Uncut Presents Music Is Your Radar: 16 Rare And Unreleased Tracks From Damon Albarn's Record Label Honest Jons
CD, 2009, Heftbeilage

UNCUT | UNCUT 2009 07 | UNCUT TAKE 146 July 2009 | UNCUT Presents | HONEST JONS RECORDS Ladbroke Grove London England | RESPECT The Value Of MUSIC // (c)/(p) 2009 Uncut / Ignite! IPC Media Ltd.


Hip Hop, Reggae, Folk Pop, Soul, Afrobeat


4.: previously unreleased
5 - remastered
6 - remastered
7.: previously unreleased
14.: previously unreleased
15 - remastered

Damon Albarn introduces Music Is Your Radar - a selection of cuts from his own label, Honest Jon's...
Honest Jon's Records has been selling quality reggae, African classics, rare R'n'B and a wide diversity of other choice sounds from its store in Notting Hill's Portobello Road since 1974. "I started going there in the early 1990s," Damon Albarn tells Uncut. "But I didn't really talk to anyone in the shop for years. I'd just sneak in, buy a record and then scuttle away."
Eventually he got to talking and by 2000, when Albarn was about to make his first trip to west Africa, he had struck up a close friendship with Honest Jon's co-owners, Mark Ainley and Alan Scholefield. "They were recommending a lot of African music to me and when I came back from
Mali with hours of tape, it seemed logical to start a label with them to put some of the stuff out," he says. Albarn's own album, Mali Music, became the first release on the Honest Jon's label in 2002. Since then, the imprint's output has been staggeringly - almost bewilderingly - diverse, ranging from previously out-of-print seminal releases by names such as Candi Staton and Moondog to new recordings by former Specials singer Terry Hall and The Good, The Bad & The Queen drummer Tony Allen, via archive recordings of calypso, Arabic music and a myriad other golden obscurities, discovered languishing in EMI's vaults, much of it not heard in 70 or 80 years.
"There's no musical policy or philosophy other than that there are no boundaries to good music, it has to be stuff we like and it has to be different," says Albarn, whose one condition when he launched the label with Ainley and Scholefield was that he would play a hands-on role. "The major labels probably wouldn't touch most of what we put out. I think the spirit of what we do is not militant exactly, but very steadfast," he says. "I'd hesitate to say Honest Jon's is unique. But I love the way it's developed and I feel now that we really can do anything..."
Check out just how the label is capable of anything as Mark Ainley talks us through these 16 tracks from the Honest Jon's catalogue, several of them previously unreleased and only available on this very CD...

1 | HYPNOTIC BRASS ENSEMBLE
Ballicki Bone
Mark Ainley: Eight brothers [sons of Chicago jazz legend Phil Cohran] tearup the tune they wrote to do their childhood chores by. Man called Flea [from Red Hot Chili Peppers] on bass."

2 | TERRY HALL & MUSHTAQ
Ten Eleven
"From the album that Terry Hallmade in 2003 with Mushtaq, who used to be part of the British-Asian band Fun-Da-Mental. This track features the blind rapper Oujdi from Paris in Arabic and Damon singing (in English)."

3 | TREMBLING BELLS
Goathland
"A hit with both Will Oldham and Joe Boyd. This track isn't on their album, Carbeth, which
we've just put out and is previously unreleased. Goathland, by the way, is a tiny village of about 400 people on the North Yorkshire moors..."

4 | ABDEL HADI HALO & THE EL GUSTO ORCHESTRA OF ALGIERS
Ya L'Quadi
"Another unreleased track, recorded by Honest Jon's at the Algiers School of Music, located between the harbour and the Casbah, in October 2006. Most of the musicians on it began playing together more than 50 years ago, and Damon produced."

5 | ERROL BELLOT
What A Wonderful Feeling
"Brilliant, haughty JA avant-gardism, inspiredby Jammy's Sleng Teng explosion. A favourite of Damon's and with the dubstep scene."

6 | WERE OMITO
Aoko
"Recorded in the mid 1950s and not heard in half a century, this is the first time this track has ever been on CD. It has a particular relevance right now as it's music from the Jalou tribe in east Africa, from which Barack Obama is descended..."

7 | SIMONE WHITE
Bunny In A Bunny Suit
"Simone's an American singer-songwriter whose album I Am The Man we released in 2007. This song - getting a first airing here - was written for her by her friends Frank Bango and Richy Vesecky and is from her forthcoming album."

8 | CANDI STATON
I'll Sing A Love Song To You "In Candi Staton's own words: "I was watching a movie about this woman who wanted this man to fall in love with her. They were great friends and he always had her to come to when he needed someone to lean on, but he never crossed that line. She wanted him to cross it - and I was inspired to write the song after watching the movie!'"

9 | TONY ALLEN
Moyege
This is from the round-the-clock sessions in Lagos, Nigeria in 2005, which we released on the album, Lagos No Shaking. 'Moyege' means 'I'm free'. It's a song about relative autonomy."

10 | WAREIKA HILL SOUNDS
Coconut Head Special
"This was a new recording for Honest Jon's in 2006 by Calvin Cameron, from the Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari and the Light Of Saba."

11 | MOONDOG
Bumbo
"This track is from the mid-1950s, when Moondog lived and busked on the streets of New York, blind and dressed like a Viking."

12 | ELMORE JUDD
Bass Bully
"Brand new and available for the first time on CD. Elmore is from Tufnell Park in north London and has travelled to Mali, Nigeria and the Congo with Damon and Africa Express..."

13 | KOKANKO SATA
Allah Kognuman Don
"We recorded this outdoors in Bamako, Mali among crowds of children, strutting peacocks and torrential downpours.' You can also hearheron Damon's Mali Music."

14 | LAS MALAS AMISTADES
Te Hablo
"Another new and unreleased recording from Bogota, Colombia. They were formed by art and film students in the mid-1990s..."

15 | PARVANEH
Mansoori [Parvāneh - Mansuri (Chahārgāh): HJR69CD in 2014]
"We re-mastered this from an old 78 recorded in Iran in 1928. Like Track 6, it's been completely forgotten ever since until we tracked it down in the EMI vaults..."

16 | MORITZ VON OSWALD TRIO
Pattern 2
"A new project of one half of [influential Berlin techno act] Basic Channel. This is an excerpt from Ricardo Villalobos' favourite track -'a frequency massage', he calls it."