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Michael Kiwanuka’s FUDGE: Making Room for the Music
There is a particular kind of listening session that starts without a plan. No queue to finish, no argument about the best album of the year. You put something on because you want to be in the room with it. That is the invitation we are taking from Michael Kiwanuka’s recently released FUDGE.
Released October 23 through Polydor, FUDGE is Kiwanuka’s fifth album. Universal Music’s announcement describes a project written almost alongside Small Changes, rather than a response to it. Kiwanuka took charge of production, then worked with Dom Monks and strings collaborator Rosie Danvers to complete the record. The sessions took place in Southampton and Frome.
The official album notes trace part of its inspiration to an interview with Chick Corea that Kiwanuka encountered during lockdown. The idea he took from it was direct: trust the music you love enough to make it. That is a useful starting point for a musician. It can be a useful reminder for a listener, too.
Give a record a little room
We spend plenty of time deciding what to play next. This week, try a smaller decision: pick a record and stay with it. Let the next song arrive without checking whether something newer has landed. There is no perfect way to listen, but there is something to be said for leaving a little space around the music.
“Summer Clothes” opens the 12-song tracklist. Start there, then let the sequence continue. This is an invitation to explore the album, rather than a track-by-track verdict. You might hear a song that joins your everyday rotation, or simply enjoy an hour that belongs to listening.
The feeling we carry
At Music Makes Me High, that return to the music is the part we keep coming back to. The record you put on while making dinner. The song that makes the walk home feel shorter. The album you share with a friend because you want them to have the same moment. Those small decisions are how music becomes part of a life.
What album makes you love music all over again? Tell us the title and one reason it still gets you. We would love to know what belongs in your rotation.
Sources: Universal Music Canada, September 24, 2026; Michael Kiwanuka official album notes; official artist site. Facts checked November 4, 2026. Listening suggestions are MMMH editorial perspective.
Jimmy Heath at 100: The “Little Bird” Who Helped Jazz Keep Moving
Jimmy Heath spent a lifetime close to the center of jazz history, but his legacy cannot be reduced to the famous names around him. He was a saxophonist with a clear voice, a composer whose tunes entered the jazz language, an arranger who understood the power of an ensemble and a teacher who believed the music had to keep reaching forward.
Born in Philadelphia on October 25, 1926, Heath grew up in a musical family. He began on alto saxophone and absorbed the language of Charlie Parker so deeply that musicians called him “Little Bird.” That nickname placed him inside the bebop conversation, but it never defined the limits of his work. Heath later moved to tenor saxophone and developed a voice shaped by speed, lyricism, swing and a deep knowledge of the big-band tradition.
Philadelphia was an important part of that development.
Heath led a big band whose saxophone section included John Coltrane and Benny Golson. He later worked with Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, carrying the energy of bebop into settings that demanded both individual expression and careful writing.
That balance became central to his career. Heath made more than 100 recordings and composed more than 100 original works. “Gingerbread Boy” and “C.T.A.” became standards because musicians could hear possibility inside them. The melodies were memorable, but the writing left room for interpretation. A new generation could enter the tune and find its own way through.
Heath also understood that jazz history lives through relationships.
Beginning in the 1970s, he joined his brothers Percy and Albert “Tootie” Heath in the Heath Brothers. Their music carried the sound of a family while remaining open to the changes happening around them. The group connected tradition, contemporary rhythm and the kind of communication that develops when musicians have known one another for a lifetime.
Teaching extended that work. Heath taught at Jazzmobile, Housatonic Community College, the City College of New York and Queens College. In the classroom, the story of jazz was not a museum display. It was a working language. Students had to learn where it came from, develop their own sound and understand that the future of the music depended on what they chose to add.
A legacy passed forward.
That may be the most useful way to hear Jimmy Heath on his 100th birth anniversary. His career joined performance, composition and education into one continuous act of passing music forward. He learned from the giants, walked beside them and then made sure the next generation had somewhere to begin.
Which musician taught you to hear music differently?
Source: National Endowment for the Arts, Jimmy Heath profile and interview.
Hero photo: Jimmy Heath performing in New York, June 1977, by Tom Marcello, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Before the World Knew Adele’s Voice, She Wrote Home
On October 22, 2007, Adele released “Hometown Glory,” the debut single that introduced a voice the world would soon recognize in a single line. The song arrived before the giant choruses, record-breaking albums and arena residencies. Its scale was smaller: piano, strings, a changing city and a teenager trying to explain why leaving home felt more complicated than simply moving on.
