Jamz Supernova: Dance Around The World, sunrise to last orders

Dance Around The World is a compilation, and a compilation's author is whoever chose the order. Jamz Supernova chose this order: sixteen tracks, out 16 October on Mr Bongo, running from a sunrise to the last hour of the night without a break. Her name is on the cover and her voice does not arrive until track fifteen. That is either modesty or confidence. It reads as the second.

She has spent more than a decade doing this on the radio: south east London, the BRIT School, Reprezent in Brixton, a 1Xtra show at 24, 6 Music since 2021. She founded the Future Bounce label in 2018 and presented Selector Radio for the British Council from 2020 to 2023. In 2024 she judged the Mercury Prize. Her club sets move through bass, funky, grime, hip hop, Jersey club and records from everywhere else. A first compilation for Mr Bongo is the obvious object for that career.

It grows out of her Dance Around The World show and the Bandcamp community around it, the residue of years of travelling and digging. The framing is hers: a Day side of live instrumentation, storytelling and bright grooves, then a Night side that tips into club rhythms and dancefloor work. "When you travel, you get to experience both the day side of somewhere and the night side, and the music and the feeling can change so much between the two," she says. The credits run across Groundsound, SIMANGAVOLE & SOA RAVELO, Esa Williams, Orua, Lenna Bahule, Celia Wa, 15 15, Catu Diosis & Neana, Jus Now, Evehive & Clementaum and Mokotron.

It draws on current records and archival ones, and the joins are deliberate. The day half opens on "Bittersweet", the longest cut here at just past five minutes, and it takes the room a first track needs if the rest is going to be a trip rather than a playlist. "NY AMPELA" and "Vanguard Drive (Kwaai Dub)" follow through live playing and voices, with "Capoeira Demo" and "Tulamie" keeping the storytelling register going. Nothing on this stretch is in a hurry, and the sequencing does something a stream will not: it makes the daytime material a place you have to arrive at, and it withholds the floor for as long as it can get away with. "Quiero Ser Buena" is the hinge, Verito Asprilla's reggaeton-tilted cut found through the music scene of Colombia's Pacific coast, the shortest thing on the compilation at 2:35, and one of two tracks here that had already been out.

Night takes the back half and commits to the split. "Sin Africa" by Brenda x Diva Cruz is the anchor: a club cut about African identity, colonial history and the Afro-Colombian experience, put together with Jamz working in an A&R capacity, arriving with the record already past its midpoint. By then the change is total, which is the trip the title promises. "Corona" and "Delulu" keep the sequence moving before "Yalode" brings in As Ganhadeiras de Itapua and "Vulgo Kebradera" hands over to MC VICKY. "Tan Toddy" finally puts the compiler in the room, with Lateena and Sam Interface, her partner since 2014 and a producer in his own right. Then "Colonised Existence" stops the record, and a title like that is the argument stated last, after an hour of evidence.

The thesis underneath is music as resistance to colonialism in every region the compilation touches, and a refusal to let a place be heard as shorthand. The second half of that is the harder discipline, and it is one of sequencing as much as of selection. Nobody here is asked to represent a country; they are asked to sound like themselves inside somebody else's running order. The compilation holds that line more often than not, which is more than most globe-spanning sets manage.

It is for people who trust a DJ's ear and want the evidence in one sitting. If your shelves run through the Bandcamp end of Mr Bongo's catalogue, this is the same taste arranged in a line, and the launch shows say so: a listening session at Shai Space in Peckham on 18 October with a short set from Lenna Bahule, then The Jazz Cafe on 30 October with Diva Cruz, Esa Williams and Samtheman. It is not a beginner's map, and the range is the point.

Two things keep it off the top of the scale. The middle of the first half runs long, with "Broke", "WIPIP" and "Daou Minm (Jako maron remix)" sitting between the hook of the opening run and the turn, and bright grooves in that quantity ask a lot of anyone who came for the night. The other is smaller: the two cuts that had already been out, "Quiero Ser Buena" and "Sin Africa", are among the strongest, so the unheard tracks carry a weight they do not always lift.

Still, the ordering is a DJ's argument made in public, and it holds up. The record begins with live hands and ends in a club, and the last title leaves you something to sit with. Mr Bongo's first Jamz Supernova compilation is a 4: strong, and earned by sequence rather than by any single track. Play it in order.

The tracklist

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