This week’s guide is by CF Smith and contributors Words By Shoaib, Neil G, and Benny Thomas.
Friday is here, and so is a fresh edition of our “Between The Cracks” feature. This week’s newer discoveries come courtesy of Harry Christelis, Bellbird, Compro Oro and Carlos Niño & Friends, while reissue gems from Grupo Um and Kelan Phil Cohran & Legacy have also been lighting up our speakers. Dive into the full selection, and if something resonates, feel free to show some love via the buy or share links. Enjoy the sounds and have a wonderful weekend ahead.
Albums
Harry Christelis – Preserving Fictions
London‑based guitarist Harry Christelis marks his sixth release in as many years with Preserving Fictions. Released via Clonmell Jazz Social, the label and events platform have been closely associated with Christelis for some time. His 2023 album Nurture The Child / Challenge The Adult was the label’s first-ever release. Last year’s EP ‘Half Truths’ was also released through the label, and the new record is a continuation and development of the EP (recorded during the same session). The press release puts it “somewhere between the buoyant serenity of Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, In A Silent Way-era Miles Davis, the spacious lyricism of Charlie Haden and Jon Hassell, ECM, and John Martyn’s Small Hours.” And honestly, they’re not wrong. Over twelve tracks, Christelis showcases his craft with a lightness and respect for space and texture that shape his melodies with effortless ease. Christelis is joined by his long-standing bandmates: Christos Stylianides (trumpet and effects), Andréa Di Biase (double bass and synth), and Dave Storey (drums). The songs on the album, such as Blues Of The Birds, Wood Dalling, and We Whittled A Spoon, breathe with a unique identity. Additionally, the complex musical layers come together with electronic and acoustic tones, merging into a raw, organic whole worth listening to on repeat. Despite this plethora of auditory glamour, Preserving Fictions ironically preserves its balanced tone all throughout. And the outcome is an album that is both sombre and hopeful in equal measure, allowing anyone to enter a deep state of reflection. – NG
Bellbird – The Call
With The Call, Bellbird steps fully into their own language: patient, searching, and quietly radical. This isn’t jazz built on flash or hierarchy. It is music shaped by listening first and speaking second, where every gesture feels considered. Bellbird consists of Allison Burik (alto sax, bass clarinet), Claire Devlin (tenor sax), Eli Davidovici (bass), and Mili Hong (drums). Rooted in collective improvisation and ecological awareness, the album unfolds like a living system, constantly adjusting and responding. Nothing feels isolated. Each track connects to the next through texture, rhythm, and emotional intent. The twin reeds rarely dominate. Instead, they circle around bass and drums, trading roles and dissolving traditional structures. It creates a sense of movement that feels organic rather than engineered. Two standouts show their range. ‘Blowing On Embers’ burns slowly, layering tension, sorrow, and resistance into a haunting, politically charged meditation. ‘The Call’ is more explosive, shaped by the white bellbird’s cry, transforming raw sound into something urgent and luminous. Elsewhere, the group eases off the throttle to luxuriate in pared‑back motifs, as on the hushed glow of ‘Soft Animal’ and the meditative warmth of ‘Phthalo Green’. What this album ultimately offers is trust: in collaboration, in vulnerability, and in the listener’s patience. Bellbird don’t chase attention. They create space and let meaning grow inside it. – WBS
Reissues
Grupo Um – Nineteen Seventy Seven
In the shadowed final years of Brazil’s military regime, Grupo Um kept the tape rolling purely out of instinct, creation as resistance, experimentation as survival, with no real prospect of their music ever seeing daylight. Nineteen Seventy Seven, laid down in ’77, buried for decades, and now resurfacing half a century into the group’s journey, stands as their second great “lost” document. The sessions took shape inside Rogério Duprat’s Vice-Versa Studios, where the band pushed themselves to the brink, layering takes and fusing Afro‑Brazilian rhythmic lineage with the strange new voltage of modular synthesis. Tracks like ‘Absurdo Mudo’ and ‘Cortejo Dos Reis Negros (Version 2)’ stretch samba and maracatu into something freer and looser. At the centre of it all is Lelo Nazário, coaxing wild colours from ARP and EMS machines, bending the group’s percussive roots into the future. It is fabulous. Highly recommended. – BT
Kelan Phil Cohran & Legacy – African Skies
“Whatever you want to do, do it all the time”, so said Sun Ra to Kelan Phil Cohran. Having spent much of the ’70s and 80s tending to the cosmic seedlings he’d planted with the AACM and Sun Ra, he recorded this beautiful tribute in 1993 for his close friend and former mentor. African Skies, released in 2010, feels like the moment everything he’d been sketching finally cohered: a rare, sharply defined landmark in a catalogue that’s more whispered legend than sprawling archive. Across its compact suite, the space-harp visionary sculpts a soundworld both earthy and astral, foreshadowing the future‑Egyptian warmth of ‘White Nile’ as if he were divining it from the riverbed itself. This fantastic album deserves your time to sit down and absorb. – BT
EP’s
Compro Oro – Lamellomania
‘Lamellomania’, the five-track EP released by the Ghent-based musical collective Compro Oro as part of their collaboration with the Congolese likembé player and vocalist Bouton Kalanda. In each track, the songs fuse the collective’s jazz-psychedelic foundation with booming rhythms rooted in Central African traditions. The mixture of bass likembé lines and vocals becomes the centre of the album. Songs in Lamellomania, such as Kukiedi and Ki Kumini Pas, showcase locked-in grooves with a hypnotic, celebratory feel throughout. A variety of instruments, such as the vibraphone, also echo the tracks’ percussive complexity. Exploring Compro Oro’s ability to successfully reshape their sound into a cross-cultural identity demonstrates the power of collaboration. – NG
Carlos Niño & Friends, Saul Williams – Elysian Invocation / Pollen of the Earth
When Carlos Niño & Friends collaborate with Saul Williams, you know it will hit different. And it definitely does. This two‑track EP finds Saul Williams and Maia the Artiste (Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra) threading their words through a dense thicket of percussion, with Aaron Shaw’s saxophone cutting bright, insurgent lines across the A‑side. Flip it over, and there’s a quiet shift in tempo that’s no less radical for its restraint. Niño and Williams join forces with Los Angeles’ indigenous collective Aztlan Unearthed, summoning a world of Mesoamerican drums, birdsong, and ritual chant. It’s a call for the listener to tune their senses to the land beneath their feet and the living world that refuses to be quiet. Carlos and his many friends are a force to be reckoned with, and we are blessed that they continue to share such beautiful and vital music. Recommended. A f—–g must listen! – CFS
