august 2025

hello all, it’s gonna be a long and we out here heavy one this month!

for those who have not been forced to talk to me in person recently, we out here is a festival, curated largely by gilles peterson, in rural dorset. i learned about it exactly one week before the first edition, in 2019, and was like ‘holy fuck, i have to be there next year’. me + jen + christine + david bought tickets for 2020, but you know, 2020. and then life had happened to me in the intervening period in a way that just made it impossible. but finally!

i’m kinda still buzzing. being in a place where i could sit down opposite any random person on the dusty festival ground, and immediately be deep in exchanging recommendations and highlights, was so nice.

the beauty of having your own newsletter is that you can write screeds about the best things you saw, and someone might even read them! please tune in below for rotary connection 222; kahil el’zabar; arp frique & the perpetual singers; a general round up. if i can even make you feel a fragment of what i felt, i’ll be pleased.

i was fairly down to see rotary connection 222, the celebration of producer, arranger, songwriter, musician etc charles stepney’s career. put together by his daughters (the stepney sisters) in the wake of their releasing of the step on step album a few years ago, rotary connection 222 is a large scale orchestral celebration of stepney’s work—think rotary connection (duh); minnie riperton; marlena shaw; earth, wind & fire etc—and had previously only been performed in chicago. me, before: “well. sounds very pleasant! step on step was an interesting piece of work, combining unreleased demo tapes with family history. it’ll be a nice saturday night.” fair to say, i slightly understated how pleasant it might be.

we were running a bit late. gorgeous warm evening, just turned dark, weaving through the back of the massive crowd. everything was already set up on stage, and the 30-piece orchestra struck up les fleurs. how pretty, i think. would be great if all these people weren’t talking. josh is like ‘we gotta keep moving in’. ok ok. weave on. but as it starts building towards the first chorus, vocal harmony upon harmony layering on top of the beautiful brass arrangements, i’m like ‘ok… hold on... this is sounding kinda… major…?? we gotta quit weaving!!’. thankfully, just in time to 🌸 ring all the bells, sing, tell all the people, everywhere that the flower has come 🌸, we made it to a decent spot. oh my god. you could tell as soon as the cymbals started crashing in that first chorus that this was going to be an incredibly special performance. as far as the eye could see, everyone was suddenly a) completely rapt and b) brimming with joy.

i picked this specific song for the playlist because it was an unreleased number from the stepney archives that came out last year. i don’t remember hearing it when it came out, but i knew it, so i guess i must have done. it was in the later part of the set, after fun and groovy earth, wind and fire numbers, a big california soul singalong, an educational video montage about stepney’s work, an appearance from o.g. rotary connection member shirley wahls (in her 90s and she even GOT UP from her chair while she was belting it out??). by this point, i’m in love with the entire world, walking on fuckin clouds, suspended in the whole ethereal experience. arms in the air, singing along like baby i’m high / you took my soul to the sky, and someone down-breeze from me just gently fires a bubble gun. toddlers are totally justified in their reactions to bubbles; it was the cherry on top of the cartoon diner sundae. i’ve been to some amazing gigs in my life, but this was kinda bananas. everyone i spoke to afterwards relayed some similar tale, how they were tearing up or otherwise overcome with how special it felt. truly a privilege to have witnessed!!

after such a delectable saturday night it was no wonder that i was feeling, err, worse for wear on sunday. in my defence, it turned out not to be just a hangover, but an impending few days of a very sad stomach (food? heat? toilets? i hope never to know). thankfully, i could do a lot of sitting on the ground, listening, none more so than at kahil el’zabar’s midday show. he is an incredible bandleader, managing his quartet in what felt like a fairly off the cuff performance while drumming (often on a large box) and vocalising. really mesmerising, could have sat there for like two more hours.

and to wind it back to saturday afternoon, i was pretty pumped to see dutch producer arp frique, having enjoyed some of his earlier electronic afro-latin collaborations with the likes of orlando julius and ronald snijders. on his recent album, the gospel of jesamy, he collaborates with amsterdam-based gospel group the perpetual singers, with a real high energy, jesus-heavy, praise break vibe—live, this was a BLAST. particularly on this track where perpetual singers’ singular dude, texan brandon delagraentiss, absolutely smashed it out of the park. what a presence, what a vocal. it was 30 degree baking sun and yet i was boogieing on down. haven’t stopped listening to the album since!

orchestre poly-rythmo de cotonou, afro-funk legends from benin again in the absolutely scorching afternoon heat; leroy burgess, big disco hitter who i honestly didn’t know that much and yet tired myself out dancing at; joe bataan, very sassy; dj set from pete bbe, who dropped the brian jackson version of the bottle at just the right time; emma-jean thackray’s techno set; big massive in the tomorrow’s warriors tent, who i hope are gonna be both big and massive because they were amazing; dancing to oby oniyoha’s enjoy your life; hermeto pascoal’s band and their deployment of squeezy farm animals in percussion; yolanda charles playing bass for james mason — incredible skills; gettin hot, sweaty and d o w n at colleen cosmo murphy’s late set at love dancin; sitting in the sun and thinking about how hard i worked to be able to do sth like this and how it is really a pinnacle of the not easy journey of the last couple of years. :’) out here!!! xxx

some 70s west virginian psychedelic rock with surprisingly groovy latin percussion and a wonderful piano solo that just… fades out?? this track would be perfection if it was 7 minutes long, but alas, i only get to feel like i am driving this exact car for all of 2 minutes 47 seconds.

shout out to whichever member of staff at alder was responsible for playing ethio jazz woodwind star girma wolde michael’s loga album in full one otherwise quiet tuesday night. unexpected and i personally appreciated it!!

hearing very “mixed” (bad) things about sault’s all points east takeover. however i don’t think anyone was dissing the actual performances - when they happened! been re-listening to the untitled (god) album and obsessing over the little almost boogie woogie piano riff in this.

the weekend before we out here, i got a vision of myself in a vibrant boxy patterned shirt (cropped and baggy like that butch style icon on instagram always says is the best fit; enough pattern to feel distracting etc). i went on a tour of sheffield’s best vintage shops to try to bring this vision to life. unfortunately i came home sans shirt and feeling terrible about myself! no shade to the shops, it was a me problem. staring down the barrel of a self-imposed evening at factory floor, i could barely contemplate changing out of a hoodie. but, i thought, perhaps i could solve this by indulging in a little of the angst i used to feel when i would listen to the red hot chili peppers as a pre-teen. and so i found myself on the spotify playlist ‘transmasc toxic masculinity indulgence’ (l m f a o) blaring pretty fly (for a white guy). and you know, it sorted me right out!