For many years, I thought I hated jazz. Turns out I just had a narrow view of jazz. Took me until into my 30s to appreciate that it wasn’t all smooth grooves with shuffling drums, nagging basslines and tooting horns, often with plinking piano or easy listening Hammond organ augmentation. Once I came around to the understanding that jazz was so much more than this, I came to realise that not all jazz is shit.
‘Slow Bones’ is from Tony Allen’s upcoming new album with Hugh Masekela, ‘Rejoice’, the first posthumous release from Masekela, who passed away in 2018. According to the blurb, ‘Allen and Masekela are accompanied on this track by a new generation of well-respected jazz musicians including Joe Armon-Jones (Ezra Collective) on keys and Steve Williamson on saxophone’.
And it’s probably ok if you dig this kind of jazz. But it’s the kind of jazz that all about smooth grooves with shuffling drums, nagging basslines and tooting horns, and while I could pick apart and celebrate the technical adeptness of the performance, summarising objectively the positive qualities, music is about what resonates on a personal level, and while many will doubtless love it, I can’t be doing with this kind of muso cal.
