Soro

Sometime in spring this year, I drove to our old stamping ground of Tulle, the unlovely prefecture of the Corrèze, to visit a genuine record shop. They're few and far between these days – and just as well because there aren't too many bargains to be had since vinyl's resurgence. I'd been to check out a little shop in Limoges, packed to the rafters with treasures, and come away with yet more records that I didn't need, so restraint this time was a pre-requisite.

The Rev is a tiny little shop on one of the quaies or embankments of the Corrèze river, which flows through the centre of Tulle. Since it opens half way through the customary two-hour lunch break, I had the shelves to myself while the owner picked out tracks at the counter from a pile of new second-hand stock. I found a couple more of the Prestige, Milestone and Riverside label jazz doubles that I've been casually collecting since they came out in the mid '70s. But my heart really missed a beat when I pulled out a mint copy of Salif Keita's Soro.

It's been a part of this household since we moved to Sheffield in the late '80s and embarked on the adventure of married life – but in cassette form. And therein lay a bone of contention, since it was my ex-wife who had sent it to me as a kind of listen-to-what-you're-missing type of goodbye gift. There was probably a subtle dig, too, since it was recorded on a humble D90. If you think you're getting an AD90 from me, moosh, you've got another thing coming. And don't even think of a high-fidelity SA90.

But I mustn't be ungracious. Even on a lo-fi tape, both of us could tell that this man was someone truly special. I might have had one or two records by African artists at this point – I seem to remember picking up something by King Sunny Adé and by Sonny Okosuns, both worthy Nigerian artists, in Cheapo Cheapo Records, the shop in Soho that I would haunt with my friend and work colleague, Pedro, during the couple of years when I worked in the centre of London – but nothing like this. The extraordinary voice of the albino griot from Mali opened my ears to a whole new continent of music.

A year or so later, the Good Wife and I went to see Salif Keita with band, chorus and dancers at some squalid dive in a suburb of Manchester. We slipped an urchin a couple of quid supposedly to keep an eye on her beautiful convertible bottle-green Beetle, in which we would toured this part of France and espied our first future home. It was a fabulous concert, but the music couldn't quite dispel the image in my head of the VW Beetle in the car park with all its tyres slashed. Fortunately, it and we got back to Sheffield intact.

We saw him a second time under very different circumstances some 20 or so years later, playing in the now annual Brive Plage festival (where they dump a lot of sand in a central park and turn it into a kind of pre-fab tropical island). Keita still sang like an angel, but the youthful frisson of that Manchester gig was no longer there. Perhaps we'd grown progressively more blasé with each new edition of our friend Pete's Africa series of tapes and, later, CDs. We met him not long after that first gig and have benefited ever since from an apparent mission in life to promote the music he felt so passionate about.

Finding that gatefold album on the Sterns label in The Rev gave me an injection of youthful excitement. Hearing it back home on the record player in living, breathing stereo was akin to re-discovery. The African nobleman who had been cast out of his community due to a pigment disorder had gone three-dimensional in Cinemascope with Sensaround Sound. Now, that extraordinary heavenly voice just soared up skywards from the speakers.

Our friend Pete will certainly disagree with this choice, because electronic keyboards and modern production techniques do not go with the singer he would have first heard as vocalist for the Super Rail Band de Bamako or Les Ambassadeurs. Soro came out in 1987, by which time Salif Keita had moved to Paris to seek international fame. Inevitably, the production is more sophisticated – even slick, as detractors have suggested – but my God!, the power and the glory. The horn section alone is like Earth Wind & Fire's Phenix horns on steroids.

Apart from blowing my mind, what Soro did do was to send me figuratively scuttling back to West Africa in search of those earlier recordings. And very fine they are, too. Came the current century, this direct descendant of the warrior king who founded the empire of Mali back in the 13^th century went back to live and record in Bamako.

In 2002, he delivered unto us Moffou, which in some ways combines his older, traditional music with that which emanated from the French capital. There are many who cite it as his finest recording, and I for one wouldn't argue. By then, though, I knew more of what to expect. Soro, I suppose, was more like my first love. Nothing thereafter will ever quite be the same.

Having survived, fool that I am, for far too long with the flattened peaks of a basic cassette tape, I find myself in idle moments lowering the stylus on 'Wamba', the funked-up first track, and boosting the volume just to re-experience that spine-tingling first moment when Keita's voice leaps forth above the female chorus like an antelope being flushed out of its shelter by a lion. Words can't really describe a voice like Salif Keita's; you simply have to pin back your lugholes and experience it for yourself.

