304: Rûwâhîne, by Ifriqiyya Électrique

Ifriqiyya Électrique (Tunisia/France/Italy)
Rûwâhîne (2017)
9 tracks, 44 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Ifriqiyya Électrique are responsible for one of the most intense musical experiences I've ever had – twice. This record – their debut – gives a good idea of the sound of their music, but it cannot convey the sheer power of its live performance.

The Banga are black Africans, descendants of West African slaves, who live in the Djerid desert in the south of Tunisia. They are a Sufi community, and as such they use their music as worship, reaching out to Sufi saints and the spirits of their ancestors in large-scale healing ceremonies, where initiates fall into ecstatic trance, vehicles for the unknowable forces.

Ifriqiyya Électrique is a collaboration between four Banga musicians and Italian-French industrial noise duo Putan Club, with additional electronics from Pierpaolo Leo and extensive samples from on-the-ground recordings of the rûwâhîne (spirit) ceremony. On the face of it, these collaborators may seem to have very little in common, but their musical aesthetics align in wonderful ways. Both use sound to break the brain. Banga music and industrial noise are both used to confuse the ears, to detach the listeners from mundane reality and occupy the entirety of body and cranium.

Together, they create an overwhelming wall of noise. Clattering krakebs, wildly distorted bass, pounding Tunisian tabla barrel drums and naghara kettle drums, smashing cymbals, anguished massed cries of religious utterances, wailing electric guitar, garbled synthesised sound, low-pitched rhythmic chanting and authentic sounds of late-night ceremonial hubbub. All of it combines to create something terrifying, exhilarating, raw and passionate. The intensity comes in waves – sometimes the noise is all encompassing, but at others it is smouldering, tension building and just as captivating, and both modes work to increase the impact of the other.

In live performance it is ear splitting. In the dark, shoulder-to-shoulder with other humans, moving together, sweating together, it becomes an assault of simultaneous sensory deprivation and sensory overload. The only way the feeling could be more acute is if it were conducted in the ceremony’s rightful location, in the deserts and tiny huts, surrounded by candles and in air suffused with many incenses, teas and highly-spiced food.

You won’t get that from this album, but you will get a flavour of it. Play it as loud as possible, turn off the lights, turn up the central heating and bring your neighbours around and you’ll get closer. But, if you can, experience Ifriqiyya Électrique in the flesh. There’s nothing quite like it, and you may never feel quite the same again.

303: Navajo Songs from Canyon de Chelly, by Sam Yazzie Sr. and group

Sam Yazzie Sr. and group (USA)
Navajo Songs from Canyon de Chelly (1990)
13 tracks, 48 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

We listen to so much music from the USA. The country has been the coalescing place for so many of the most popular and enduring musical styles that have impacted the culture in almost every corner of the world. But this American culture only dates back about 500 years at the very earliest and springs from peoples who have either taken the land for themselves or who were forcibly relocated from their homes an ocean away against their will. Very little do we hear the sounds of the original custodians of the land.

Perhaps you’re like me: when I considered Native American music, it was always in the frame of New Age music. You know the sort, echo-y chants, pounding drums, wooden flutes and panpipes of origins from anywhere across the American continents, backed by layered synthesised drones and variously accompanied by cheesy saxophones, wolf howls and gongs of indeterminate Asian origin. But as ever, that association of Native American music with New Age pap is just one curated by white people dumbing down, making bland and generally ruining anything that the Native Americans touched, as has happened for centuries, for shame.

We can counter these narratives – and our own involuntary associations within ourselves – by listening to Native American music as it is performed traditionally. For me, this journey began with this album – recorded in 1975 – of music of the Navajo people, whose nation spans Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. The music presented on this album is of many different functions. Many of the songs are important in the Ndaa’ or Anaa’ji’ music and dance ceremonies, which are held to purify Navajos after battle. As such, they hold a lot of sacred meaning. But although Native Americans are often regarded as incredibly solemn and spiritual people, the music here isn’t always so serious. Other songs included are work shanties, songs to accompany games and sports and songs whose sole purpose is as entertainment.

For those not accustomed to this sort of music, it can be quite difficult to listen to. The preferred vocal style is not what we’re used to, with very heavy vibrato and often quite a guttural tone, and the melodies are sometimes limited in their range to just two or three notes. There is however a hypnotic quality to a lot of it, the insistent rhythms, repetitive lines and recurring song structures. This music rewards close listening, although it may take some getting used to.

Of course, Navajo traditional music is only a small drop in a massive ocean of Native American music that stretches across a whole continent, and there are many more cool and fascinating styles out there – another recommendation is to listen to the intense and exciting pow wow music of the Hopi people. My own knowledge of these cultures is still scant and I’m looking forward to improving it. Listening to the music of indigenous and oppressed peoples is a powerful way of recentring and recalibrating cultural assumptions that may have been derived from inaccurate sources, and can also lead to further knowledge and understanding of these peoples’ wider cultures, beliefs and histories. The story of America is many millennia older than the USA, and its musical heritage deserves proper recognition too.

302: Gris-Gris, by Dr John

Dr John (USA)
Gris-Gris (1968)
7 tracks, 33 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Right at the beginning of this blog, on the sixth entry, I talk about Dr John’s Gumbo and lamented the fact that I’d never managed to catch the Good Doctor live; that he was right at the top of my must-see list. I never did see him live. Since I wrote that entry, Dr John has passed – he died in June aged 77. He was in New Orleans when he went, and was honoured as a true son of the city in the way that New Orleans does best – the Dr John Second Line has already become a legendary occasion of celebration and mourning through the medium of spontaneous, leaderless music making. There are a lot of videos from that day, but the first I saw – this one, from Dust-to-Digital – impacted me hard. You can feel the love of the city for a man who loved it in return. It’s only fitting that we take another listen to one of Dr John’s most important albums.

