Sheila Majid

Habibi Funk is happy to present a selection of works by Algerian-born, Amazigh artist Majid Soula. With synths, driving drums, prominent repetitive guitar lines, Majid’s music blends the best of Kabyle sounds, disco, highlife and groovy funk into something wholly unique. At the same time for Majid Soula music is a vessel for his political message.

The 2022 Jazzfest Berlin performance by revered, iconoclastic reedist Peter Brötzmann, Moroccan Gnaoua adept Majid Bekkas playing the two-stringed, camelskin-backed guembre, and Chicago-bred drummer Hamid Drake, documented as Catching Ghosts, is historic.

This 1997 concert marked the first time that vocalist Sheila Jordan and bassist Cameron Brown had performed live as a duo. Nerves aside, they had their Belgian audience captivated from the opening of the set. Jordan improvises much like a horn with her interesting choices of notes as she sings the lyrics to standards like "The Very Thought of You," while Brown is also a superb musician, comping perfectly for her and launching on inventive solo flights of his own.

Four years ago, just after the birth of their first daughter, Sheila Jaffé’s husband, pianist Peter Longworth, passed away. This album is a deeply personal reflection on the experience of grief that followed. The Franck sonata was a regular in Sheila’s home - and Sheila and Peter played it together in lieu of a ‘first dance’ at their wedding. Recording at Potton Hall in Suffolk, with the Welsh pianist Huw Watkins, the album includes Benjamin Britten’s Lachrymae (recorded after a field trip to the Britten library at the Red House and fish and chips on the Aldeburgh coast) and concludes with Elgar’s vast and expressive Sonata for Violin and Piano.