world music
mark.kidel
Songhoy Blues, a punchy guitar band with roots on the edge of the desert, take the downhome country sounds of Ali Farka Toure, Afel Bocoum and Sidi Toure and give them a high-octane dose of urban urgency. They don’t just play those mesmerising Sahel blues licks with electric instruments, but they pack a punch that comes from transplanting laid-back village cool to the steamy cauldron of the city. It’s a lot like Elmore James or Howlin' Wolf taking the raw Delta sound of Robert Johnson or Charley Patton and upgrading it to match the citified excitement of the South Side of Chicago.“Music Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The most extraordinary bunch of global musicians I met this year were the groups who were singing on the barricades during the Ukrainian Revolution on the Maidan Square, foremost among them the all-female Dakh Daughters, who describe themselves as "freak cabaret". The video below is well worth a look as they sing in front of massed ranks of police and army to an exhilarated crowd (the music comes in after five minutes): The band grab lyrics wherever they can – one of their hits “The Rose of Donbass” uses as a chorus a Shakespeare sonnet “Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud” and, Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Afro-Atlantic world, in music as well as in religion, has always been characterized by a continuously self-renewing tendency to combine elements from cultures that originate on either side of the ocean. Lucas Santtana is a thoroughly contemporary Brazilian musician – in spite of his roots as an accompanist of bossa nova and tropicalia greats such as Gilberto Gil and Gaetano Veloso. His most recent music has drawn from the polyrhythms of Africa, the soft lilt of reggae, Brazil’s own rich samba tradition, as well as the complex textures of European club music and indie rock.His new release Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Bex Burch is a percussionist with a classical training at the Guildhall School of Music. First visiting Ghana as an undergraduate, on the recommendation of a Ghanaian friend, she initially felt very uncomfortable there, but gradually grew to love the people, the way of life, and the musical culture. Settling in the north, with the Dagaare People, for two years after graduation, she began an apprenticeship with Thomas Segkura, a professional maker of Dagaare xylophones, or gyilli. Musical performances are one of the essential rituals of Dagaare life, central to its important ceremonies, and Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
There is a special poignancy to these performances of Sacred Monsters, Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan's terrific 2006 joint show. Guillem, the former Paris Opéra étoile and Royal Ballet prima ballerina whose singular talent has lit up contemporary dance for the last decade, announced in October that she will be retiring from the stage for good in 2015. Sitting in Sadler's Wells last night I was achingly conscious not only that this was probably the last time I would see Sacred Monsters, but also one of the now vanishingly small number of opportunities left ever to watch Guillem, one of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Kassé Mady Diabaté is one of the great singers of West Africa, a member of Toumani Diabaté's Symmetric Orchestra and, more recently, the Afrocubism all-star line-up. His latest album Kiriké (Horse’s Saddle) on the Parisian No Format label is a beautiful return to his acoustic, traditional roots as a singer, produced by French cellist Vincent Segal and featuring kora maestro Ballaké Sissoko, Lansiné Kouyaté on balafon and Makan Tounkara on ngoni, conjuring up the spirits and messages of centuries-old Bambara songs of the ancient Manding Empire. This music runs deep. The kora of the south, the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jon Hassell / Brian Eno: Fourth World Vol. 1 - Possible MusicsIts opening is exotic. The music shimmers like heat haze and incorporates a sing-song instrument which might be a treated trumpet, or a high-register bass guitar reverberating like water on distant rocks and pattering percussion. “Chemistry”, the opening track on Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s 1980 album Fourth World Vol. 1 - Possible Musics, melded the ambient to serialism and what became both electronica and world music.Possible Musics is a stunningly beautiful album. Its reissue on album and CD brings an opportunity to Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When you're talking about dancers, the old adage about genius being 99% perspiration has a point. You have to work damned hard just to be average in professional dance; to be good, like Akram Khan and Israel Galván are good, takes sweat (and tears and blood, like as not). Still, all the perspiration in the world won't avail if you don't have that 1% of inspiration, a little blue flame of a pilot light in your soul, ready to spark the gas jets of hard work into fiery life, rather than just a lot of hot air.This show works because Khan and Galván are inspired. The premise is pretty simple: let' Read more ...
mark.kidel
In reaching out to audiences beyond the African context, Malian musicians and singers have adopted performance styles that don’t always reflect the intimacy and personal communication so fundamental to the praise-singing at the heart of the region’s musical tradition. Kassé Mady Diabaté’s latest release, while not his first acoustic outing, avoids the world music festival staples of rock-tainted histrionics and takes us really close-up to possibly African’s greatest living singer’s warmth, generosity of spirit and deep-flowing soul. Kassé Mady is the epitome of the "cool", demonstrating Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
Exoticisation, at an event named "Sahara Soul", was perhaps inevitable. With Tuareg jewellery and souvenirs in the foyer, there was a touristic expectation last night that these genuine desert-dwellers would bring the burning spirit of the Saharan blues along with their glinting necklaces. Indeed the first set was the diamond display of an all-star ensemble, brought together exclusively for this performance as part of the Barbican’s Transcender Festival.The women of Malian ensemble Tartit were the first to file onto the stage, in irridescent white gowns and ornate headdresses, to be joined by Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
If I had to pick the highlight of this sun-drenched WOMAD it would have to be the fresh, emotionally charged set of Ukrainian band Dakha Brakha. I can’t recall seeing such a unanimously positive response for a relatively unknown band at the Festival. It wasn’t as if the music was obviously crowd-friendly, and parts were quite challenging, mixing soulfully sung Ukrainian folk tunes with other influences – Nigerian drumming, Bulgarian singing and Japanese koto.They call it “ethno-chaos”. As an untypical folk band, their jaunty stovepipe hats are not traditional but do give them an instant Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This year’s edition of the Gnawa Festival in the medina of the beautiful coastal town of Essaouira featured two spectacular fusions – between Bessekou Kouyate with Hamid El Kasri on the closing Sunday night, and on Saturday night – in the early hours of Sunday morning, in fact, on the main stage at Moulay Hassan – bassist, band leader and Miles Davis alumni Marcus Miller with Mustapha Bakbou, forging a dense, deeply rhythmic fusion to match the pounding Atlantic ocean on one side, and the long, curving bay on the other (with its own late-night beach stage in the distance).Earlier in the day, Read more ...