- Sounds Familiar launches a 7-inch series with one of the most gifted musicians in dance music.
- Albums by Kaidi Tatham—the West London mainstay who helped innovate the city's most musically accomplished dance music sub-genre, broken beat—are generally a maximalist affair, with virtuosic piano, flute and percussion exploding off each side. For this reason, a Tatham 7-inch, at a little over four minutes a side, feels like a daunting proposition. Could his sprawling musical vision be contained on a 45?
The answer is yes. This record is the first in a new series of 45s called 7 Inch Nails from Sounds Familiar, the Italian booking agency that has been repping Black music-derived house, disco and broken beat across the European continent. Kaidi is a great lead-off hitter as his music expounds on all those genres and more. Here, he presents a concentrate of his classic style across two incredible tracks.
"Feeling Happy" is a fleet-footed jazz dance track replete with dense piano voicings, solos and the occasional virtuosic bass run. Even so, Tatham tastefully reins in his style, as you might expect from the format. The melodies orbit around a clear instrumental hook—a repeating cluster of joyful piano chords, with Tatham deftly alternating between going off and laying back. The track ends on a classic bruk breakdown, with Tatham's exuberant drums up front in the mix.
The flipside, "Sooner Or Later," takes a more novel approach, sounding like Head Hunters-era Herbie Hancock (and band) trying their hand at a massive downtempo hip-hop beat. This one glides along at just under 110 BPM, with lush horns, strings and heavy bass surrounding a minimalist guitar lead. There are flourishes of funky Brazilian jazz in the outro, as if Tatham was trying to cram as much beautiful music onto this brief record as possible.
Lista de títulos01. Feeling Happy
02. Sooner Or Later