Mali
mark.kidel
Contemporary music from Mali hovers delicately (and creatively) between purist tradition and more or less successful attempts at making things more attractive to a younger and worldwide audience. Oumou Sangaré’s first five albums for the British World Circuit label stuck mostly to the raunchy Wassoulou style, characterized by pentatonic style and irresistible loping polyrhythms; but her first with No Format, who have, paradoxically, distinguished themselves with very fine acoustic albums for Ballaké Sissoko, Vincent Ségal and Kasse Mady Diabaté, launches into new territory, the great singer’s Read more ...
Tim Cumming
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 Desert, they have released eight consistently fine albums (the recent Live in Paris is particularly good).Their music is internal, meditative, sombre, political, philosophical, poetic, and returns again and again to the long line of troubles besetting the Tuareg region of Saharan Mali, riven by Islamists – a former friend of the band ended up Read more ...
howard.male
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 blinkered eyes was a purer, more authentic form than rock (which was what Tinariwen were really all about). But having said that, Tinariwen sound like Tanita Tikaram compared to parts of this second album from fellow Saharan desert rockers Kel Assouf (who feature Tinariwen guitarist and singer Anana Harouna). The title translates as "Surprise" and a Read more ...
mark.kidel
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 the same rules and expectations, and is free to take liberties that the servants of the great Manding heritage are not.This is the second of her collaborations with producer John Parrish, the Bristol-based musician who has been both inspiration and studio helpmate to PJ Harvey for many years. Thankfully, and unlike some other producers who have 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 ...
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 ...
David Nice
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 went there before it became a no-go zone - with luminous cinematography by Sofian El Fani, but the human interest is never secondary.Sissako gets magnetic performances from the actors playing the beautiful Bedouin family at the heart of the film (pictured below), but he also manages to make the men of Ansar Dine, the jihadist extremist Read more ...
emma.simmonds
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 of any thriller Timbuktu avoids the manipulative tricks of genre cinema. Sofian El Fani's sun-kissed cinematography mirrors the defiant beauty of the landscape and its people, while the screenplay - from Sissako and Kessen Tall - gently draws out the hypocrisy and absurdity of the situation, alongside the exasperating injustice.Inspired by the Read more ...
theartsdesk
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 psychedelia, Ethiopian fuzz-tone guitar, Brazilian reggae, English folk, underground Congolese music, a bunch of Italian eccentrics, Senegalese funk and numerous stops in between, including a side project from everyone’s favourite south London rockers Fat White Family. Albums of the moment include those by Blick Bassy, Sacre Delone Cuore, Flavia Read more ...
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 ...
mark.kidel
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 perhaps that a work as primal and rich in possibility as Terry Riley’s In C should work miraculously well when played and recorded in Bamako, one of Africa’s most vibrant musical cities. The piece is structured around repeated groups of notes and rhythms, taken up by different instruments – strings, percussion, and in this case vocals – which 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 ...