Weekly Music Roundup: Cinder Well, Seun Kuti, and Mike Ladd

This week, Seun Kuti, Cinder Well, and Bobby Weir look back. Plus, returns from Mike Ladd and A Hawk And A Hacksaw. 

Seun Kuti Enlists High-Powered Friends On New LP

Seun Kuti keeps alive the Afrobeat sound of his father, the legendary Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti. Fela’s band was called Africa 70; Seun’s band is Egypt 80 (and for much of its tenure has included Fela’s original bassist). Fela’s Afrobeat groove was the result of his work with the late great drummer Tony Allen. The groove on Seun’s new album, Na Dem, comes in part from working with Femi Koleoso, the drummer who leads the Mercury Prize-winning London band Ezra Collective and who was a protégé of Tony Allen. Koleoso produced the album in addition to drumming on it, and guitarist Tom Morello adds to the star power as well. They all come together on the leadoff track “Adara,” sung in a mix of Pidgin English and Yoruba; the song has the effortless-sounding polyrhythms and horn-heavy sound of classic Afrobeat. 

Cinder Well Helps Mark Free Dirt Records’ 20th Anniversary

American folk singer/songwriter Cinder Well, whose work grows out of her time spent living on the west coast of Ireland and soaking in the local music, is one of the artists helping mark the 20th anniversary of the Washington DC-based record label Free Dirt, which has championed contemporary roots musicians like herself. The Long Memory: 20 Years of Free Dirt Records includes unreleased tracks from Kaia Kater, Willi Carlisle, and others. Cinder Well’s contribution is this song, “One Morning In May,” which is one of dozens of songs in the “Unfortunate Lass” family, where a young woman is undone by fate, or poor decisions, or men’s hands. 

The album’s release today is timed to the annual Brooklyn Folk Festival, taking place at the Church of St. Ann’s in Brooklyn this weekend. 

Mike Ladd Returns to the Future

Rapper and spoken word artist Mike Ladd may be best known for his turn of the century album Welcome To The Afterfuture. This was followed by some – but not a lot of – solo work, as well as quite a bit of collaboration, mostly well outside the usual hip hop circles. A couple of projects with jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer come to mind, as well as work with Ethio-groove band Arat Kilo and Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca. But now, Ladd has released his first solo album in over a decade. Nonechosen is, typically, all over the sonic map, and on this track, “Twenty Five,” he’s looking back twenty five years, and it’s hard not to assume he’s referring, at least obliquely, to the world of Afterfuture. Musically, he’s looking even further back, with a sample from King Crimson’s “Sheltering Sky,” a gently grooving instrumental from their 1981 album Discipline.

A Hawk And A Hacksaw Return… To The Ottoman Empire

The New Mexico-based duo A Hawk And A Hacksaw consists of married couple Jeremy Barnes (of Neutral Milk Hotel) and Heather Trost, both of whom are fans of the traditional folk music and instruments of the Balkans, Romania, Turkey, Armenia, and other areas that had formerly been part of the Ottoman Empire. Over the years, they’ve made seven albums where they rearrange traditional melodies from that region or write their own tunes in that style – but nine years ago, the duo seemed to move on to other projects. Now, they’re back, with their eighth record, inventively called Volume 8, due in February. This week they released the single “Gayda,” which is the name of the bagpipe in southeastern Europe. While Barnes and Trost can and do play lots of instruments from that part of the world, here Trost plays a violin, its sound made crunchy and raw by the use of a distortion pedal, while Barnes plays the double-headed drum known as tupan, or tapan, or daval. Built on a drone, the track is at once mesmerizing and full of barely-controlled energy.

Bobby Weir’s Posthumous Single, With an All-Star Cast

I know he started using Bobby a few years back, but it’s hard to think of the late Grateful Dead singer/guitarist as anything other than Bob Weir. In two weeks, a deluxe edition of his Blue Mountain album will come out, and yesterday we got a previously unreleased live version of the old folk song “Peggy-O,” which will be part of that new release. The Grateful Dead did this song a lot (as did many, many other people), but this version features alternating verses sung by Matt Berninger of The National, with The National’s rhythm section, Scott Devendorf on bass and his brother Bryan on drums. The band’s guitarists, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, sat this one out, but their replacements are no slouches: Steve Kimock and John Mayer. Josh Kaufman of Bonnie Light Horseman (and many, many other bands) and mandolinist Jon Shaw round out an ensemble that offers a rollicking take on this tragic old tale of a love that cannot be.