Various: Colombia! (Soundway/Southbound)

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Fruko y sus Tesos: A La Memoria Del Muerto
Various: Colombia! (Soundway/Southbound)

Serious ethnomusicologists could analyse this and identify all the various musical styles on display, but that would rather miss the point.

This collection -- pulled together oddly enough by the Brighton-based label Soundway -- is a sampling of tracks recorded between 1960 and '76 on the Disco Fuentes label, a Colombian record company which started recording local musicians in 1934.

So what's here is just a tiny sampler from that label and that country -- but it bristles with energy, humour, propulsive rhythms, swoon-inducing jazz, angular piano solos and stacked up horn sections, rhythmic heat . . . .

Let us hope there is a sequel -- but not too soon. It'll take quite a while to get your breath back after this one.

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Gavin Hancock - Dec 8, 2011

I couldn't wait to get this in my hands once I'd ordered it from Amazon UK and it was worth every dollar. Soundway are one of several brilliant boutique reissue labels excavating forgotten grooves...virtually everything they release is gold.

How the compiler managed to select a mere 20 tracks out of the (presumably) thousands in the Discos Fuentes catalogue is another story but for an intro to the tropical goodness that is the music of Colombia you can't wrong with this.

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