April 29, 1999
Tasty as sweet potato pie and homemade butter-drenched cornbread, this warm and hearty country blues album is also something of a surprise. For over 20 years, Olu Dara has been working as a sideman, quietly building admiration in jazz circles as a challenging, stellar cornetist. I understand that his avant-garde cornet work forwards the cosmic ideas of endearing jazz weirdos like Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman, but he kept it as earthy as can be on this, his first solo release.
Dara backs himself on cornet, but also plays a mean slide guitar and has a friendly, conversational voice - he's a one man dream team. Songs like "Zora" combine the heartbreaking cornet of Louis Armstrong and the slashing guitar of Robert Johnson with the Pan-African vocal expressiveness of Taj Mahal. This album encompasses African folk music, muddy Delta blues, smoky back alley jazz and even nods to hip-hop on "Jungle Jay". With guest vocalist Mayanna Lee, his reckless fusion of genres makes the sensual "Bubber (if only)" sound strangely like PJ Harvey fronting Tommy Dorsey, and "Father Blues" has Dara successfully channeling the twin moans of Son House and Leadbelly.
All this sounds as natural and unforced as a light Sunday morning rain shower, and is just as refreshing. True to the title, Dara slides through the dense bluesy Mississippi mud, skips up to Chicago for some sophisticated guitar, rides the rails down to New Orleans for fatback rhythms and sweet horns, ending up in the bustle of Harlem. Remarkably unselfconscious yet wise and affectionate, In The World is a big aural hug that brings together geography and time, a capsule of African-America music, culture and experience of the last 80 years.
- Jared O'Connor
Warm and hearty
country blues