Kicking off in a delightful and obviously delighted Afrobeat gear, the title track from Shane Cooper and Mabuta’s Finish the Sun swiftly opens up to a friendly, rhythm-bounced space laced with breezy atmospherics. The song organically loops upon itself, but with new aural flavors and detail entering each loop. “Finish the Sun” then casually subsides into a gentle outro, the sun’s arc traced.
Track two, “Where the Heart Is,” immediately enters smiling Cape Jazz territory: There’s the feel of kids scrambling out of their homes into morning-shone streets and parks, goofing around and gigglingly at play, their adventurous tumbles narrated by Sisonke Xonti, Buddy Wells and Robin Fassie’s horns. By the song’s end the entire community is out smiling and dancing.
“Umshana’ continues in a similarly merry vein, with Mabuta’s horns now seeming to announce some pending celebration – a wedding? A feast? The keyboards enter via Bokani Dyer and tug at outer space, before the horns return and the festival is on. Weather Report’s “Birdland” seems to be playing in an adjacent neighborhood, spilling into the proceedings, with the keys returning again, shifting the focus into glowing stellar horizons.
Track four, “Spirit Animal” momentarily breaks the preceding narrative feel and brings Shane Cooper’s effortlessly groove-meets-intricacy bass to the fore, without diminishing the color and vibrancy of the accompanists, here in an Afro Soul-steeped mood. Again, the keys bring an otherworldly tinge to affairs with a nod to mid-’70s Herbie Hancock.
“Kucheza” continues the bouncy rhythms that perpetuated thus far on Shane Cooper and Mabuta’s Finish the Sun, with Reza Khota adding some Mbaqanga guitar licks to the proceedings. The song enters into an aquatic buoyancy toward the end. Lovely, restrained stuff. “Joburg Poem” is a stroll of a song: The feel is that of a couple, or childhood best friends, walking through some friendly alien community, home to them. The smiling, stellar vibe is grounded by drummer Christopher Cantillo’s laidback metronome, which occasionally shifts to the left and right of steady consistency, adding subtle intrigue to the rhythms.
“Flow” warmly explodes back into a near tumult of West African rhythms, busy as a happiest bee in a frenzy – hunting pollen drunkenly from flower to flower, getting giddier and more excited with each sip. Drummer Arthur Hnatek keeps things fresh, shifting rhythmic accents throughout his gracefully frantic performance.
During the flow, the horns entwine in laidback solos and Khota briefly appears in a fading frenzy of near-buried guitar in the background before stillness slips in and the honey carrier is loaded and heading home. This, the longest track on Finish the Sun, is also the most satisfying, allowing almost each player space to stretch out.
Shane Cooper and Mabuta close things with “The Walk,” a funk outing with some tastefully restrained solos by guitarist Reza Khota and keyboardist Bokani Dyer. For reasons unknown, but perhaps subliminally intentional, the track ends with a premature full-stop – which in the case of this listener, makes one press play to restart the bubbly album afresh.
Finish the Sun is mildly frustrating, only because Mabuta’s wealth of musical talent is deliberately kept in check in order to give the album a certain lightness. The LP would work well playing in the background at some friendly get-together, but also invites close scrutiny thanks to subtle intrigues of musical detail.
Watching the album-launch video confirms that Finish the Sun is also, in a sense, a carefully structured diving board from which individual band members can leap into dizzying solos or reinventions. I look brightly forward to the live performances.
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