African Jazz

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba Jama Ko Out/Here 2013 Malian ngoni player Bassekou Kouyate and his band, Ngoni Ba's third album continues the increasingly outward-looking trajectory of its predecessors. The debut, the lovely Segu Blue (Out/Here, 2007), was unadorned roots music. Its follow-up, the more visceral I Speak Fula (Out/Here, 2010), wove amplification ...

Sterns Music's lovingly put-together compilations of work by stars of Francophone West African music's “belle époque“--the decade and a half accompanying and immediately following the independence years of the 1960s--are now digging further into history with releases featuring more obscure, but just as entrancing, figures from that era.

For different reasons, Senegalese singer and songwriter Ablaye ...

Owiny Sigoma Band Owiny Sigoma Band Brownswood Recordings 2011

Along with its close neighbors, Tanzania and Uganda, Kenya--as viewed from Europe or North America--is one of the final frontiers in African music. Indirectly, this is the result of the decades-long, overwhelming impact of Zairean rumba on east Africa, and its fall-out. From the ...

Double-albums of classic Congolese and South African recordings demonstrate the right and the wrong ways to go about compilations.

Tabu Ley Rochereau The Voice Of Lightness Vol. 2: Congo Classics 1977-1993 Sterns 2010

From its inception, everything about Sterns' compilation program has been pitch-perfect. Curated by enthusiasts with deep knowledge of their subjects, ...

King Sunny Ade Baba Mo Tunde IndigeDisc 2010

A leading exponent of Nigerian juju music since the late 1970s, and in 2010 still the most sought after live artist for expatriate Nigerians in Europe and north America, vocalist and guitarist King Sunny Ade once rivalled Afrobeat's Fela Kuti and Zairean rumba's Franco with ...

The birth of mbalax in Senegal towards the close of the 1970s, and a 2010 highlife/funk hybrid from south London, show how the embrace of imported styles by African musicians can enrich the continent's music.

Etoile de Dakar featuring Youssou N'Dour Once Upon a Time in Senegal: The Birth of Mbalax 1979-1981 ...

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba I Speak Fula Sub Pop! 2010

Much has been made of the symbiosis between traditional Malian and roots North American musics, of which the “desert blues" of guitarist Ali Farka Toure (1939-2006) provides convincing evidence. Any remaining doubts about west African savannah-belt culture as a ...

Franco and Le TPOK Jazz Francophonic 2: Africa's Greatest: A Retrospective: Vol.2: 1980 - 1989 Sterns 2009

The Congolese guitarist, singer, bandleader and composer Francois Luambo Makiadi--most commonly known as Franco but with a raft of other nicknames including The Grand Master and The Sorcerer of The Guitar--had by the ...

Amadou & Mariam The Magic Couple Wrasse Records 2009

For most people outside Mali, and maybe France, Amadou & Mariam came out of nowhere in 2005 with Dimanche a Bamako (Nonesuch). But the duo had released three other, Paris-recorded CDs before their Manu Chao-produced breakthrough, which were themselves preceded by ...

Keletigui et ses Tambourinis The Syliphone Years: 1968 - 1976 Sterns 2009

In Memoriam: Keletigui Traore: 26 May 1934 - 11 November 2008

The fourth release in the Sterns label's series anthologising Guinea's tradition-rooted “authenticite" bands of the 1960s and 1970s follows close on the death of its illustrious subject. ...

Tony Allen Secret Agent World Circuit 2009

It's been a good six months for Afrobeat, the turbulent jazz meets funk meets West African roots music associated with the Nigerian singer Fela Anikulapo Kuti (1938 - 1997) and his bands Afrika 70 and Egypt 80. There have been cracking albums from, ...

Rail Band Belle Epoque Vol. 3 - Dioba Sterns Africa 2009

With Belle Epoque Vol. 3 - Dioba, the estimable Sterns Africa label has completed another definitive archive project documenting West Africa's post-colonial “belle epoque" of the 1960s and 1970s. The three two-disc volumes in the series present the hits, highlights and lesser ...

Third albums from Guinea's Ba Cissoko and the Kenyan/American collaboration Extra Golden prove, respectively, to be uplifting and just a little disappointing.

Ba Cissoko Seno Sterns Africa 2009

Like the kora played by its eponymous leader, the music made by Ba Cissoko is graceful, rooted in tradition and, ...

Oumou Sangare Seya World Circuit 2009

Before European-derived concepts of career management became widespread among African recording artists, following the emergence of the world music movement in the late 1980s and 1990s, a musician's stature could be measured by the frequency of the albums he (or, less often, she) released. ...