The Freedom Principle

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The Freedom Principle

Canada's longest running syndicated radio show (40+ years) featuring new releases of the African diaspora.

Featuring music of the African Diaspora, this program sees acoustic ensemble music as a developing world jazz incorporating styles and rhythms which draw from indigenous sources. On the air since June 1986, The Freedom Principle features new releases from the disparate genres of the African Diaspora with occasional forays into specialized thematic programs. Past programs include Manding Swing, Con

golese Rumba, Zimbabwean Liberation, South African Jazz, Mississippi Delta Slide & Moan, African Impressionism in American Jazz, etc.

12/15/2025

Last chance to support this budding community radio station. The raffle takes place today! Immediate reward?!
https://cvox.ca/digfm/

12/14/2025

Adrian Sherwood African Head Charge Speakers Corner Quartet - (2025) Barbican Heights - On-U Sound Records
On-U Sound fan group (Official)
A meeting of three visionary forces, Barbican Heights captures the electricity of a single day in the studio, where dub alchemist Adrian Sherwood, the trance-percussive engine of African Head Charge, and the boundary-erasing jazz of Speakers Corner Quartet fuse into something both spontaneous and sharply sculpted. Reimagining AHC’s “Wicked Kingdom of This Earth” and SCQ’s “Topanga” with thick beds of bass pressure, spectral electronics, and conversational improvisation, the EP turns familiar material into shifting, hypnotic terrain. Sherwood’s mixwork is unmistakable: textures bloom and dissolve, rhythms mutate, and the session’s semi-improvised origins remain palpable in the music’s restless forward motion.
The two new pieces, “Musical Medicine” and “Garden of Inspiration,” feel like dispatches from a shared language discovered on the spot—dubwise architecture animated by SCQ’s chamber-jazz precision and African Head Charge’s ritual propulsion. Alex White’s contributions on guitar and keys add flashes of psychedelic edge, rounding out a soundworld that sits comfortably between club culture, avant-jazz, and Afro-diasporic rhythm science. Short in length but dense in ideas, Barbican Heights is less a crossover than a convergence: proof of how effortlessly these artists can stretch their traditions when placed in the same creative laboratory.

Provided to YouTube by IIP-DDSMusical Medicine · Adrian Sherwood · African Head Charge · Speakers Corner QuartetBarbican Heights℗ On-U SoundReleased on: 2025...

12/14/2025

Black Jesus eXperience (BJX) -(2025) Time Telling - Agogo Records
Time Telling is the latest album from Melbourne’s Black Jesus Experience, a long-running ensemble known for blending Ethiopian traditional modes with jazz, funk, and hip-hop. The record features new material built around the group’s signature five-tone Ethiopian melodic frameworks, supported by horns, percussion, and rhythm-section grooves. Several tracks reference themes the band has explored over two decades—community, displacement, and social resilience—with vocalist Enushu Taye continuing to anchor the sound through lyrics sung in Amharic.
Musically, the album alternates between tightly structured ensemble writing and open, trance-leaning passages shaped by layered percussion and extended vamps. Pieces such as “Earth to Earth” and “Alemtsahaye” foreground Ethiopian modal structures, while tracks like “Stipa” and “Dakini Land” integrate contemporary jazz-funk patterns. Within the group’s catalogue, Time Telling functions as both a continuation of their Ethio-jazz fusion approach and a reflection on recovery and collective support following Taye’s return to performing.

Provided to YouTube by !K7 MusicPeople Broken People · Black Jesus ExperienceTime Telling℗ 2025 Agogo RecordsReleased on: 2025-11-21Associated Performer: Neg...

12/14/2025

Cristina Branco - (2025) Mulheres de Abril (Portugal) – SR
Cristina Branco returns to the repertoire of José Afonso with Mulheres de Abril, a concept album that reframes his songs through the voices of the women who inhabit them. Where Afonso’s originals often held these figures in symbolic silence, Branco’s interpretations bring them forward with clarity and emotional weight, creating a cross-generational dialogue about intimacy, freedom, and the feminine experience within Portugal’s social history. Her long-time ensemble shapes the material with chamber-jazz elegance—subtle piano, warm double bass, and understated percussion giving space for the poetry to breathe.
The selection of eight songs is sharply curated, focusing on characters who embody solitude, resilience, and quiet resistance. Branco doesn’t modernize Afonso so much as illuminate him, letting the nuances of pieces like “Endechas a Bárbara Escrava” or “Canção da Paciência” resonate with renewed contemporary relevance. Mulheres de Abril feels both reverent and quietly radical: a beautifully performed, intimate tribute that restores agency to the women embedded in one of Portugal’s most cherished songbooks.

