In what at first seems like an excess of eclecticism, he’s set the lyrics to Williams’ songs such as “Lost on the River” and “I Ain’t Got Nothin’ But Time” to new music written by himself and rendered in soul-jazz arrangements by the likes of Herbie Hancock, David McMurray, Terence Blanchard and Harvey Mason – much the same team that worked on Was’s excellent Backbeat jazz score. With Sweet Pea Atkinson fronting most of the songs, it’s actually not that far from a Was (Not Was) album, though it does lack the trickster element provided by the departed David Was. What’s most immediately impressive about the album is the seamless transition the lyrics have made from their white rural origins to these black urban environs, suggesting that emotional truth knows no colour bar. Here, “I Ain’t Got Nothin’ But Time” and “Forever’s a Long, Long Time” are gently shuffling slices of jazz-funk arranged in the brooding shadows of Miles and Ming’s, with Herbie Hancock offering quizzical piano chords and tenor saxophonist David McMurray supplying solos of immense conviction.

The lengthy “Lost on the River”, by contrast, has something of the implacable destiny suggested by the title, with Was’s acoustic bass gripping firmly at the rudder, while violin and pedal steel guitar tones shimmer tantalisingly on its meniscus.
Alongside the Hank Williams material that provides the core of the work, Was has added a few instrumental pieces of his own. Former MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer daubs bold Hendrix strokes over a tight funk matrix on “Excuse Me, Colonel, Could I Borrow Your Newspaper?”; and “You’ve Been Having a Rough Night, Huh?” ploughs a majestic, rolling camel-gait groove, sounding rather like Sun Ra in one of his more Afrocentric moods. Finally, “A Big Poem About Hell” brings events to a climax with a nightmarish synth- and sample-scape, before Merle Haggard bestows an appropriately oceanic weariness on “I’m So Tired of It All”, restoring Williams’ song to its natural country home.It’s an absorbing journey, and one which, avoiding as it does the mainstreams of jazz, country, rock ‘n’ soul, could easily slip between the cracks of generic taste. But ultimately, it’s only through exercises like this that those genres are broadened and enriched, and at present, all four could do with a little of that.. You have to admire Michael Franti’s gift for surfing the successive waves of hip-hop style without diluting his polemical ardour. In the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, he offered fierce Public Enemy-style lectures on neo-colonialism and cultural decay; with Spearhead’s 1994 debut, he shifted more towards a blend of funky didactic soul; and now, with its follow- up, he makes another subtle but significant shift in direction, with swingbeat, ganja and basketball more to the fore. The message throughout is still one of black underdevelopment, however, whether he’s highlighting the drawbacks of typical black job `opportunities’ (rapper, postie and cop) in “The Payroll”, or narrating the tale of another doomed homie, shot by cops en route to a job interview.

It’s ferociously intelligent stuff, perhaps too much so: how many swingbeat-soul tracks do you know that namecheck Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, as he does on “Keep Me Lifted”? But when the polemic is as skilfully woven into the track as it is on “Why Oh Why”, it’s powerfully populist: here, Franti reminisces about a youth spent shooting hoops with friends long since cut down by crack and crime: “I played with brothas with so much badness/ But now they gone I sing a song/ Pop a three from the top of the key in they memory.”. Broadly speaking, a record producer has two main duties: to accurately capture the feel of a performance, and to seek to improve that performance by offering such advice as is necessary. Serving in that capacity on Don’t Look Back, Van Morrison errs on the side of the former and, it would seem, neglects the latter, resulting in a warm but complacent offering on which the two chums noodle away awhile without ever approaching the heights of which each is capable. A rousing opener of “Dimples”, featuring the Hook backed by Los Lobos, rather belies the general tenor of the album, which is thereafter somewhat cosier.

It’s by no means bad, especially when pianist Charles Brown brings his characteristic moody atmosphere to tracks like “Travellin’ Blues”, but the trademark boogies are a little thin on the ground. Under Roy Rogers’ reliable guidance, Hooker has in recent years made some of the most creditable of modern blues albums, but here the tone is more that of a mutual admiration society than a working relationship. Like its subject, slavery, Blood on the Fields lasted an awful long time. The songs were great, Cassandra Wilson was sublime and there was some incredible music, but nothing moved one quite so much as the promise of release from bondage. The London performance was the final night of a tour that began in January, and it felt like it.

The band looked tired, poor old John Hendricks – who is 75 – was puffed out by the time he got to the mike for each of his solo-spots, and while conductor and bandleader Marsalis tried to inject vigour into the proceedings, some of his charges were clearly running on empty. Though not quite clocking up the expected three hours, the performances seemed much, much longer. Part of the blame may have lain with the Barbican stage, whose deep apron seemed to create a virtual glass curtain between performers and audience. Add to this a total lack of design – undifferentiated white lighting, with almost as much light in the hall as on stage – and the result was uncomfortably like watching a rehearsal. Though you can argue that the piece stands or falls as music and nothing but, Blood on the Fields is really a collection of songs and as such there needed to be at least a suggestion of stage business to lead us from one to another. Any sense of mystery was undercut by the too-visible figure of a hippie sound engineer sat at a primitively camouflaged desk at far stage left, like a refugee from a Grateful Dead concert.