Stan Douglas

Luanda-Kinshasa is a 2013 video by the Canadian artist Stan Douglas, born in Vancouver in 1960. It stages a fictional 1970s jazz-funk band in a painstaking reconstruction of Columbia's 30th Street Studio in Manhattan, the converted church known as The Church, where Kind of Blue was recorded. Shot like a documentary, it shows an apparently endless real-time session, running six hours and one minute on a loop. The title points at the moment it imagines, when American jazz and funk met Afrobeat as African nations gained independence and visibility. The work premiered at David Zwirner in New York in early 2014, the first film Douglas shot on location in the city. Like his other recombinant pieces, it treats narrative as something that can be permuted almost without end. When it was shown in London at The Infinite Mix, the Hayward Gallery exhibition at 180 The Strand in 2016, The Vinyl Factory released the soundtrack, now back in a second edition.

The band was chosen and led by the pianist Jason Moran on Rhodes and Hammond B3. Around him play Liberty Ellman on lead guitar, Antoine Roney on alto saxophone and Kimberly Thompson on drums, with Moog, Wurlitzer, bass, rhythm guitar, congas and tablas. They were recorded in Brooklyn on 22 and 23 June 2013, playing ten-minute improvisations that Douglas then cut and recombined in the editing room into hours of alternate takes. In the video the mix follows whichever musician the circling camera lingers on, so that the whole thing feels live while being entirely constructed. Douglas has linked the method to the electric records of Miles Davis, finished in the studio with a razor blade, and the work is in part a homage to On the Corner. On disc each piece takes two sides at 45 RPM, Luanda on the first record and Kinshasa on the second. The players cycle through jazz, funk and Afrobeat motifs, with tablas and congas set against the drum kit and Rhodes and organ against two guitars. What you hear is a long groove that seems to run on its own momentum. It sounds like a session rather than a set of tunes, which is precisely the illusion the work is built on.

Second edition, 2024: double 12" heavyweight vinyl at 45 RPM in a gatefold sleeve with two printed inner sleeves, including the essay The Eye of the Trumpet by Diedrich Diederichsen and Stan Douglas.