Africa
howard.male
This debut is the best collaboration between a French producer and African musicians since Yves Wernert got together with Malian ngoni player Issa Bagoyogo for a string of masterful fusion albums during the Noughties. But his time around it was the electronica producer Débruit who was blessed by chance to encounter a bunch of inventive musicians in Kinshasa. Although "inventive" hardly covers it, because poverty dictated that KOKOKO! forged their instruments out of plastic water bottles and other garbage and junk. But don't let that put you off. A tight riff played on a one-stringed guitar Read more ...
Barney Harsent
You hear a lot about living legends, but there aren’t actually that many around – at least not since the first half of 2016. Carlos Santana, however, definitely fits the bill. From his early days stealing the show at Woodstock alongside drummer Michael Shrieve, to achieving bone fide icon status for his pioneering work in the field of fusion solos, he’s at a stage where he can do pretty much whatever he wants. This makes the intent and wide-reaching scope of Africa Speaks all the more impressive, and Santana’s claim that this is a project born out of a love and obsession for the music of Read more ...
Owen Richards
Set in the months and years after the Libyan revolution, Freedom Fields follows several women aiming to compete in international football. The documentary finds the players excitedly preparing for their first overseas tournament. However, it soon becomes clear that liberation doesn’t equate to freedom, as threats of violence from religious extremists cause the Libyan Football Federation to cancel the trip.It’s clear that British-Libyan filmmaker Naziha Arebi originally planned to follow the women to the tournament, an uplifting tale of competition and sisterhood. Instead, we catch up a year Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Yousou N’Dour has come a long way from his cassettes with Super Etoile de Dakar, that wild mbalax energy, fed by the clatter of the high-pitched sabar drums, with vocals that soared and fizzed with emotion and soul. Today’s Youssou is air-brushed and smooth, world music for global tastes, with a slickness that almost - but not quite – submerges the unique quality of the heart-stirring voice that made him famous.Salif Keita, that other super-charged West African voice, led the way back in the late 80s, with rock-flavoured productions by Ibrahim Sylla. As with Youssou’s more recent Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Are brothers Harry and Jack Williams mounting a takeover bid for British TV? They’ve written (among other dramas) The Missing, Liar and Baptiste, and they produced Fleabag. However, judging by their co-writing efforts on The Widow (ITV) they’re spreading themselves thin.The final two episodes saw the tension mount as the mysteries unravelled, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for the basic flaws which had made it creak and wobble from the start. It was as if the Williamses had patched it together from a random assortment of press clippings about African corruption, rapacious capitalism and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Mediterranean’s massacres of the refugee innocent come uncomfortably close to a lone female sailor in this stark parable of European helplessness and indifference.When German doctor Rike (Susanne Wolff) casts off from Gibraltar, the ocean’s vastness seems a challenging backdrop for a testing voyage. For a while in Wolfgang Fischer’s austerely beautiful film, she is silent and peacefully alone, relishing her freedom. When a storm rolls in, and her ship repeatedly slips into the trench between waves with her at the helm, Robert Redford’s lonely stoicism as the sailor of a sinking ship in Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Oumou Sangaré is not a woman to be trifled with – tales of people who have crossed her and lived to regret it abound: one story (of many) has her personally hiring a bulldozer in a land dispute and getting a recalcitrant local official sacked. She looked super-glamorous at Earth in a white dress and blue nails, and her backing singers looked and sounded ravishing in vertiginous heels and 70s hairdos.The Dalston venue is becoming a great addition to London’s music venues – a little run-down with wooden seating but with a warm atmosphere and excellent sound centring on Oumou’s extraordinary Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The Williams brothers (The Missing, Liar, Rellik, Baptiste) are back. In The Widow, the writer-producer team of Jack and Harry move on to Wales, Rotterdam and corruption in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but the recipe is wearyingly familiar: a bag full of evil money, a missing person, foreign languages that some characters can’t speak, and people who say ponderous things like, “They say hope is to see the light in spite of all the darkness” and “We can never hide who we are." There’s a fine cast, it’s stylish and colour-saturated, but in the first two episodes at least, there’s Read more ...
andy.morgan
Damn exotica. It has a habit of marshalling your gaze away from shabby Soviet-style apartment blocks and training it on white-washed palaces with ornate doors and latticed balconies; away from traffic jams of fume-spouting 4x4s and on to the old water sellers on Kenyatta Road with their bicycles, their brass cups and curious hollers; away from large groups of Russian tourists fresh off gleaming cruise-shipsand on to groups of school kids in blue uniforms and spotless white hijabs; away from the messy compromises of human existence and on to the recognisable certainties of sea and sky, which Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Tinariwen and others have made taken the haunting sonorities and lolloping camel rhythms of the Sahara far and wide. Kel Assouf are the next wave, more deeply soaked in the rock energy of bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath or Queens of the Stone Age.Sofyann Ben Youssef, the band’s keyboardist and producer of the album brings to the mix a subtle infusion of electronics as well as a taste for trance-inducing repetition and psychedelic textures that works well with the force of Kel Tamsahek (Tuareg) music, and yet doesn’t fully avoid the sameness that characterises so much of this music, not Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
On Drums was inhabited by a parade of fine-looking young and middle aged multi-ethnic anglophone drummers, all introduced by Stewart Copeland, the American drummer of the Police. In vintage film and contemporary interviews his chosen musicians seemed almost invariably fit and trim whatever the substances ingested in the past. Presumably touring schedules and the sheer physical effort (only temporarily supplanted, it turns out, by Roger Linn’s 1980s invention of drum machines) of banging the instruments kept our musicians in good nick.Copeland suggested that percussionists, sitting behind Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Wow! First, the Black Panther team took cinema by storm; now, they have conquered theatre as well. Or, at least, two of them have. The Convert has been written by actor and playwright Danai Gurira (Okoye), and stars Letitia Wright (Shuri). Originally staged in the United States in 2012, and currently part of Kwame Kwei-Armah's first season at the Young Vic, this three-hour historical epic, which tells the harrowing story of an African Catholic believer's attempt to convert a young black woman in colonial South-East Africa, has a great cast which also includes Ivanno Jeremiah, Wright's Read more ...