The man is in his mid-'60s now. Maybe unsurprisingly, he's gone back to his roots and is currently touring with an acoustic line-up. My friend Pete met the man when he was writing for a music magazine and by all accounts he's a charming individual. His 2009 release, La Différence, won an international award and pleads for tolerance and compassion towards albinos. Difference, the singer argues, is not a bad thing. I second that emotion. It's more than just a physiological difference that sets Salif Keita apart from the crowd.

Abbey Road

I somehow seem to have acquired two copies of this album over the years, which suggests how much I value The Beatles' artistic swansong. I think I snapped up my second copy in Cash Converters in the days just before vinyl had its second coming. It was going for a song and I rather fancied the idea of an Apple album made in France by Pathé Marconi.

My sister and brother-in-law have two copies of Sergeant Pepper hidden away in a trunk full of Cat Stevens and Rod Stewart albums that never see the light of day. Being an acquisitive collector, I am of course jealous, but it was actually Abbey Road and not its more lauded iconic predecessor that re-kindled my love affair with the Fab Four.

Earlier in my life, after a period of my childhood when my siblings and I would divide up our meals into four portions, one for each Beatle (and the best bits for our particular faves), over-exposure and perhaps an innate rebelliousness led me to jump the yellow submarine for a few years' close allegiance to the Rolling Stones. That lasted up to and including Let It Bleed, whereupon I became far too caught up in the progressive-music underground bandwagon.

Emerging, though, from a darkened bedroom where I would listen to the questionable glories of Yes, King Crimson and Van der Graaf Generator, spread-eagled on my bed between the two tinny speakers of my first very own stereo system, I bought my first copy of Abbey Road to see what all the fuss was about. My decision was no doubt assisted by that simple but evocative cover of the now shaggy-headed foursome striding across that famous North London zebra crossing.

It's all part of the album's mystique: from all those absurd rumours about Paul's barefoot death to the various homages that have appeared over the years (and what initial indignation I felt when I first saw Booker T. & the MGs' McLemore Avenue, before remembering that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery). And how appropriate it is that their last sojourn in the Abbey Road studios was to produce this their final masterpiece, so they could bow out with a creative bang rather than the desultory whimper that was Let It Be. Giving it this simple title was a nice way to acknowledge the importance of George Martin and his recording domain over the course of their career.

There's also something appropriate in the way that George's contributions finally equalled and even perhaps trumped those of Lennon and McCartney after all those begrudging allocations of a little space on each album for his song-writing efforts. Right at the last, George asserts that he was quite competent after all, thank you very much – only for Frank Sinatra (was it?) to go and spoil it all by saying something stoopid like 'Something' was his favourite Lennon and McCartney number.

While George graduates summa cum laude, it's Ringo's turn to provide some padding, although 'Octupus's Garden' is certainly rather charming and every bit as worthwhile as, say, Paul's 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer', which pales into insignificance beside the first two tracks on Side 1: John's 'Come Together' with its memorable cryptic lyrics, followed by 'Something'. 'Oh Darlin' is notable for Paul's superb singing and the side ends with the long and winding and ultimately somewhat tedious 'I Want You'.

In truth, it's not their finest half hour, but the second side makes up for it with knobs on and transforms Abbey Road into a truly great album. When I first heard it, I was a little mystified. I'd never heard anything quite like the suite of song snippets that follows George's lovely 'Here Comes The Sun'. They all segued into each other, 'Sun King' seemed a curiously close echo of George's song, themes fade out only to reappear a little later and to drop the arm on an individual track demanded guesswork and a lot of luck.

Once I got used to it, though, it would become my single-most played and beloved side of a Beatles' album. It's audacious, creative, dramatic and chock full of such tuneful delights as 'She Came In Through The Bathroom Window', 'Mean Mr. Mustard', 'You Never Give Me Your Money' and 'Carry That Weight'. My wife and I would sing 'Golden Slumbers' to our daughter at bed time and she grew up to love this album as much as we do. Or more accurately, she grew up – as many of her generation have done – to love The Beatles as much as we do.

It has been with me for longer than I care to think, followed me on all my travels – from Northern Ireland to England and then on to France – and I shall give that second copy to my daughter when finally she's ready to flee the parental home. It's a testimony to an album's creative endurance when it can be handed down from one generation to the next without any kind of condescension.

Speak No Evil

Since we were on the subject of Weather Report last time – and the political weather looks decidedly heavy since the Brexit fall-out – it's but a short hop, step and a saxophone squawk to Wayne Shorter. Specifically, his third album for the legendary Blue Note label, Speak No Evil.

