This is the second post I’m devoting to my favorite albums of the decade 2010–2019. The first is here.
Black Panther: The Album is, despite everything, my favorite of Kendrick Lamar’s albums (and I’m not alone here: it’s also Robert Christgau’s). The others are more brilliant, perhaps, but they seem labored, and there are usually a couple of tracks that you simply never want to hear again. While Black Panther’s best tracks have Lamar all over them, and while Lamar wrote or cowrote all the songs, the soundtrack benefits from its collaborative nature, which forces Lamar to relax a little. It also benefits from being based on a comic book rather than real life (some of my other favorite hip-hop records—both KMD albums, Slick Rick’s The Ruler’s Back—are also influenced by comic books). Christgau rightly calls the album “sneakily experimental,” but it’s also great pop music, by turns angry and sweet.
Logan Richardson is an alto saxophonist from Kansas City who moved to New York City at the age of 21 in 2001 and made quite a name for himself. His career seemed to culminate in a 2015 album (his third) on Blue Note with jazz superstars Pat Metheny, Jason Moran, and Nasheet Waits, with a typically New York sound: spiky and difficult. Then he turned his back on all that. He went back to Kansas City (though not for good—he’s been living in Paris since 2011), got together with local black musicians (electric guitarist Justus West, electric bassist DeAndre Manning, and jaw-dropping drummer Ryan Lee) and a second electric guitarist (Igor Osypov) from the Ukraine, and just improvised, the tunes coming together through interplay and imagination, with nothing ever written down. The result is a thick, blistering, stuttering, fierce mix of metal, jazz, and funk, simultaneously invigorating and meditative (sorry about all the adjectives there). I’m no expert, but as far as I can tell this is the darkest and most powerful “black rock” record since Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain, and the best jazz-rock record since the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Inner Mounting Flame (both from 1971). It’s called Blues People, after the Amiri Baraka book, and was released on Ropeadope Records in April 2018.
Two months ago, Jupiter & Okwess gave the most dynamic rock concert I’ve ever seen. Each of the six members showed off their distinctive characters while getting the audience frenzied. Their second record, Kin Sonic (2017), distills their adrenaline into a potent brew, adding rock and funk elements to the Congolese rumba I used to groove to in the 1980s and ’90s to create a more international sound. Jupiter, whose real name is Jean-Pierre Bokondji, was born in Kinshasa in 1963, and spent his childhood in Tanzania and East Berlin, absorbing the sounds of American soul from his record player. He returned to Kinshasa at age seventeen and, cut off from his family and sleeping on the streets, devoted his life to music. His band, Okwess (which means “food” in Kibunda), has spent years perfecting their musicianship—and their astonishing performance routines. With lyrics in six languages (Lingala, Tshiluba, Mongo, Ekonda, Tetela, and French), and with six distinctive singers, Kin Sonic exemplifies creative interplay and a devotion to crowd pleasing. But it never masks its political anger, and the source of its energy is not just the will to dance but the impulse to revolt.
More of my favorite albums will follow shortly . . .