I don't think I'm stretching my credulity when I assert that I think Akira Ishikawa's 1972 album, Uganda is a tribute to the birth of rock and roll. Why do I say that? Well, the full title is Uganda (Dawn of Rock) for starters. But more importantly, rock is a popular music form, one that has spanned the globe and united people of disparate languages and backgrounds under the banner of an electric zeitgeist. And all of the sounds that allow it to have such power can be traced back to a single, geographical area of the world. Allow me to elaborate. It's incontrovertible that rock owes its origins to the folk traditions of the Americas, specifically the black blues traditions of the Southern United States. Further, it's long been accepted that the blues and other such traditions owe a debt to African rhythm traditions. What the jazz drummer by trade, and maverick by character, Akira does in collaboration with his band, Count Buffaloes, on Uganda, is nothing short of inverting the trajectory of rock's evolution without losing any of the merits of its progression. By latching notional twists on transportive psychedelic ruminations to African-inspired percussion and carving into the grooves of this dark ouroboros, splendid articulations of venomous dank heavy metal chords and agrestal flourishes of interpretative delta blues, he is articulating a sense of universal sonic heritage that is not reductive or primitivist, but instead gives the gift of the heritage of these sounds a corporal and real presence that allows it to take up space and exert a kind of determinacy in the motion of our shared destiny. As a result, Uganda doesn't sound like it's aged as much as it's arrived from the future.
