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Jake Long was born in Southfields in Southwest London, Long brought together some of the capital’s most exciting young players as a loose collective he called Maisha. Featuring guitarist Shirley Tetteh and saxophonist Nubya Garcia and more, Maisha cut their debut EP Welcome To A New Welcome for Jazz re:freshed, following up with critically acclaimed album There Is A Place on Brownswood. Long was asked by Gilles Peterson to assemble a band to perform with saxophone legend Gary Bartz at We Out Here Festival and at Royal Festival Hall. Opening up the opportunity to record with Gary Bartz for a direct-to-disc Night Dreamer session, Maisha took a different form once more.
For the new album City Swamp Long spent a time with Maisha collaborators Amané Suganami, Tim Doyle, Twm Dylan, Nubya Garcia, Binker Golding, Tamar Osborn, Shirley Tetteh, Artie Zaitz, and Al MacSween recording material that formed the foundations of City Swamp. He reassembled the tracks, using analogue effects & feeding old reel-to-reel to loop signals back on themselves, to create delays and dub the recordings.
While the record feeds on musical touch points like Miles Davis and classic Funkadelic, working towards a thick & heavy sound that spoke to the work of King Tubby & Russel Elevado’s production of D’Angelo’s Black Messiah. Yet, it is the influence of theorist Mark Fisher on whose foundations the whole project rests.
