Africa
simon.broughton
“Zanzibar, are you ready?” yells the singer from the stage.There’s a huge cheer. It seems the crowd – and it is a crowd – is certainly ready. In shades, a flat cap and dreadlocks down his back, singer Barnaba Classic (pictured below left) is on stage at Zanzibar’s Sauti za Busara festival. Over from Dar es Salaam, Barnaba is a big star in Tanzania and is headlining the festival’s first night after seven hours of music.Seeing it live on Plus TV, it seems like watching another world. A live band on stage and an audience of some 2500 people, mostly dancing. Usually audience cutaways Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There have been Felabrations, stage musicals, bands featuring his sons Seun and Femi that have continued the legacy. There has been the slew of re-releases from his massive catalogue, and a number of films, including Alex Gibney’s Finding Fela, and the 1982 classic, Music is the Weapon. In his afterlife, the legendary Fela Kuti and his music feels more alive than ever. More than 20 years after his death, and a funeral that attracted a million mourners (police claimed there were no crimes committed in Lagos over its three days) Afrobeat continues to pull dancers onto the floor in order to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Enlisting Hollywood giant Samuel L Jackson to host a series about the history of slavery, his own ancestors having been trafficked from West Africa to the Americas, was a headline-grabbing move, and scenes where we travelled with Jackson to the historic slaving hotspot of Gabon rang with a steely sense of commitment. Elsewhere, though, the editorial focus was slack and the content rambling, as though the project (on BBC Two) had undergone a last-minute salvage job using whatever was at hand.However often you hear them, the details of the slave trade are stomach-turning – it’s estimated that Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This fifth feature from Claire Denis must surely be the director’s most sheerly concentrated film. Scaling back narrative and dialogue alike – story elucidation relies mainly on intermittent retrospective voice-over narration – Beau Travail engages the viewer instead with its sensual elements (“A Cinema of Sensation” is the title of the essay by critic Girish Shambu that comes with this new Criterion edition). It’s absorbing in every sense – from the choreographically stylised gestures of its military protagonists to the parched desert surroundings of Djibouti, a striking presence in itself, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Filmed, as one would, well, imagine, prior to lockdown, Imagine .... My Name is Kwame hearkens to what now seems a bygone era of full and buzzy playhouses and adventurous theatre-making that was about the live experience and not some facsimile online. That the hourlong film, directed by Charlie Sever, tells of the multiple iterations over time of a theatre practitioner, Kwame Kwei-Armah, now running the Young Vic makes one long to be back in the whirligig of playgoing again to see where this multi-hyphenate talent will lead us next.But the focus of such programmes is inevitably to look Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Peter Culshaw’s periodic global music radio update is back, quicker than usual as there is some catching up to do. There’s a focus on Ennio Morricone, who died this week - with his amazing range from Westerns to lush soundscapes and experimental hipster 1960s hipster pop. A secondary focus is on re-issued and new Moroccan grooviness - the wonderfully stoned 1970s soundscapes of Abdou El Omari to the hot off the press fabulousness of Bab l’Bluz. Other sizzling new stuff includes a rework of Saint Germain’s “I Want You To Get Together Right Now”(who sampled it from Marlena Shaw in the first Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Peter Culshaw’s occasional global radio music show comes blinking into the light after lockdown, as MusicBox radio’s studio In London’s Clerkenwell has tentatively, antiseptically, opened. In the months since March, we have lost numerous kings of rhythm, including, as mentioned in the show, Florian Schneider and Little Richard.This edition focuses on the legacy of the great drum legend Tony Allen, who pioneered Afro-beat with Fela Kuti. We talk to Stephen Budd, Tony Allen's friend, as well as an obsessive Afro-beat collector and DJ. He has had an illustrious career in music, from being a Read more ...
Dancing at Dusk: A Moment with Pina Bausch’s 'The Rite of Spring' review - an explosive African rite
Jenny Gilbert
There’s sun and sand, and both are golden – but this is no holiday beach. Distantly, out of focus, you can make out a man with a donkey and cart. Off-camera, some locals kick a ball. A square of sand about the size of a tennis court has been carefully raked in preparation for a performance – a unique performance, as it turns out.Early this year, 38 dancers from 14 African countries were assembled to mount a production of The Rite of Spring in the 1975 landmark version by the late Pina Bausch. It was due to premiere in Dakar in mid-March followed by an international tour. But then lockdown Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can this weekly lineup really now be three months old? As we move towards at least some degree of relaxation on the social restrictions that have long been in place, the offerings of theatre online continue to afford many a reason not to leave your laptop. National Theatre at Home has a particularly weighty (and timely) entry in its capacious rendering of Lorraine Hansberry's rarely glimpsed Les Blancs, whilst the Old Vic down the road places the music industry under the microscope via the Joe Penhall play Mood Music. You get recipe cards if you tune into Toast, not to mention the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The debut album from one woman outfit [MONRHEA] shows off the seriously impolite electronica that’s blossoming in East Africa. Electronic sounds from Africa are over-represented in Europe by jolly pop and elegantly faceless house music, but there’s a whole lot more going on. Via uber-producer and Killing Joker Martin “Youth” Glover’s Youth Sounds label, this album gives an exciting taste of the wild gumbo of dancefloor-friendly experimentation that’s on the bubble there.[MONRHEA] – and I’m going to lose the square brackets and caps from hereon – hails from Athi River, a town outside Nairobi Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ghana was visited by two British musicians in the early Eighties. One was Mick Fleetwood, who recorded the Visitor album in Accra during January and February 1981. The other was Brian Eno, who came to the country in late 1980 to attend the National Festival of Arts and Culture (NAFAC). While in Ghana, he also produced The Pace Setters, the first and only album by local band Edikanfo.In the reminiscence Eno contributes to the new reissue of The Pace Setters, he says “having spent the previous few years immersed in Fela Kuti's early albums and the previous few months stuck into John Miller Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Outside his home country Madagascar, Damily was first heard via a couple of tracks on the 2004 French compilation album Tsapiky, Panorama D'une Jeune Musique De Tulear, an overview of the tsapiky dance music of the south-west of the island. He’d moved to France in 2003. His first internationally issued full-length album, Ravinahitsy, followed in 2007. Since then, there’s been three more albums: the last of which was 2018’s Valimbilo.The new compilation Early Years – Madagascar Cassette Archives soundtracks a previously untold backstory by revealing what Damily’s music was like on his Read more ...