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Malian Strings: Kora & Guitar
by AAJ Staff
Two remarkable albums cultivated in the fecund sonic soil of Bamako showcase different West African syntheses of traditional and modern music. Kora player Toumani Diabaté's Boulevard de l'Indépendance, made with his massive, but light on its feet, Symmetric Orchestra, blends Mande acoustic music with contemporary instruments and approaches. The Kel Tamashek band Tinariwen--compared to Diabaté's lineup ...
Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba: Segu Blue
by Chris May
Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba Segu Blue Out Here 2007 Bassekou Kouyate is a virtuoso of the ngoni (West African lute), approximating the larger kora (West African harp) in sound but with a tougher, more percussive edge. Outside his home country of Mali, where he is widely ...
Dance: Arabia, Turkey and Beyond
by AAJ Staff
Maybe it's all the bellydancing, maybe it's the European immigrants, maybe it's just plain easier access to recordings... but Arabic and Middle Eastern music has seen a dramatic rise in popularity in the last few years in North America and Europe. Of course, the music of over twenty countries can never be distilled to any single ...
Liberation Music: South Africa, Zimbabwe & Zambia
by Chris May
Protest music has a long and honourable tradition in southern Africa. In the colonial era, it began at least as long ago as 1897, when the South African songwriter Enoch Sontonga wrote his classic “Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika" ("God Bless Africa"). The song went on to become the anthem of the country's African National Congress and, translated ...
South Africa: A Rough Guide & Vusi Mahlasela
by AAJ Staff
South Africa has fostered its own musical traditions since long before the earliest days of the colonial era, but the 20th Century saw an explosion of new styles and their widespread documentation on record. The mass relocation of rural blacks to urban areas, where they sought mining and service jobs, led to the establishment of poor ...
Ali Farka Toure & Vieux Farka Toure
by Chris May
One immediate response, when presented with these two albums--the first posthumous release by the extraordinary Malian guitarist and singer Ali Farka Toure, and the first ever release by his son, Vieux Farka Toure--might be to see in the albums the passing of the “desert blues" flame from one generation to the next. In a sense, of ...
Crossborder Traffic: Congo, Guinea and Mali
by Chris May
Four outstanding albums for the New Year--two from Congo, one each from Guinea and Mali--each coloured to some degree by crossborder, crosscultural traffic, but each remaining deeply and authentically African. Rumba On The River and 20ème Anniversaire track the impact of Cuban rumba on Congolese electric dance music. Electric Griot Land takes traditional Guinean kora music ...
Continental Drift: Congo, Senegal & Cuba
by Chris May
Three outstanding albums, with recording dates spanning more than fifty years, shine a light on the symbiotic relationship between African and Cuban musics. Roots Of Rumba Rock collects forty tracks, recorded by Congolese dancehall musicians and locally released as 78 rpm singles from 1953-55. The compilation documents some of the earliest recorded impacts of Cuban rumba ...
West by Northwest: Senegal, Morocco, Mali, Niger
by AAJ Staff
In this installment: a collection of recordings from West Africa, two of them overlapping with North African music. The debut recording by Nuru Kane, a Senegalese musician based in Paris, is a fascinating hybrid of Senegalese, Moroccan and other styles; veteran vocalist Salif Keita returns to his roots on a mostly acoustic album recorded in Mali; ...
Out of Africa: Ethiopia, Angola, Peru
by AAJ Staff
There's been an interesting recent trend in popular African music where international exports (that is, widely distributed recordings and touring artists) have penetrated European and American markets to the point where they've started being recognized by outsiders as the definitive music of Africa. The Africans, however, are listening to very different music, so global Afro-pop has ...