That small scale is exactly why the song still works.
“Hometown Glory” begins with observation. It notices streets, people and the emotional geography that forms around a place over time. Adele does not treat home as perfect. She treats it as personal. The song understands that our attachment to a city can include pride, frustration, memory and resistance at the same time.
The performance already contains the qualities that would define her later work. Adele sings with force, but she does not rush to prove it. She lets silence and space carry part of the emotion. When the arrangement grows, it feels earned. The listener is not simply hearing a powerful voice; the listener is being invited into a specific memory until it starts to feel like their own.
That became one of Adele’s defining gifts. “Someone Like You” made heartbreak communal. “Hello” turned distance into an anthem. “Easy on Me” made an adult decision sound both certain and unresolved. “Hometown Glory” holds the earliest version of that approach: begin with something intimate, remove everything unnecessary and trust the truth in the voice.
The song also offers a useful reminder about beginnings. An artist’s first statement does not have to predict every future move. It only has to make the point of view clear. Adele’s was clear from the start. She cared about the emotional detail people usually leave unsaid, and she knew how to make that detail fill a room.
Nineteen years later, “Hometown Glory” still sounds less like a period piece than a doorway. It leads back to the place that shaped the artist and forward to every enormous song that followed.
What song takes you home the moment it starts?
Sources: Adele official site; Official Charts: “Hometown Glory” release history.
Image: Adele / official Instagram, Weekend 19 (June 25, 2023).
Chuck Berry at 100: The Sound That Taught Rock & Roll How to Move
Music History · 4 minute read
On October 18, 1926, Charles Edward Anderson Berry was born in St. Louis. One hundred years later, the sound he helped create is still moving through popular music.
Chuck Berry did not invent every ingredient of rock & roll. Rhythm and blues, country, gospel and the blues were already in the room. His achievement was hearing how those traditions could speak to one another—and then turning that conversation into songs that felt immediate, young and alive.
Berry’s own influences reveal that combination. His official biography points to the smooth vocal clarity of Nat King Cole and the blues of Muddy Waters. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame describes how he absorbed country, blues and R&B into a singular guitar technique. By the time “Maybellene” arrived in 1955, those influences had become something audiences could recognize within seconds: the forward-driving rhythm, the bright guitar lines and a story already in motion.
That storytelling mattered as much as the guitar.
Berry wrote about school days, cars, dancing, romance and the restless energy of being young. His songs gave teenagers a world that sounded like their own lives. “School Day,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “You Never Can Tell” and “No Particular Place to Go” were compact scenes as much as records. He could establish a character, a conflict and a destination before most songs reached the first chorus.
Then there was the guitar language.
The double-stop phrases, sharp introductions and rhythmic momentum became part of rock & roll’s basic vocabulary. Countless guitarists learned that vocabulary directly from Berry’s records. Bands that followed did more than cover the songs; they absorbed the structure, attitude and motion inside them. His influence crossed geography, race and generations, helping shape the music that would follow on both sides of the Atlantic.
Berry understood that performance was part of the message. The duckwalk became instantly recognizable, but the deeper lesson was how completely he connected the sound, the movement and the audience. Rock & roll was not only something to hear. It was something to see, imitate and carry into your own identity.
That is why his centennial matters.
Remembering Chuck Berry should not become a ceremonial exercise in calling someone “important.” His work still gives us a way to hear how American music develops: styles meet, audiences change, young artists borrow a language and then reshape it for the next generation.
“Johnny B. Goode” offers the clearest example. Its opening guitar figure became one of the most recognizable entrances in popular music. Its central story—about talent, ambition and the possibility of being heard—proved durable enough to travel far beyond its original moment. In 1977, the song was included on the Voyager Golden Record sent into space, making Berry’s vision of rock & roll part of the musical portrait humanity chose to carry beyond Earth.
One hundred years after his birth, Chuck Berry’s influence does not live only in museums or anniversary tributes. It lives every time a guitar introduction announces itself before the singer begins. It lives in songs that turn ordinary teenage details into mythology. It lives in artists who understand that style, movement and sound can become one complete identity.
The equipment changes. The audience changes. The language keeps traveling.
Chuck Berry helped teach it how to move.
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