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French flirting, flute fusion and love flowin’ free: the best old music we discovered this year
A little crate-digging can yield buried treasure – as our music writers found this year when they discovered everything from Taiwanese pop star to Cher’s disco era
For Blacks and Blues, the Mizells cooked up a slate of tracks that grazed fusion but pulled back from the muso intensity in favour of adept, perfectly judged grooves – light enough to let the sunshine in, but funky enough to ground Humphrey’s lyrical, questing flute. There was an extra element, too; the video was annotated by vocal coach Jaron Legrair, whose positive feedback – “She keeps that mouth open and pretty wide … She’s not using a ton of air, though!” – and the stunned face smiling away in the corner added a collective sense of wonderment. One recent standout was Italian singer Mike Francis’s 1985 single Features of Love, which hits me right in my soft spot for wistful mid-80s pop: imagine if Orange Juice hailed from the Balearics rather than Bearsden, and were roped in to soundtrack a big-budget romance starring Daryl Hannah.
Or read this on The Guardian