Stevie Nicks, Sleaford Mods and Fela Kuti are among the touchstones for this free-ranging New Yorker’s adventures in sound
Most artists are promiscuous in their musical tastes, even if their own work seems easy to categorise. Thirty-year-old New Yorker Baba Ali’s
music is a sweaty, slippery orgy to which all his influences are invited. He’s called up J Dilla, Stevie Nicks, Sleaford Mods, Nick Cave and Fela Kuti (a relative), among others, and the antic spirit of his restless, adventurous songs reflects them all. As a youngster, Ali dreamed up an artistic philosophy called yarchism, which says that you must always be led by your muse’s instincts rather than try to fit in, and he’s stuck by it.
Ali started studying and making music at university on classmate Nicolas Jaar’s label, then moved to
London for its ever-permissive creative culture and the chance to work with people such as Hot Chip’s Al Doyle, who lends some structure to the teeming ideas on Ali’s forthcoming debut album, Memory Device. It shares its moody-euphoric dancey unpredictability with older tracks such as Cog in the Wheel, but there’s very little of the anti-classicist rock of last year’s Rethinking Sensual Pleasure mixtape. Impressively, he’s equally proficient at both. A music industry happier pigeonholing black artists as “urban” has often struggled with acts like Ali. But fans of Yves Tumor and Tyler, the Creator prove there’s a big market for black music that, as Ali says, is “expansive, and goes everywhere, and touches on everything”.