Keziah Jones

How many ways can a bleeding man sigh? Crack into a million pieces of hamstrung emotion then reassemble himself with a guitar, a song and a soul?

On Keziah Jones' long-awaited third album, Liquid Sunshine, the answers come crooning over waves of melody, rhythm and dubwise noise. Astute listeners will discern literate echoes of Curtis Mayfield, Freddy Mercury, Marvin Gaye and Prince in the Nigerian-born Keziah's keening vocals, of John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Nolen and Jimi Hendrix in his bedevilled and driven rhythm guitar, of Tricky, Nirvana and Soundgarden in Liquid Sunshine's trippy songcraft and experimental production conceits.

As with any artist of substance, Keziah presents us with more to chew on than the sum of his inspirations. As the great Argentina writer Jorge Luis Borges has remarked, artists invent their influences as much their influences invent them, a fact often overlooked in that reductive game we all play of sourcing recent arrivals to their ancestry. At the end of the day though, the only thing past geniuses can provide a committed young artist with besides a technical foundation and an impeccable standard is the necessity of becoming an individual.

For those who have been following Keziah's career from his post-busker debut of 1992, Blufunk Is A Fact, through it's follow-up of 1995, African Space Craft, Liquid Sunshine will appear as both a realisation and a revelation.

Keziah's growth as musician, vocalist and lyricist will stagger those who already found him more than compelling in those areas; the passion, intellect and courage evident in Liquid Sunshine's lyric statements equally attest to the profound evolutionary process that has gone on between recordings.

Always a magical and galvanising performer, Keziah has become in the interim a more mature, more sophisticated and more thematically diverse album artist. Composed in London and Nigeria between 1995 - 1998, Liquid Sunshine was self produced (excepting three coproductions credited to New York based Gregg Mann and one to Ian Caple) and recorded in London.

The album's fourteen tracks provide an impassioned and hook-filled invitation to a full banquet of styles and moods - ranging from the 70s soul evocations heard in "Hello Heavenly" and "Don't Forget" to the sombre recombinant interpolations of Grunge and Ambient achieved on "Phased" to the acoustic psychedelia beaming out of "Sunshine Shaped".

Liquid Sunshine is not just another post-modern shopping mart of chic musical styles. It is also, thanks to Keziah's passions, obsessions and lyricism, an album with a resolute core of emotion at the heart of every tangent and divertissement. Accompanying himself with slap-bass on "Functional", Keziah delves headfirst into the murky and manic-depressive depths of abandonment. The hiprocking riddims and gorgeous falsetto sighs heard on the drum-and-bass inflected "Runaway" mask a wounded man's elegy to impossible love, while "Stabila's" bareboned guitar funk, doogwoofing chorus and Pentecostal handclaps concoct a strange brew Keziah drops a surreal lament over postcolonial African alienation and disenchantment. The album's crisp closing acoustic statement "Wounded Lover's Son" articulates and confuses religious and political notions of salvation, martyrdom and redemption just in time for a millennium whose pendulum promises to swing between oblivion or overcoming.

Thematically and conceptually the album swings between melancholia and ecstasy on one hand and struggle on another in ways that evoke both Robert Johnson's visions of erotic hellhounds and Robert Nesta Marley's revulsion for slavedrivers. Equal parts polish, passion and philosophy, Keziah's Liquid Sunshine is a remarkably complex and diaristic portrait of a youthful, literate and cosmopolitan bluesman's soul.

Throughout it all Keziah's vocals, guitar work and sometimes-cryptic-sometimes-crystalline lyrics form a call and response union bent on addressing the exorcism of pain, the folly of politics and celebrity, the embrace of vulnerability and pleasure, and the glory of God.

Heady stuff on paper, no doubt, but the clear pop appeal of Keziah's infectious sing-a-long melodies and bodyworking rhythms illuminate and render accessible the compound complexities of his brain, heart and viscera.

As of Liquid Sunshine, Keziah's name joins the ranks of other contemporary romantic troubadours such as Prince, Lenny Kravitz, Maxwell, Tricky and Chocolate Genius.

As with his brethren Keziah anxiously and openly speaks to zeitgeist through his own troubled soul and sensuality. Cutting hard against the grain of black male stereo types in music with shinning pop craft and rigorous self examination, Keziah emerges from his sabbatical a 21 century front runner.

---By Greg Tate
http://www.marcellosendos.ch/keziahjones/