★Honest Jon's
Maki Asakawa
2019 Repress. A stunning survey of the 1970s heyday of this great Japanese singer and countercultural icon. The “Queen of the Japanese Underground” stuck to her unique personal style – long black dress, dark glasses, cloud of cigarette smoke…Deep-indigo, dead-of-night enka, folk and blues, inhaling Billie Holiday and Nina Simone down to the bone. A traditional waltz abuts Nico-style incantation; defamiliarised versions of Oscar Brown Jr and Bessie Smith collide with big-band experiments alongsi…
Time Wept: Vocal Recordings from the Levant, 1906-1925
Stunningly beautiful, poignant music from BilÄÂd al-ShÄÂm -- "the countries of Damascus," known nowadays as Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine -- including performances from the very first recording sessions in the region. The legendary, moody Beirut singer BÅ«lus á¹¢ulbÄÂn is here -- some historians have him singing before Egypt's Pasha IbrÄÂhÄ«m BÄÂshÄ during his military campaign in Syria, in 1841 -- and ḤasÄ«ba Moshēh, Jewish "nightingale of the Damascene gardens.…
Rang'ala
Open-hearted, fresh, lovely, bumptious recordings of women’s singing, from Rang’ala village in southwest Kenya. ‘Dodo’ is a type of traditional Luo music mostly used for entertainment at weddings, drinking parties and wrestling festivals. Songs in praise of the happy couple, the hardest drinkers and the best wrestlers. Ogoya Nengo was born in 1943. Her vocal abilities were discovered when she was herding cattle, as she never attended school, though nowadays her professional name signals bot…
Kelan Philip Cohran & The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble
2018 repress; double LP version. For the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, the voyage to where they are now -- whether tearing up festivals from Glastonbury to Melbourne, or touring with Gorillaz, or recording their first album on Honest Jon's -- has involved a necessary stepping away from their father's shadow. Phil Cohran is the first to recognize this, happily allowing their sound -- heavy on the funk, with the urgency of hip-hop never far away -- to blossom. But likewise this album is for all of them…
To Scratch Your Heart - Early Recordings From Istanbul
The music here is so transfixing, intensely devotional and sublimely beautiful, that some contemporary listeners thought they were levitating. Drawn from recordings made in istanbul by the gramophone company and hmv, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, amidst the ruins of the ottoman empire, it crosses and mixes the folk and classical heritage of turks, greeks, armenians and gypsies, muslims, christians and jews, urbanites and countrypeople, and the demands of tradition and …
Marvellous Boy: Calypso From West Africa
endlessly satisfying' (Boston Phoenix); 'Blending cheeky calypso with rocking highlife — and by turns breezy, wistful and downright uproarious' (Daily Telegraph); 'gems at every turn... weaving highlife, swing, military brass bands, Afro-Cuban jazz, into a hell of a compilation... Honest Jon's have added to the highest order of this simple music of heartbreaking celebration' (Brainwashed). The inter-war dance bands of British West Africa are often strikingly similar in sound to Trinidadian orche…
Open Strings: Early Virtuoso Recordings From The Middle East
'Superbly stylish in conception and packaging, it shows that small independent labels can still be an inspirational force' (Daily Telegraph); 'definitive and essential' (Brainwashed); 'stunning in its historical interest and musicianship' (Boston Phoenix); 'phenomenal and mesmerizing' (Dusted); 'one of the major phonographic salvage operations of our time' (The Wire). 'The archival finds are, without exception, phenomenal – and mesmerizing. The oud, the santour and spike fiddle dominate. There a…
Open Strings: Early Virtuoso Recordings From The Middle East, An
Spectacoular 4LP box on Honest Jon's called Open Strings which features 2 LP's of 78's from the MIddle East circa the 20's (we're talking Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Turkey) and 2 LP's of more contemporary folks who are clearly inspired by such greatness. Thems being the likes of Richard Bishop (no longer calling him a sir as I don't believe the queen has chinned him with her sword), MV/EE, Ricky Tomlinson, Steffen Basho Junghans, Six Organs of Admitance, Micah Blue Smaldone, Michael Flower, Charlie Parr…
Sprigs Of Time: 78s From The EMI Archive
2LP version, in deluxe gatefold sleeve with 2 booklets of photos and notes. This is the third in Honest Jon's series of albums exploring the earliest 78s held in the EMI Hayes Archive. Honest Jon's has spent the last two years delving through more than 150,000 78 records in the temperature-controlled steel vaults of EMI's Archive in Hayes, Middlesex. Following studious compilations of West African and Iraqi music of the 1920s, the latest release in the Honest Jon's Hayes Archive series is a spar…
Give Me Love: Songs of the Brokenhearted: Baghdad, 1925-1929
In the mid-1920s, The Gramophone Company sent representatives into Iraq to investigate the indigenous music found in its record stores and performance halls. Their research laid the foundation for sessions that produced almost 1,000 recordings. The selections on this disc, restored from their original 78s, present a compelling multicultural portrait of Iraq that is all but forgotten today.Rural Arab folk singers, Kurdish violinists, professional Jewish musicians, and prostitutes share equal bill…
The Viking of 6th Avenue - The Authorized Biography
Here is one of the most improbable lives of the 20th century: a blind and homeless man who became a famous eccentric in New York, and who rose to prominence as an internationally respected music presence. Born Louis Thomas Hardin in 1916, Moondog first made an impression in the late ’40s when his music was played by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. His unique, melodic compositions were released on the Prestige jazz label. In the late ’60s the Viking-garbed Moondog was a pop music sens…