With Small Small, The Rail Abandon Is Thinking Big

Inspiring new music from a UK-Ghana collective

Almost missed this just-out second album from Isaac Birturo, the xylophonist from Ghana, and the UK collective The Rail Abandon. The followup to the enchanting 2019 debut Kalba, it turned up in Bandcamp’s New Releases queue under Folk. (That’s a taxonomic glitch that made me wonder how many amazing records we don’t encounter because they’re narrowly classified or affected by some sort of dreaded “search bias.”)

The cross-continent collaboration between Birturo, British songwriter Sonny Johns and a large crew of players may — and should — be listed under other genres as well; its stretchy, vibrant pulse contains traces of Afrobeat (one track pays tribute to the late master drummer Tony Allen), West African guitar music, big band jazz and more. Recorded during the pandemic, Small Small — a translation of a Ghanaian phrase meaning “a little at a time” — radically expands the sonic canvas of the first album with harmonically inventive instrumental forays and charged call-and-response vocals. Vibey and haunting and disarmingly beautiful.

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