Another Nice retrospective, another set of Nice liner notes. It's KALIMA from 1986.
It’s the incidental stories that put things in to perspective isn’t it? Factory Records had an offer from Robin Millar to record this album, Millar having heard and taken a fancy to some earlier KALIMA demos. Millar had produced the supermarket-filling "Diamond Life " with jazzish SADE ADU in 1984. But Factory reckoned (wrongly as it turned out) that Yellow 2 in Stockport would do the job more cheaply. Nathan McGough, KALIMA'S manager left the band behind in 1986 to take charge of the HAPPY MONDAYS. And things didn’t quite go on the High Road thereafter.
As former SWAMP CHILDREN, as most of A CERTAIN RATIO and some of SWING OUT SISTER, it's not as if KALIMA were an unsuccessful British jazz combo. The concept and basic personnel stuck around through most of the 80s and produced two more full-length albums after "Night Time Shadows" Sales in Japan and Europe did quite well.
Ann Quigley (vocals and lyrics) and brother Anthony Quigley (bass and soprano sax) were key members. Andrew Connell (SWING OUT SISTER), Jeremy Kerr, Chris Hornerman, Martin Moscrop, John Kirkham and Clifford Saffer are also listed for this release.
The music features Ann Quigley's warmly rich and risk-taking voice. It has a slightly other-world feel to it, with 50s small group jazz, bosa nova pulses, stabs of be-bop and a generally restless point of view. Clever is part of it – being both an attraction and a detraction. British jazz players always seem to me to have that uncertainty about playing in their own style – ultimately the styles are all derived from elsewhere anyway. Finding the right context to listen, the right room, the right company. These are the irrelevant but crucial factors in just how much you’re going to enjoy this album. The music is well up to it.
|
A and B sides from three singles are added to the collection, and there really isn’t a duff track to be heard in the full seventy minutes of music. Sometimes it’s good to pause and relisten to some of the real history of British popular music. It’s a sobering challenge to the increasingly compressed accounts of our national musical life that a steadily dwindling music press have left us with. Even at the time Melody Maker and the NME failed to give coherent accounts of this kind of stuff as they started the long struggle to contain the whole of our music in movements, -isms and trends that they had the duty to label and define. The time has gone, but the music sings on if you let it.
|
