CYMANDE
Cymande (Partisan)
Cratediggers and sample heads alike should be well aware of Cymande, with their work sampled by hip-hoppers all the way back to the Sugar Hill Gang. Rewind 50 years from today and this debut album by nine jazz and fusion-schooled Londoners of Afro-Caribbean origin didn’t prove hits in the UK, but their singles lit up America’s Billboard charts.
Artfully smudging the genre boundaries between heavy roots reggae, jazz and funk, the album still sounds like little else. Zion, its nyabinghi drums and devotional chant mixed with funky bass and flute, should have played well with the Rastafarians, while the instrumental One More has a yearning bluesy quality. You can see the influence on Shabaka Hutchings with the saxophone-led Getting Back, and Listen is spawned from the same wah-wah superfly as Curtis Mayfield.
Cymande takes flight on side two, Dove snaking into Conrad’s heart of darkness like the jazz equivalent of The Doors’ The End. The storm is broken by the sunny cheer of the squiggly funk of Bra, sampled by De La Soul and Gang Starr, followed by the equally plundered The Message.
words CHRIS SEAL
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