Miles Davis
Merci Miles! Live At Vienne
(Rhino)
★★★★

JAZZ fans are in for a real treat. Merci Miles! is a two-CD album of a previously unreleased Miles Davis Group concert in Vienne, France, from July 1991 — one of Davis’s final live performances before he died a few months later.

The set is largely sourced from his recent records, such as 1987’s Tutu and Amandla two years later, although, tantalisingly, it also includes two tracks written for him by Prince.

His trumpet playing is relaxed and melodic, beautifully conjuring the muted sound that is often imitated but never bettered.

The 18-minute run-through of Michael Jackson’s Human Nature is a real highlight, moving from a hypnotic, restrained In A Silent Way-style beginning before slowly building into a pulsating cacophony that wouldn’t sound out of place on his dense and very loud 1970s jazz-rock work.

A legend in fine form.

Faye Webster
I Know I’m Funny Ha Ha
(Secretly Canadian)
★★★★★

ATLANTA-BASED singer-songwriter Faye Webster has written a stone-cold confessional masterpiece of loneliness and romantic longing.

The record’s indie country-soul brings to mind fellow southerner Natalie Prass’s sublime debut, though the sheer depth of emotional desolation rivals George Jones’s bottom-of-the-bottle blues and sadcore bands like American Music Club.

“There’s a difference between lonely and lonesome/But I’m both all the time,” she croons. “I don’t get the point of leaving my house/Cuz I always come back.” The Elbow-sized strings on A Stranger sound incredible, while Webster’s spoken-word delivery finds her getting upset about a song she heard — it turns out she is jealous of not thinking of it first, there is lots of sly humour.

Amazingly, she is still in her early 20s and has side hustles as a photographer and as a yoyo pro.

Black Midi
Cavalcade
(Rough Trade)
★★★★

ALONG with the mighty Black Country, New Road, London’s Black Midi has been flying the flag for British experimental rock since forming in 2017.

Cavalcade, their second studio record, is their latest burst of very loud and intense Mars Volta-levels of noise. The 100-miles-an-hour tracks such as Hogwash and Balderdash and in-your-face opener John L rival Miles Davis’s On The Corner album for challenging listening.

The band clearly have little time for conventional song structures or melodies, with Geordie Creep’s distancing spoken-word vocals and the additions of violin and saxophone only increasing the combustible musical interplay.

There are moments of calm among the madness — Marlene Dietrich’s lush 1960s pop vibes is a stunning about turn — but it’s the seemingly uncontrolled aural mayhem that make Black Midi one of the most exhilarating bands working today.