at the same time having an entirely contemporary feel to his funk-fuelled rhythms.

When Blur/Gorillaz front man Damon Albarn made his initial visit to Mali in 2000, Lobi was one of the first musicians invited to play on the Honest Jons’ label’s Mali Music album. Damon was so impressed with Lobi’s gritty voice and gutsy guitar playing at these sessions that he invited him to record a solo album. Recorded under African skies, in an open-air club, with no overdubs and no second takes, here is Lobi Traore and his band conjuring up fiery blues at its stone funkiest.

Kokanko Sata
When Blur/Gorillaz front man Damon Albarn flew to Mali to record his Mali Music project, amongst the West Africans musicians who joined him for the recordings was a strikingly tall woman who skillfully moved between the kamelen n’goni (the traditional African hunter’s harp) and a selection of drums. Her name was Kokanko Sata and her contributions to Mali Music helped make it one of the best albums to come out of Mali, ever.

Despite the inherent prejudices in African society regarding the role of women, especially when it comes to being a musician, Kokanko Sata has become one of the most revered new young singers working in Mali today. But her stature also comes from her skilful performance on the kamelen n’goni, a three-stringed hunter’s harp. Not only is this instrument notoriously difficult to play, but Sata’s skills are even more amazing for being self-taught as no male villager would teach a woman the hunter’s harp.

Sata’s fame spread for also being the only woman to sing the traditional hunters’ songs while raising some controversy with her own feminist compositions. It is little wonder why Damon Albarn wanted to release this debut album from this tradition-breaking performer who has earned the nickname "the hunter’s heroine."

Never The Same

Bill Leader, who had mixed records by folk artists Anne Briggs, Davey Graham, Bert Jansch and many others in the 1960s, saw the opportunity to capture this music and started the Leader label for the artists for whom doors were closing everywhere else.

Never The Same documents these lost years of British folk captured on the Bill Leader’s label, when British folk returned to its traditional roots and in so doing produced some of the most deeply affecting music of the era.

Lagos - All Routes
The period stretching from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s is often considered the 'golden age' of African popular music a period concurrent the years of nationalist struggle and independence.

With the winds of political change blowing in the air, this African popular music became extremely important as a component of the cultural life of newly or soon-to-be independent nations.

Lagos - Chop Up
The enthusiasm, idealism, and optimism can be felt in African music from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s as artists either modernized traditional African genres, or Africanized foreign genres such as R'n'B and funk. From West African came 60s highlife, which would become an unmistakable influence on Fela Kuti's Afro-funk of the 70s, while from the traditional Yoruba religion came juju, fuji, waka and apala tracks, all of which are included here.

Lagos Chop Up (“chop-up” being Nigerian pidgin English for “ bountiful feast”) and its companion album Lagos All Routes (compiling music from various parts of Nigeria) together collect some of the most infectiously funky music ever made. They are a must for any African/world music fan due to their inclusion of the key tracks that influenced countless others including the likes of Fela Kuti and Tony Allen, drummer and unofficial father of Afro-beat.

Son Cubano - NYC
The recordings on Son Cubano highlight this movement and were made over the decade beginning 1972, for the new Salsoul and SAR labels and their sisters Mericana and Guajiro. Because of the more Cuban personality of these recordings, they were suppressed by radio stations - inexcusably dismissed as old-fashioned or unjustifiably accused of having Communist associations. This was still the period of the Cold War - when Eddie Palmieri was accused of 'communist salsa' for his song Mozambique (which isn't even salsa) - and the radio stations did their bit to suppress Cuban culture.

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Lif Up Yuh Leg An Trample
The idea for Lif Up Yuh Leg An Trample came when Blur front man Damon Albarn together with co-Honest Jons’ founders Mark Ainley and Alan Scholefield visited this year’s Carnival in Trinidad. “Nothing prepares you for Carnival in Trinidad. It’s a way of life and the entire calendar seems to be built around it. People are up for days on end and you hear the songs over and over again until they become like mantras.”

Most of the songs are hot tracks from this and last year's Carnival season, chosen to create an up-to-the-minute snapshot of the best and most cutting-edge sounds from the eastern Caribbean. From the devastating rhythm of Dawg E Slaughter's ‘Trample’ to the provocative sexuality of Denise Belfon's ‘Saucy Baby’ via the Bajan jump-up sensation of Timmy's ‘Bumpa Catch A Fire’, it's a unique compilation of tracks.

