Mali
CD: Tinariwen - ElwanSunday, 05 February 2017
Tinariwen are one African band you don’t dance to. It’s not that kind of music. They emerged from refugee camps, guerrilla camps and nomadic desert camps through the Eighties and Nineties, and since reaching a global audience via The Festival of The... Read more... |
CD: Kel Assouf - TikounenWednesday, 04 May 2016
When the Tuareg band Tinariwen first started to come to prominence a decade or so ago, world music purists tried to lay claim that they were purveyors of what they called "desert blues". The reason being, presumably, that the blues in their... Read more... |
CD: Rokia Traoré, Né SoThursday, 11 February 2016
The Malian music scene has always been dominated by the griot caste, the jalis who serve as historians, praise-singers and guardians of the tradition. Rokia Traoré, like Salif Keita, isn’t a griot, but a member of the nobility. She is not bound by... Read more... |
Songhoy Blues, KOKOThursday, 05 November 2015
When it comes world music there are few countries bigger than Mali in terms of impact and popularity. (Cuba probably ranks a close second.) It’s from Mali that Songhoy Blues hail, one of the few major new successes in world music to emerge in the... Read more... |
Kasse Mady Diabate, Queen Elizabeth HallSunday, 13 September 2015
Not many concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall culminate in a string of beautiful African women sashaying down the aisles to the stage to press fivers and tenners upon the still-crooning singer. After taking their hands in turn, as if in benediction... Read more... |
DVD: TimbuktuThursday, 20 August 2015
A heartbreaking, inexorable tragedy served by one stupendous visual composition after another, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu is a masterpiece. The Mauritanian locations are a plausible stand-in for Malian Timbuktu and the desert around it – yes, I... Read more... |
TimbuktuThursday, 28 May 2015
The imposition of a brutal jihadist regime is relayed with formidable articulacy and a surprising lightness of touch in this gut-wrenching drama from Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako. Although its narrative events are as horrifying as those... Read more... |
theartsdesk Radio Show 9Saturday, 23 May 2015
Been a while since you checked out the best and latest world music releases? theartsdesk’s global music expert Peter Culshaw's selects the best music released in the last month or so.His peripatetic wanderings take in hot New Orleans brass, Indian... Read more... |
CD: Songhoy Blues - Music in ExileSunday, 22 February 2015
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... Read more... |
CD: Africa Express Presents... Terry Riley's In CWednesday, 21 January 2015
If humanity first emerged in Africa, so did music, that’s for sure. The continent provides an endless reservoir of sounds and rhythms that have fed into blues, gospel, rock and jazz and influenced musical culture the world over. Not surprising... Read more... |
Kasse Mady Diabate, Purcell Room, Southbank CentreSunday, 23 November 2014
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... Read more... |
CD: Kassé Mady Diabaté - KirikéMonday, 03 November 2014
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... Read more... |