'Mulheres de Abril' is available in CD, vinyl and streamingStream: https://mermaids.ffm.to/mulheresdeabril Buy: https://www.musicglue.com/cristinabrancoUpcom...

12/14/2025

Granmoun Lélé — the Réunionese singer, percussionist, storyteller, and ceremonial leader born Julien Philéas — is the focus of this restored reissue of Soléyé, issued by BABANI with the Philéas family. First released in 1995, the album captures Lélé and his family ensemble performing repertoire drawn from servis kabaré, the ritual maloya tradition rooted in Malagasy, Tamil, and Afro-Creole heritage. The opening and closing versions of “Soléyé” frame the set like a night-to-dawn ceremony, while pieces such as “Belanzé,” “Inawangué,” and “Goulou” showcase the ensemble’s vocal interplay and polyrhythmic percussion.
Presented with refreshed sound, the album underlines Lélé’s role as both musician and cultural bearer, preserving forms that sit at the heart of Réunion’s communal and spiritual life. Its chants, drum cycles, and call-and-response structures document maloya not as performance style but as living ritual practice. Soléyé remains a cornerstone of Réunion’s musical history, now accessible with the depth and clarity it has long deserved.

Granmoun LÉLÉ – SoléyéOfficial 2025 reissue by BABANI x KRÉOL ART, in collaboration with the Philéas family.Originally released in 1995, Soléyé is one of the...

12/14/2025

Griot Galaxy - (2025) Live on WUOM 1979 - Two Rooms Records
A major expansion of the Griot Galaxy story, Live on WUOM 1979 is a revelatory snapshot of the Detroit avant-garde at its most combustible. Captured in a compact quartet lineup—Faruq Z. Bey and Anthony Holland on reeds, Jaribu Shahid on bass, and Tani Tabbal on drums—the session distills the group’s cosmic mathematics into raw, propulsive form. Their hallmark blend of polyrhythmic drive, polytonal horn lattices, and Afro-futurist poetics is already fully realized here: “Dragons” coils with tense momentum, “Osiris” unfurls in ritualistic arcs, and “Androgeny” shows the ensemble’s gift for turning dense material into something hypnotically alive. Long overshadowed by their scarce studio discography, this recording finally gives proper weight to a band whose influence has loomed far larger than their released output.
The restoration of this radio performance, newly mastered and paired with a rare interview, feels less like an archival issue than the recovery of an essential chapter in creative Black music. Shahid and Tabbal—both steeped in Sun Ra’s discipline of groove and chaos—anchor the music with a muscular elasticity, while Bey and Holland move between shrieks, chants, and tightly braided motifs that never lose their narrative pull. Live on WUOM 1979 documents a group on the cusp of its most defining years, playing with a clarity of purpose that makes their later cult status feel inevitable. For anyone tracing the lineage from the AACM to Detroit’s own radical continuum, this is mandatory listening: fierce, visionary, and finally rescued from the margins of memory.

From the 1984 Metro Times Music Awards A tribute to the late, great Faruq Z. Bey, whose vision, skill and dedication raised the standard for his instrument a...

