world music
Kieron Tyler
Relentless is the word. The second studio album from post-punk jazzers Melt Yourself Down starts as it means to finish. It opens with a hard, pulsing bass guitar which sets the scene for “Dot to Dot”, a persistent chant suggesting Sufi adepts with a yen for Killing Joke. It ends, nine tracks later, with “Yazzan Dayra’s” melding of Nyabinghi percussion to the sound of an exotic market-stall barker and strident saxophone interjections. Over its 36 minutes, Last Evenings on Earth does not let up.The varied roots of the Melt Yourself Down sound are clear. They have collaborated with New York no Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The last time I spent hours on end listening to Xavier Rudd I was giving birth to my daughter. Weirdly, the anaesthetist had seen him perform in Australia a few weeks previously (this was a few years ago when Rudd wasn’t as heard of as he is now) and we bro’d about the magical coincidence pretty hard, in between contractions.To see him live was therefore a pretty big deal, seeing as what he essentially (musically) birthed my baby. There was a lot to live up to. I am thankful in life for many things – the fact that seeing him in the flesh did not disappoint, is one of them. The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is greatness there from day one, does it evolve or suddenly strike? Do artists – in any discipline – develop in steps or arrive fully-formed? How does the quotidian become exceptional? With the new triple-CD set Highlife-Jazz and Afro-Soul (1963-1969), the man who would be dubbed the Black President has what amounts to 39 musical baby pictures made easily available for the first time. As to how this release answers any of these questions, it is a question of degree.First issued in Japan in 2005, Highlife-Jazz and Afro-Soul (1963-1969) was a pioneering collection of the bulk of Fela Kuti’s pre Read more ...
Martin Longley
Since its UK debut in 1982, the WOMAD festival (World Of Music, Arts & Dance) followed its uncertain first steps and early threat of bankruptcy with a swift consolidation and expansion. By the time its first decade had passed, WOMAD was busy spreading around the globe, spawning alternative manifestations in Spain, Italy, New Zealand and the UAE. Not all of these were successful: attempts to colonise the USA eventually failed (Seattle, San Francisco), but along with the long-established twin Spanish weekenders, they have enjoyed a remarkable longevity with WOMADelaide, the Australian Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lizzy Mercier Descloux was an early adopter. In 1975, she travelled from her Paris home to Manhattan and saw The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television and the Richard Hell-edition Heartbreakers. Although the first issue of the New York fanzine Punk came out at the end of the year, punk rock was not yet quite codified. Nonetheless, there was a scene and something new was in the air. Descloux had to check it out and on her return to France, she co-founded the new music monthly Rock News.The new magazine was dedicated to The Velvet Underground. Iggy Pop was its first issue’s cover star. There were Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The career of the Gran Canaria-born musician Pablo Díaz-Reixa seems to work in an accelerated time-frame, speeding through decades and eras as he develops his sound. Though he has always worked with digital technology, his early work sounded archaic, its massed carnival percussion and traditional melodies roaming around the Afro-Latin diaspora.Then, on 2008's Pop Negro, he embraced modernism, albeit still with a retro twist, rigorously examining and adopting the high-gloss production and songwriting techniques of the biggest mainstream American and Latino pop acts of the mid-1970s to mid-'90s Read more ...
Tim Cumming
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 past few years. In many ways, it is a dwindling genre, where the chances of “discovering” a little-known great like Ali Farka Touré or Cesaria Evora are getting close to zero – most people, like everywhere else, don’t listen to that old stuff anymore: by and large it’s hip-hop, R&B and digital beats. The fresh and the fine-ground does still Read more ...
Michael Church
Never has the world of music been so open to exploration, nor so rich in paradox. Recording is abolishing history – the music of the past is being subsumed into a voracious and ever-expanding musical present. The shrinking of the globe to a digital village is abolishing geography: everyone can listen to everyone else’s music, wherever they happen to be. But in a piquant irony, just as the short-lived “world music” CD boom was whetting people’s appetite for new sounds, so those sounds were becoming homogenised out of existence, in response to the demands of the global pop market.The lament for Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Athens, 1987: Youssou N'Dour opens for Peter Gabriel on a world tour. It's a wonder – and to his credit – that the British rock star should dare follow such a powerful performance. Few bands at the time could produce such a seductively joyful sound.Dakar's super-talent hadn't yet succombed to the lure of international audiences. Although he'd begun to move away from the explosive party music of the lengthy grand bals with which he would entertain Senegalese audiences for three to four hours, he was still wholeheartedly true to his roots: the unique combination of African and Afro-Cuban Read more ...
Matthew Wright
For three unassuming musicians, sitting cross-legged in a row, Korean folk-noise fusion band Jambinai’s London debut last night was seismic. With an ambitious project to integrate the techniques and idioms of traditional Korean folk with a blend of noise-rock, drone-rock and electronic music, they gave a concert that was, from the moment the grinding drone of the geomungo started yawing through the crowd, utterly distinct and original.There are two formations performing, a trio of multi-instrumentalists, with Eun Young Sim playing geomungo (a traditional seven-stringed zither, plucked with a Read more ...
Tim Cumming
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, Kassy Made Diabate turned and dropped the fistful of notes at the feet of his ngoni player. Then, after the encore, the final bows, the raising of the house lights, the ngoni player got up with his instrument and left the money there behind him. Enough for a very good night out. Perhaps the roadies were going to get lucky.Kasse Mady Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Africa Utopia at the Southbank Centre is back for its third year with a raft of concerts and events, and for Friday night Senegal's Orchestra Baobab returned to the UK for the first time in three years, one of the great names of the post-independence African renaissance. They were joined by a young French-Cameroonian artist, Blick Bassy (pictured below), who was coming to London for the first time with his debut album Ako.He was here with his trio of cellist Clement Petit and trombonist Fidel Fourneyron, both superb, malleable players, and Bassy on banjo, singing songs inspired by Skip James Read more ...