It took me a little while to make that short step, but seeing him live at the North Sea Jazz Festival sometime in the mid '80s made me realise that there was nothing to be scared of. I had this misguided notion that the second great Miles Davis Quintet, the '60s model that included Wayne Shorter and two other foot soldiers on this album, pianist Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter on double bass, played much more atonally than they actually did. My youthful sensibility was still too fragile for anything seriously avant garde.

Shorter played that evening in a marquee in the grounds of the UN's International Court of Justice complex in The Hague. He was flirting with jazz-funk at the time and the band was nothing to write home about, but Shorter played superbly and was presented with a huge bouquet of gladioli at the end of his set. I remember, too, being transfixed by the female drummer. The only others I'd ever seen behind a drum kit before were Karen Carpenter and Honey Lantree of the Honeycombs, so it was quite a novelty to see a genuine jazz drummer of the opposite sex. It must've been Terri Lynn Carrington, who would go on to enjoy a varied and successful career behind a hi-hat.

Speak No Evil was recorded on Christmas Eve, 1964, not long after Miles Davis persuaded him to leave Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and join his quintet. A special day, a special album. If anyone were to ask, and even my closest friends probably wouldn't, then I'd tell them unhesitatingly that my three favourite jazz albums are Kind of Blue, Mingus Ah Um and Speak No Evil. There; I've got that out of my system.

What puts this album a notch above his first two for Blue Note is not necessarily the playing, but the quality of the compositions. Shorter plays uniquely tenor rather than soprano sax on this album, which suits me fine, and although he had his own voice (pitched somewhere just between John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins), he will probably be primarily remembered as a composer rather than a stylist.

He did it for Art Blakey, he did it for Miles Davis and Josef Zawinul, and he certainly does it here. There are six numbers and they're all memorable in their different ways. The opening 'Witch Hunt' and the title track are almost even hummable, sort of, and all six share a wonderful air of mystery. It's partly the complementary combination of Shorter's sax and Freddie Hubbard's trumpet underpinned by a superb but unobtrusive rhythm section and Herbie Hancock's customarily elegant piano. And it's partly just Shorter's unusual way with a melody.

He was known in school apparently as 'Mr. Weird' and there's a slightly unsettling ambiguous quality about the chords he chooses. You never quite know which way a tune is heading. It can float off at any moment onto some quite new plane. On this album, he revealed how he was 'thinking of misty landscapes with wild flowers and strange, dimly-seen shapes – the kind of places where folklore and legends are born. And then I was thinking of things like witch-burnings, too.'

The title track, for example, is unquestioningly beautiful and yet the insistent theme leaves you a tad uncomfortable. It would be a brave film director to do so, but I can't help but think this album would make a fantastic soundtrack for an adaptation of a Wilkie Collins or an Edgar Allen Poe novel. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has yet made The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym into a film. Here's the ready-made score...

Nowhere perhaps is this quality more deliberate than 'Dance Cadaverous'. Shorter was 'thinking of some of those doctor pictures in which you see a classroom and they're getting ready to work on a cadaver'. Mr. Weird indeed. It's a very strange creative trigger and it certainly has the desired disconcerting effect. By contrast, the gorgeous 'Infant Eyes', inspired by his daughter, is the most obviously traditional piece in the collection.

In making Speak No Evil, Shorter talked about abandoning everything that he had done before. 'I'm trying to fan out,' he explained, 'to concern myself with the universe instead of just my own small corner of it'. That was quite some creative ambition to harbour. While the result doesn't deviate as far from the customary Blue Note template of the time as much as, say, Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch does, it still transcends the majority of the label's bread-and-butter blowing sessions. There's no doubt in my mind, at least, that Speak No Evil is a great composer's finest hour and a very accessible masterpiece.

Tale Spinnin'

Sitting in on one of a series of jazz seminars at Brighton Art College in the '80s, I embarrassed myself by suggesting that, of all contemporary jazz outfits, perhaps Weather Report would one day acquire Duke Ellington's status of immortality. Really? Eyebrows were raised; titters were barely suppressed.

I should have known better at my age. Having decided to take a year off from the daily treadmill to study for a PGCE in the mistaken belief that a teacher's life was possibly for me, I had enough time on my hands to participate in a weekly seminar among students at least five years younger than I was.

