Lahai
by Sampha
Singer/producer Sampha Sisay’s 2017 debut Process won Britain’s Mercury Prize but, despite impressive production and despondent honesty, it was a sometimes downbeat affair dealing with loss and hurt. Sampha – London-born to parents from Sierra Leone – was already known to illustrious peers. His collaborators have been a constellation of stars: Kendrick Lamar, Kamasi Washington, Travis Scott, Kanye West, Drake and Solange.
On this new album are the multilingual French sisters Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Diaz (who are Ibeyi), British jazz artists and drummer Morgan Simpson from the rock band Black Midi among others.
Lahai – the name of his grandfather and Sampha’s middle name – is a softer, less anguished album, a tone inspired by the birth of his daughter Auri.
With discreet elements of soul, contemporary R’n’B, African ingredients, glitch and minimalism, Lahai is a sophisticated musical journey.
Discrete genres are so cleverly interwoven you hardly notice you’ve slipped from atmospheric soul underpinned by repetitious electronics on Spirit 2.0 (“lying in reflection, moonlight hits your skin, safe in conversation”) to the increased urgency of Suspended (“I’ve been lifted by her love, I feel lifted from above”).
Unusually – although maybe not, given the imagery of elevation throughout – Jonathan Livingston Seagull gets name-checked in Spirit 2.0 (“just like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, try catch the clouds as I free fall”) and later on a song of that name: “Seasons grow and seasons die, how high can a bird ever fly?”
Although Lahai is a collection of individual songs – a bit shapeless in its closing overs – Sampha’s relaxed soulful delivery (even on the rap of Only) makes this sound all of a piece, a subtle shift of emphasis and direction opening up a new song or thought.
Sampha keeps things low, quiet and reflective. You could imagine little Auri drifting off to it.
But you won’t.
Ephemeral
by Dave Wilson
With a string quartet and a quintet, Wellington saxophonist and bass clarinettist Dave Wilson brings out a provocative, enjoyably challenging and thoroughly engrossing collection of charted and improvised pieces.
There is multi-layered energy to burn on the confident, 12-minute opener Speak to Me of Yesterday and Tomorrow (Elusive as the Dead) which weaves its way towards an electric version of Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic style. The romantic unease of What Shines is A Thought That Lost Its Way opens with yearning violin but morphs through passages underpinned by repeated phrases into a tasty spaghetti of coiled sax, strings and funky grooves.
Elsewhere, there’s the swinging High Maintenance with guitarist Callum Allardice and trumpeter Ben Hunt, the whimsically pastoral then urban prog-jazz of the shape-shifting, 14-minute Liv’s Theme and bass clarinet melancholy against strings on For Olivia.
These are exciting jazz orchestra arrangements with as much Duke Ellington as Charles Mingus in places for the horns (Dissipation with Wilson and Allardice leading from the front).
There’s great joy here too (Lift) as jazz traditions are inventively reinvigorated.
Well worth discovering.
These albums are available digitally and on vinyl. Sampha is also on CD. Sampha plays the Powerstation, Auckland, February 23; Splore Festival, Tāpapakanga, February 24.