12/14/2025

Jill Newman Blues - (2025) Little Bit of Luck – Independent
On her third album, Little Bit of Luck, Pacific Northwest guitarist–songwriter Jill Newman leans fully into the roots-and-blues sensibility she’s been quietly refining for years. Recorded at Seattle’s Studio Litho, the album feels warm, lived-in, and handmade, its nine originals shaped by Newman’s clear, unaffected vocals and her versatile guitar work—particularly her lyrical slide playing. The songs move between ease and ache: the title track opens with a laid-back, harmonica-lit groove about needing presence more than possessions, while “Lost Without You” and “Making Up for Lost Time” reveal a writer unafraid of vulnerability, folding regret and tenderness into melodies that land gently but decisively. The band—Patrick McDanel, Kelly Van Camp, Scott Smith, plus tasteful guest contributions from Annie Jantzer, Joe Doria, Chris Gestrin, and cellist Peggy Lee—keeps the arrangements spacious and supportive, allowing the songs’ emotional core to shine.
As the album progresses, Newman broadens the palette without losing cohesion. “Lay My Worries Down” rides a funky organ pulse; “Not Gonna Change My Mind” adds a ragged blues-rock edge; and the instrumental “Yellow Dog Shuffle,” a playful nod to her dog Lucy, shows off her touch, tone, and love of groove. The lone cover, “Love Has No Pride,” closes the record with understated conviction, its simplicity reinforcing the album’s overarching strength: honesty delivered without theatrics. Little Bit of Luck isn’t trying to reinvent roots music—it’s doing something rarer, offering sincerity, craftsmanship, and lived experience in songs that feel both familiar and deeply personal.

Provided to YouTube by CDBabyLittle Bit of Luck · Jill NewmanLittle Bit of Luck℗ 2025 Jill NewmanReleased on: 2025-04-23Auto-generated by YouTube.

12/14/2025

John Scofield & Dave Holland - (2025) Memories of Home – ECM
Two titans of modern jazz meet in a setting as exposed as it gets: guitar and double bass, recorded with ECM’s trademark clarity. Memories of Home marks the first duo album between John Scofield and Dave Holland, though their musical history spans decades—Miles Davis ensembles, Joe Henderson sessions, and the ScoLoHoFo quartet. Here they revisit familiar repertoire from across their catalogues, stripping each tune to its melodic and harmonic core. Scofield’s pieces like “Icons at the Fair,” “Meant to Be,” and the blues-tinged “Mine Are Blues” reveal how naturally Holland slots into his phrasing, answering lines with warmth and rhythmic lift. The interplay is conversational but never indulgent, each phrase placed with the ease of musicians who know exactly when to lean in and when to leave space.
Holland contributes some of the album’s most striking moments, including a tender tribute to Ray Brown (“Mr. B”), the elastic pulse of “Not for Nothin’,” and the title track, which draws on the bassist’s early bluegrass roots. The emotional centre, though, is Scofield’s ballad “Easy for You,” unfolding slowly as Holland shapes a luminous, deeply felt solo. Throughout the album, the pair balance lyricism, swing, and textural nuance, offering a masterclass in duo communication. Memories of Home feels both intimate and expansive—a distilled exchange between two artists reflecting on long careers while sounding utterly present.

Provided to YouTube by Universal Music GroupYou I Love · John Scofield · Dave HollandMemories of Home℗ 2025 ECM Records GmbH, under exclusive license to Deut...

12/14/2025

Kahil ElZabar - (2025) Let the Spirit Out (Live at mu) - Spiritmuse Records
Recorded over two nights at the intimate audiophile venue mu in London, Let the Spirit Out captures Kahil El’Zabar and the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble in a wholly live ritual setting, where audience presence becomes part of the music’s energy. New compositions sit alongside reimagined versions of “Footprints,” “Summertime,” and “Caravan,” all rendered with the Ensemble’s characteristic blend of spiritual jazz, groove-based improvisation, and communal call-and-response. The stripped-back instrumentation—El’Zabar’s percussion and voice, Corey Wilkes’ trumpet, Alex Harding’s baritone sax, and Ishmael Ali’s cello—creates an open, resonant sound field that emphasizes pulse, breath, and repetition.
Across the set, the focus is on music as healing exchange rather than performance spectacle. Pieces such as “From Your Heart” and the title track stretch into extended forms, building slowly through rhythmic layering and collective improvisation. El’Zabar’s concept for the recording—to document a live spiritual encounter rather than a studio artifact—comes through clearly: the music moves with ritual intention, foregrounding renewal, presence, and emotional release. Let the Spirit Out stands as a vivid document of the Ensemble’s current language and a reminder of El’Zabar’s long-standing commitment to music as communal practice.

https://ethnicheritageensemble.bandcamp.com/ A powerful yet playful reimagining of the jazz classic ‘Caravan’ by Juan Tizol & Duke Ellington, this track capt...