Terry Hall & Mushtaq
You can call it chance. Or you can call it fate. But the result is a remarkable album of breathtaking genre-bending that fuses Arabic and Jewish musical forms, Asian and East European sounds, hip-hop atmospherics and wild gypsy passions, slamming beats and audacious samples. In short, an album quite unlike anything you've ever heard before from former Specials and Fun Boy Three vocalist Terry Hall. First, Mushtaq, once of British-Asian pioneers Fun-Da-Mental, came on board as an equal partner. Then the cast list expanded to include a Tunisian singer, a Syrian flautist, an Egyptian who had settled in Iraq, Hebrew vocalists, Turkish musicians, a 12 year old Lebanese girl called Natasha, a blind Algerian rapper from Paris, a troupe of Polish gypsy refugees and a septuagenarian clarinetist famous for playing the Pink Panther theme. Oh yes. And Blur's Damon Albarn is also in there somewhere.

“A unique album...a tapestry of global grooves that defies description” - Billboard

"A bewitchingly beautiful blend of earthy roots, liquid jazz, sweet soul and playful Afro-beat...[an] extraordinarily uplifting retrospective...pure bliss for headspace wanderers." - Muzik

Mali Music
In July of 2000, Damon Albarn (frontman for Blur and Gorillaz) traveled to Mali - west Africa's most musical city, the hot bed of one of the world's most fascinating music cultures. Upon arriving in Mali with a battered melodica, Damon met with some of Mali's top traditional and contemporary musicians. The exchange of musical ideas sowed the seeds for this remarkable collaboration. Touring the capital Bamako and its surrounding villages, Damon sat in on club and private jam sessions; playing concerts and street corners, in bars and on boats. The album's 16 tracks fuse Malian and western influences to bring a taste of the incredible life and music of Mali to a new audience. Damon is generously donating his royalties from all sales of the album to Oxfam's program in Mali and a matching contribution will be made from the sales of the Mali Music album.

"Mali Music offers up all the brilliance of what 'world music' should be: exchange and tradition, collaboration and cultural respect, not to mention all of Mali's most brilliant musicians influencing and being influenced by Blur's front man." - XLR8R

Best World Music Album of 2002 - Entertainment Weekly

Various - Watch How The People Dancing
Imagine a mixture of techno and hip-hop hot-wired via a Casio keyboard to soulful reggae played in an overheated club, filled to the rafters with people dancing in baggy pants and Kangol hats, from 10 at night to 8 or 9 o'clock in the morning. Such would be the atmosphere at parties held throughout the late '80s by London's top reggae DJ collective known as the Unity Sounds.

On a regular basis Unity Sounds "tore the place down" with a soundclash that could almost now be described now as an "electroclash" approach to reggae. What Unity Sounds played was reggae infused with a shot of stark electronic pip-pip sounds and hi-hat swishes played without the aid of loops. Watch How The People Dancing celebrates an important transition in London's reggae scene from classic reggae to raga. It is a music deep in traditions but with nods to US hip hop and electronic. A music that would later mold the new English breakbeat and jungle movements.

"These singles and instrumentals show no-name locals rocking mics over toy-store electro-beats that marked reggae's transition into modern-day digital dancehall....
a sweet bouncy snapshot of a pungent regional scene." - Entertainment Weekly

"A stellar collation...If you've ever gotten lost in the warm, inviting blanket that is dub, you'll want to get all tangled up in these head-rocking rhythms." - Urb

Various - London Is The Place For Me
After arriving in rickety merchant chips in the late 1940's, Lord Kitchner and his musical contemporaries sought to establish themselves on the London pub and club circuit, playing for white audiences as well as his countrymen, creating London's first non-Jazz, Black entertainment scene, long before there was reggae, or even ska. They played in late night cafes, cellar bars, and many illegal venues. In what were to become underground blues dances, calypso was the music of choice until Jamaican R&B and ska sound systems took over at the end of the 1950's.

In the calypso vocalist's tradition of singing about what's going on around him and adding a subtly subversive social commentary, the songs in this collection offer a unique and unfiltered view of what it felt like to come to Britain - moving into a row houses, riding on the Underground, nosey landladies and of course that inclement British weather. Performed by the finest Caribbean musicians in the country (Cyril Blake, Fitzroy Coleman, Freddie Grant, Bertie King & company), the songs in this collection juxtapose sexual double-entendre, racism, voodoo, current events, mixed marriages, insult, bebop, and just trying to fit in.

"In the fifties, Calypso was the CNN of black Britain. The calypso hits on this compilation were a running commentary on the realities of the street and told tales of subtle racism or misadventures aboard the London Underground....In this way, these tunes are like capoeira - both deceptive and beautiful - because they were born out of heartbreak, as well as the hopefulness, of immigrants in a cold and sometimes unforgiving new land."
- Rolling Stone