Track Listing

1. Okra
2. Rain Shower
3. Natchez Shopping Blues
4. Your Lips
5. Harlem Country Girl
6. Zora
7. Young Mama
8. Bubber (If Only)
9. Father Blues
10. Jungle Jay
11. Kiane

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74092 in Music
• Released on: 1998-07-07
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .21 pounds

From Amazon.co.uk
Over the last two decades, Olu Dara has been known principally as a regular collaborator with jazz reedsman David Murray, playing the cornet. All of this time, he's been operating a blues sideline, his talents also including a stark, Taj Mahal-influenced vocal delivery, coupled with an earthy amplifier-cranked guitar style. He can do it all, equally well. On this long-time-coming debut, he makes an inspired shackling together of Caribbean, African and New Orleans styles (these three being the very basics of its extremely varied ingredients). He works with either a rootsy sextet or as a grainy, sepia-shot one-man band, overdubbing cornet, guitar, drums and percussion on "Zora" and "Natchez Shopping Blues", everything recorded up-close, so we're sitting plumb in the middle of his intimately clanking songs. His son, Nas, raps on "Jungle Jay", with Melba Joyce leading the partying backing vocal posse throughout. "Your lips are juicy", succinctly goes one Afro-chant chorus, while further Caribbean harmonising wafts through from "Okra"'s steamy kitchen session. This was the genre stewpot of its year, maybe even the decade. --Martin Longley