Weather Report lasted 16 years, but Josef Zawinul is dead now and his group's reputation has faded over the ensuing decades – along with my damaged pride. We're all entitled to an opinion, but it was a fairly absurd notion: the Duke is widely acknowledged not only as possibly the greatest jazz composer, but also as one of the greatest composers – in any discipline – of the 20^th century.

And yet, I wasn't entirely deranged. Weather Report was built around Joe Zawinul, one of the great keyboard experimenters in jazz, and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, whose compositions for the likes of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and Miles Davis' second great quintet in the '60s are now widely recognised as some of the most distinctive since those of Thelonious Monk.

Nevertheless, it's true that the only number to achieve immortality is 'Birdland', the high water mark of Heavy Weather, the group's first album to include their new scarily talented and insanely self-confident bass player, Jaco Pastorius. As good as the album is, I have a particularly soft spot for the funkiest and most fluid of their many records for Columbia, 1975's Tale Spinnin'.

I bought it while still an undergraduate and remember first playing it at a friend's parents' house in Ealing, West London. Her father had a great hi-fi system and was game enough to let me give my new record a spin. Before handing it over, I remember rolling my new Pixal over the vinyl to collect any dust on the sticky surface of what looked like a miniature garden roller. I dispensed with it on learning that life's too short.

Probably I'd never heard a record played on a truly high fidelity system before, but I still vividly recall how the opening bars of 'Man in the Green Shirt' almost blew me across their front room in an approximation of the old Maxell cassette ad. Fortunately, it wasn't anything resembling free jazz. No honking and squealing to set your teeth on edge. An Ornette Coleman might have got me thrown out of the house.

No, there's a distinct melody, carried throughout by Shorter's soprano sax, propelled by the band's (temporary) no-nonsense new rhythm section of Alphonso Johnson on bass, Leon 'Ndugu' Chancler on drums and the Brazilian percussionist, Alyrio Lima. Weather Report was by now principally Zawinul's band. He wanted more bounce to the ounce and, by Jimminy, he got it. Johnson had none of Pastorius's flash and was no jazz heavyweight like his predecessor, Miroslav Vitous, but he was a fine uncomplicated player whose elastic bass lines could push the band into turbo-drive.

My hosts were as under-awed as I was impressed. By the second track, Shorter's 'Lusitanos', played on tenor sax this time, they'd probably wandered off to leave me to it. It's big beefy funk, but taken to a higher plane by Shorter's trademark melodic tension and an ability to use infinitesimal pauses to create drama.

The final track on Side 1 is another Zawinul composition, 'Between the Thighs', whose title and thrust leaves no doubt as to the band's leaning at this stage. Leon Chancler's drumming is particularly enthralling and the ensemble playing sounds a little like Bootsy's Rubber Bland doing jazz.

One consistent criticism of Weather Report was that Zawinul's increasing dominance sublimated Shorter's role. It's true that he was content to play second fiddle and in the first half of this track you barely notice his soprano sax in the background wash. But then comes a wonderful moment when the band collectively takes its foot off the pedal and Shorter comes through to lead things to their engrossing conclusion.

The second side finds the band in a more reflective mood, not only on the final track, 'Five Short Stories', which is mainly just Shorter on tenor sax and Zawinul on acoustic piano with synth-etic atmosphere, but also on the opener. The faux Far Eastern effects of 'Badia' show off the range of Zawinul's array of electronic keyboards and typify the band's impressionistic form of jazz. There are even a few vocal motifs that anticipate its leader's later interest in Mongolian throat singing.

Sandwiched between comes Shorter's 'Freezing Fire', which harks back to the funky feel of the first side. Johnson's stuttering bass figure hurries things along and a whole range of percussion effects redolent of one-time weather-reporter Airto Moreira, the Brazilian maestro himself, colours in the outlines.

Tale Spinnin', like its predecessor Mysterious Traveller and its successor Black Market, won Down Beat's best album award for their particular years. Add Heavy Weather to the equation and you can perm any one from four, but if in doubt it's still Tale Spinnin' I reach for first.

They're still busy releasing new concert albums to cement Weather Report's legacy. Joe Zawinul left us with the band's fine world/jazz successor, the Zawinul Syndicate. Wayne Shorter is in his dotage now, but (as far as I know) still playing and still composing his haunting melodies. And Mike, who led the seminars at Brighton Art College, pardoned my faux pas to the extent of offering me a ticket to go and see Abdullah Ibrahim's Ekaya at the Gardener Centre on the Sussex University campus. I should tell him that I still listen to my Weather Report albums – if not quite as often as I imagined back in the day.