Kokoroko - Could We Be More (2022 UK Brownswood Black Vinyl LP)

Kokoroko - Could We Be More | Vinyl LP - 2022 UK Brownswood Recordings (BWOOD0228LP, black vinyl)

Kokoroko formed in London in 2014, an eight-piece led by trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey and built around a shared love of Nigerian Afrobeat and Ghanaian highlife. Their name is an Urhobo word for "be strong". They spent years building a reputation on the live circuit, and then "Abusey Junction", a slow-burning track from Gilles Peterson's We Out Here compilation, went quietly viral and pulled in tens of millions of plays. Could We Be More is the debut that followed, eight years after the band first got together. It runs the group's influences together without seams: Fela Kuti and Ebo Taylor grooves, the bright ripple of highlife guitar, soul, funk and a psychedelic streak in Yohan Kebede's keys, with the horn front line of Maurice-Grey, Cassie Kinoshi and Richie Seivwright out ahead. "Tojo" opens to a fanfare, "We Give Thanks" rides a highlife lick, and "Those Good Times" slips into neo-soul with a Maurice-Grey vocal.

It landed as one of the signal records of the London jazz scene that had been building through the late 2010s, the same broad movement as Ezra Collective, Nubya Garcia and Sons of Kemet. This is the 2022 UK pressing on Brownswood, catalogue BWOOD0228LP, a single black vinyl LP mastered at Metropolis with a printed inner sleeve.