12/14/2025

Lone Ark, Roberto Sanchez - (2025) Singers & Players - Evidence Music
Roberto Sánchez returns to his Lone Ark moniker with Singers & Players, a rare project in which the veteran Spanish producer steps forward as lead vocalist. Recorded at his famed A-Lone Ark Muzik Studio in Santander—an analogue shrine to 1970s Jamaican engineering—the album is steeped in classic roots reggae aesthetics: warm tape saturation, deep and steady basslines, hand-played percussion, and devotional, socially attuned lyricism. Sánchez draws the riddims from his earlier Showcase I & II instrumentals, re-animating them with new vocal performances that feel grounded, meditative, and unmistakably rooted in the Caribbean spiritual tradition.
Across its nine tracks, Singers & Players highlights Sánchez’s knack for atmosphere and reverence. “Mr. Liar” rides a melodica line that nods directly to Augustus Pablo, while “Words of My Mouth” lifts its prayerful refrain from Psalm 19, capturing the album’s devotional centre. Supported by longtime collaborators—including bassist Lee and keyboardist I Man Cruz—Sánchez delivers a set of roots reggae crafted with deep respect for its lineage. It’s a modest, unflashy record, but one that reaffirms Sánchez’s place as one of Europe’s most devoted stewards of the classic Jamaican sound.

Provided to YouTube by Evidence MusicMr. Liar · Lone Ark · Roberto SanchezSingers & Players℗ A-Lone / Evidence MusicReleased on: 2025-11-28Producer: Roberto ...

12/14/2025

Or Kantor - (2025) Snake Island - Anova Music
On his sophomore release Snake Island, Or Kantor deepens the cinematic, transportive language he introduced on Sarda Sarda, crafting instrumentals that function like scenes from an unseen film. Calling his aesthetic “Subterranean music,” Kantor blends Mediterranean balladry, desert blues, spiritual jazz, and psychedelic textures into a sound that feels both ancient and dreamlike.
Twangy guitars, dusty organ tones, and spacious grooves set the mood, while guest trumpeter Sefi Zisling adds a luminous melodic presence on two of the album’s highlights. What begins as a fictional love story unfolds into a fully realized sonic world—one shaped by Kantor’s years as a visual artist and his affinity for evocative, narrative-driven composition.
The album’s strength lies in its atmospheric clarity: every track feels like a landscape rendered in sound, from the pulsing urgency of “Milos Viper” to the wide-angle stillness of “The Stillness of Forever.” Kantor’s influences—Gábor Szabó, Omar Khorshid, Dorothy Ashby, The Budos Band—surface not as references but as colours absorbed into his palette. If Sarda Sarda hinted at possibilities, Snake Island marks the moment Kantor steps fully into his own mythic territory, offering a soundtrack to a film that lives only in memory yet feels vividly real.

Provided to YouTube by KudosRecordsThe Golden Temple Revelation · Or Kantor · Sefi ZislingThe Golden Temple Revelation℗ Anova MusicReleased on: 2025-06-06Mai...

12/14/2025

Siwane Muzic - (2025) Amann - Protomaterial Records
Amann is the debut album from Siwane, a project built around vocalist Mounia Siwane and a Lyon-based ensemble led by guitarist-composer Stani Jardel. The compositions draw from popular melodic material associated with the Al-Andalus era, integrating it into newly written pieces arranged for electric guitar, bass, drums, and percussion. The album features Siwane on vocals, Jardel on guitar, Vincent Domergue on bass, Wendlavim Zabsonré on drums and percussion, and Mohamed M’Sahel on additional percussion. Recorded and released in 2025, the project presents historically rooted themes reframed within a contemporary ensemble format.
Musically, the album blends Andalusi melodic contours with jazz-informed harmonic language and modern rhythmic structures. Jardel’s electric guitar anchors the arrangements, while the dual-percussion setup creates cyclical, groove-oriented frameworks around Siwane’s ornamented vocal lines. The material alternates between adapted traditional motifs and Jardel’s original compositional responses to them, resulting in a hybrid sound that situates the project between modal improvisation and structured ensemble writing. Within the group’s emerging catalogue, Amann functions as a conceptual exploration of Al-Andalus repertoire through a present-day jazz lens.

Provided to YouTube by Kontor New Media GmbHAmann Amann · SiwaneAmann Amann℗ Protomaterial RecordsReleased on: 2025-09-05Artist: SiwaneProducer: Joan Arnau P...

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