Honest Jon's is a British independent record shop based on
Portobello Road in
Ladbroke Grove,
London, operating since 1974. The shop is owned and run by Mark Ainley and Alan Scholefield, who took over from one of the original proprietors, "Honest" Jon Clare. Their record label of the same name is run in conjunction with
Damon Albarn
Damon Albarn (; born 23 March 1968) is an English-Icelandic musician, singer-songwriter and composer, best known as the frontman and primary lyricist of the rock band Blur and as the co-creator and primary musical contributor of the virtual ...
, who has been quoted as saying: "I don't really like the term
world music. Wherever it comes from, it's all just music, isn't it? Hopefully that's what Honest Jon's is about - to open a few minds to what's out there".
The shop sells a multitude of genres of music on vinyl and CD, specializing in jazz, blues, reggae, dance, soul, folk and outernational. It runs a mail-order business.
Formed in 2002, the label has released
compilation album
A compilation album comprises Album#Tracks, tracks, which may be previously released or unreleased, usually from several separate recordings by either one or several Performing arts#Performers, performers. If by one artist, then generally the tr ...
s such as its ''London Is The Place For Me'' series, excavating the music of young Black London, in the years after
World War II ("a fascinating archive of material from the 1950s and 1960s, chronicling a time when diasporic rhythms were more or less the sole preserve of the small communities responsible for bringing them to these shores");
[Dave Stelfox]
"Various Artists: London Is the Place for Me: Part Four. Honest Jon's; 2007"
''Pitchfork'', 14 February 2007. also collections of British folk,
Port-of-Spain soca,
Afro-Cuban jazz from
the Bronx, Jamaican dancehall; and retrospectives of artists including
Moondog,
Maki Asakawa,
Bettye Swann and
Cedric "Im" Brooks & The Light of Saba. It has released original music by
Candi Staton
Canzetta Maria "Candi" Staton (, ) (born March 13, 1940) is an American singer–songwriter, best known in the United States for her 1970 remake of Tammy Wynette's " Stand by Your Man" and her 1976 disco chart-topper "Young Hearts Run Free". In E ...
,
Actress, T++,
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble is an eight-piece, Chicago-based brass ensemble consisting of eight sons of the jazz trumpeter Phil Cohran. Their musical style ranges from hip hop to jazz to funk and rock, including calypso and gypsy music. They call t ...
, Mark Ernestus,
Trembling Bells
Trembling Bells were a Scottish folk rock group formed in 2008 by drummer Alex Neilson, a musician with a history of free and improvised playing with several artists. Based in Glasgow, the group released three albums through Honest Jon's Records ...
,
The Good, the Bad & the Queen,
Simone White
Simone White (born February 7, 1970) is an American singer-songwriter.
Life and career
Simone White appeared in the 1984 comedy-drama " The Wild Life" written by Cameron Crowe and directed by Art Linson. Eddie Van Halen and Donn Landee compo ...
,
Shackleton
Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton (15 February 1874 – 5 January 1922) was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of An ...
,
Michael Hurley,
Terry Hall, DJ Sotofett, and the
Moritz Von Oswald Trio, Vladislav Delay Quartet, Insanlar &
Ricardo Villalobos, Kassem Mosse, Pinch, Don't DJ, Tribe Of Colin and many more. It recorded the
chaabi orchestra of Abdel Hadi Halo on location in
Algiers
Algiers ( ; ar, الجزائر, al-Jazāʾir; ber, Dzayer, script=Latn; french: Alger, ) is the capital and largest city of Algeria. The city's population at the 2008 Census was 2,988,145Census 14 April 2008: Office National des Statistiques ...
;
Lobi Traore Lobi may refer to:
*Lobi, Estonia, a village in Estonia
*Lobi people, a West African ethnic group
*Lobi language
Lobi (also Miwa and Lobiri) is a Gur language of Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Ghana
Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), offici ...
and Kokanko Sata Doumbia in
Bamako; and
Tony Allen in
Lagos.
In 2008, Honest Jon's began a run of compilations of early recordings — mostly drawn from the
EMI Archive in
Hayes, Hillingdon
Hayes is a town in west London, historically situated within the county of Middlesex, and now part of the London Borough of Hillingdon. The town's population, including its localities Hayes End, Harlington and Yeading, was recorded as 83,564 i ...
— stretching back to the start of the twentieth century, covering all corners of the world: from the break-up of the
Ottoman Empire more than a hundred years ago, to 1950s
Beirut, to late-1920s
Baghdad, to 1930s East Africa.
See also
*
List of record labels
References
External links
Official site
British independent record labels
Indie rock record labels
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