From Zimbabwean heavy rock pioneers Wells Fargo to the meditative desert blues of Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, KLOF Mag’s Monday Morning Brew playlist is one of contrasts and quiet revelations. Gillian Welch mourns a myth, Polar Bear tear up the rulebook, and Elijah Minnelli steps into new territory alongside Osaka vocalist Kiki Hitomi. Folk, jazz, dub, desert blues and beyond — your week’s finest soundtrack.
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Listen via your Streaming Service:
Apple Music | Tidal | Spotify | Qobuz*
*Qobuz was missing several tracks.
Brew Notes
This week’s offering opens with “Watch Out!”, the title track of a landmark release from Wells Fargo, a mid-70s Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) band who created music that was very much a pulse of its time:
Just as the hippie era came to an end in America, a second 60s was beginning. In what is now Zimbabwe, young people created a rock and roll counterculture that drew inspiration from hippie ideals and the sounds of Hendrix and Deep Purple. The kids in the scene called their music “heavy,” because they could feel its impact, and it resonated from Zambia to Nigeria.
At its peak in the mid-70s, the heavy rock scene united tens of thousands of young progressives of all racial and social backgrounds. The country was called Rhodesia then, one of the last bastions of white rule in Africa, and heavy rockers defied segregation laws and secret police to make a stand for democratic change.
Wells Fargo was at the forefront of the scene, and the title track of this album, Watch Out, was the anthem of the counterculture.
There’s also a track from Robert Lester Folsom, taken from If You Wanna Laugh, You Gotta Cry Sometimes: Archives Vol. 3, 1972-1975, which was released back in March on the excellent Anthology Recordings, the third instalment in an ongoing series of archival excavations that have steadily cemented the Georgia-born singer-songwriter’s reputation as one of America’s most quietly essential voices.
Drawing from the same cache of homespun demos and informal sessions that yielded the two previous volumes — Ode to a Rainy Day and Sunshine Only Sometimes — this collection catches a young Folsom in his late teens, filling tape on a Sears 3440 reel-to-reel between summer jobs in his sleepy hometown of Adel, Georgia. The recordings stretch across a handful of improvised spaces, including, memorably, the local hog parlor, as well as a favoured Atlanta studio and sessions in Auburn, Alabama, where Folsom briefly relocated with soft rock outfit Abacus in 1975. The lo-fi settings give the material a particular warmth and drawl that perfectly suits its off-the-cuff origins.
This is quite an eclectic playlist, one of contrasts, and they don’t come more meditative than the beauty of In the Heart of the Moon, the 2005 collaboration between Malian guitar legend Ali Farka Touré and kora virtuoso Toumani Diabaté, released on World Circuit Records. Recorded in a single, unrehearsed session at Bamako’s Hotel Mandé overlooking the Niger River, the album draws on Songhai and Bambara musical traditions, blending Touré’s blues-soaked guitar with Diabaté’s fluid, rippling kora. Despite the musicians having spent barely three hours performing together over fifteen years, the music flows with the ease of lifelong partners. The album won the Grammy for Best Traditional World Album in 2006, shortly before Touré’s death.
Some songs also carry a weight of presence. Gillian Welch‘s Elvis Presley Blues is a kind of meditation on myth, mortality, and the strange alchemy of American music. Taken from her 2001 album Time (The Revelator), this song seemed to arrive from somewhere older than its recording date. The song approaches its subject sideways, the way you might look at something too bright to face directly. Welch doesn’t mythologise Elvis so much as mourn him, and mourn what he carried. The song traces the moment a young man from Tupelo picked up something enormous — the sound of black America, the ache of the Delta, the hunger of a nation — and wonders aloud at the weight of it. “I was thinking that night about Elvis,” she sings, and the simplicity of that opening line is disarming. It asks nothing of the listener except presence.
Raw, mercurial, and shot through with unexpected warmth, Polar Bear‘s Peepers (a well-chosen title track) is so defiantly original, it’s pure joy to return to it here. Led by Scottish drummer and composer Sebastian Rochford, the band on Peepers is a tight-knit quintet: twin tenor saxophonists Pete Wareham and Mark Lockheart, double bassist Tom Herbert, and the endlessly inventive Leafcutter John on electronics. Rochford’s stated ambition for the album was rawness — to capture something of the energy and controlled chaos of their live performances — and on the title track that ambition is fully realised. Polar Bear have always occupied a space that resists easy categorisation — too melodic for the avant-garde purists, too restless for anyone expecting straight jazz. Peepers, their fourth album released on The Leaf Label on March 1st, 2010, is where that tension becomes a genuine strength, and the title track is one of its finest expressions.
Polar Bear sits well alongside Elijah Minnelli, who has always operated at a slight remove from the rest of the world, building his own quietly mythologised sonic universe from dub bass, folk melody, cumbia rhythms and earthy drone. But Unkind, taken from his new EP Ball & Socket — released March 6th, 2026 via Accidental Meetings — finds him stepping into new territory in more ways than one.
Most notably, Ball & Socket marks the first time Minnelli has pushed his own vocals to the centre of the mix for something more exposed and direct. On Unkind, that vulnerability is matched and deepened by the presence of Osaka-based vocalist and producer Kiki Hitomi, known for her work with Waqwaq Kingdom and her time with King Midas Sound. The two voices move through the track with a natural ease that feels less like a feature and more like a genuine conversation.
Enjoy these moments and others from Alela Diane, Joshua Burnside, José González, Cocanha, Madi Diaz, Alabaster DePlume, Damien Jurado, Dana Sipos, Sam Amidon, Lemoncello, Barry Walker Jr., Patti Smith and more.