This summer sees the return of the unique collaboration between Ghanain xylophonist Isaac Birituro and British singer-songwriter Sonny Johns, AKA The Rail Abandon. Having created something of a buzz back in 2019 with their debut album Kalba - gaining support along the way from Gilles Peterson, Cerys Matthews and Tom Ravenscroft to name but a few - after something of a hiatus, the duo teased us earlier this spring with the Lapaz EP in preparation for their new LP. 

Small Small is a very Ghanaian saying, a direct translation to English, which is used in a wide variety of contexts to mean ‘bit by bit,’ ‘one step at a time’ or ‘slow and steady’. Sonny was first introduced to the phrase on his first trip to Ghana in 2016, when he met Isaac in Kalba, and the phrase popped up over and over ever since. There didn’t seem to be a word or phrase more appropriate as a name for this album, as Sonny explains: 

“Any second album is a difficult process – how do you make something that follows on from the first but is different enough? It’s particularly difficult when your first album was made under the unique conditions of having never played together, in unusual surroundings. It is also difficult when you live on different continents from each other. To add to those difficulties, we had to make a record in the middle of a pandemic. 
Fortunately, just before the world was locked down, we’d written and recorded the basis of the album over three days while on tour in Germany in October 2019. Then we went about adding our own musicians to the recordings in Ghana and the UK respectively, bringing everyone together via the internet instead of physically. Everyone involved had been hit dramatically during this period, some physically, some financially, all emotionally.