Gris-Gris actually marked the invention of Dr John. The man’s real name was Mac Rebennack, a New Orleanian session player specialising in R’n’B piano. He was just about scraping by in Los Angeles, but needed a real creative outlet. And so was born Dr John, The Night Tripper. Originally a character, Dr John’s aim was to distil the essence of New Orleans and its music using the language of psychedelic rock that provided the soundtrack to California at that time.

This is a very different album to Dr John’s Gumbo. Where the later album was all about the very specific brand of NOLA piano jazz and boogie with all the exhilarating perkiness that entails, Gris-Gris presents the city’s more esoteric side, looking less at the picturesque colonial architecture of the French Quarter and more out into the surrounding swamps where the language is a mixed-up creole of French, English, Spanish and ancient African words.

Although there are stand-out tracks and hits in this set (‘Walk on Guilded Splinters’, ‘Jump Sturdy’ and ‘Mama Roux’ among them), the real impact isn’t about any particular piece of music; it’s the whole atmosphere that is the real triumph of the album. It is a dark work of funk, Afro-Latin rhythms and Voodoo references, all echoing together as if emanating from the belly of a deep cauldron. Jazz is present to a degree, but more important are the waves of rock, soul and gospel that sizzle and shimmer in among the rest of this ominous and vaguely threatening musical potion. Most heady of all is Dr John’s distinctive voice, high-pitched and pinched and with the strongest, most beautiful accent. His speech-song is littered with arcane imagery in all of the languages of New Orleans, and, word and sound together, he paints an extremely evocative image of place, time and atmosphere.

Gris-Gris was Dr John’s big arrival, a mysterious Voodoo priest of psychedelia, a man plucked out of time to change the directions of rock, jazz and R’n’B. Between this album and Dr John’s Gumbo, his prodigious musicality and his deep reverence for the ever-present New Orleans are starkly obvious. He was rightly hailed as a musical hero of the city and his loss leaves a big hole in the cultural landscape not only of New Orleans, but the world. He was celebrated in life and in death, and those celebrations will continue. His legacy lives on.

301: Music from the Mountains of Bhutan, by Sonam Dorji

Sonam Dorji (Bhutan)
Music from the Mountains of Bhutan (2013)
8 tracks, 43 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Did I choose this album just because it represents the music of Bhutan? Yes. Do I actually know anything about the music of Bhutan? Very little. Is it a Good Album nonetheless? Of course.

Bhutan seems like a fascinating place. It’s a small country whose land is entirely part of the Himalayas and has the all stunning scenery that brings; its unique architecture is similarly beautiful and in keeping with the country’s natural wonders. It is one of the world’s most peaceful countries and is well-known for its focus on ‘Gross National Happiness’ rather than Gross National Product. It’s home to only 800,000 people.

It sounds like the perfect place to visit, but unless you’re from India, Bangladesh or the Maldives, it isn’t that easy. Tourists are only permitted to enter with a fully pre-booked trip that consists of a guided tour – the cheapest available is US$200 per day. Ouch. That does include all accommodation, food and activities, and there is a good reason for it – tourism is kept to a minimum to protect the country’s unique culture and breath-taking environment. Naturally, however, this restriction means that it is a difficult place to get to, and very few people get to experience it. All of this is basically a long-winded way of pointing out that if you want to hear Bhutanese music, you’re going to have to rely on recordings.

Even then, recordings are hard to come by. There are only a handful of albums of Bhutanese music available internationally, and even then, a fair number of those focus on the music of the exiled Tibetan population. This album by Sonam Dorji, the founder and director of the Music of Bhutan Research Centre, is one of very few recordings of non-sacred Bhutanese music.

The music itself is a mix of traditional folk songs, original pieces written in the traditional style and lu-saar (‘new songs’ written in the contemporary style). The way that the pentatonic scales interact with the rhythms of the languages and the melodic ornamentations give the songs a sound as distinctive as the rest of Bhutanese culture, an intriguing mix of Tibetan, Chinese and Indian sound-worlds and (you know I love it) a real bluesy bend to a lot of the melodies. Featuring just Dorji on vocals and drangyen – a traditional lute with three double-coursed strings that dates from the eighth century – and, on one track, Atta Yeshi on bamboo flute, the sound of this album is sparse and calm, an atmosphere promoted by the heavy reverb applied to it all.

Bhutan is a place I truly want to visit sometime in my life, although it seems very unlikely any time soon (but feel 100% to donate to the cause!). Until then, at least you and I can listen to the beautiful and evocative sounds of Sonam Dorji and his drangyen, who can take us to those peaceful mountaintops with our ears.

300: First Recordings, by R.L. Burnside

R.L. Burnside (USA)
First Recordings (2003)
14 tracks, 37 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

R.L. Burnside was one of the big names in the 90s/00s blues revival and punk blues scenes. He was the real deal. He grew up in rural Mississippi, learning all of the roots blues styles along the way –fife and drum, gospel and country blues, which he learnt from Mississippi Fred McDowell; spent some time in Chicago playing with Muddy Waters before returning to the Delta as an itinerant worker and bluesman on the side. He even did a spell in Parchman Farm for killing a guy with a bullet to the face. He was one bad motherfucker – and his story also happened to tick all the boxes for what a ‘real’ delta blues musician should be. On top of that, he’d also developed a penchant for loud, noisy blues that 90s punks, desperate for an ‘authentic’ sound, latched on to. He became the poster-bluesman for Fat Possum Records and worked with everyone from the Jon Spenser Blues Explosion to the Beastie Boys.

That material is still super interesting, if occasionally dated at the points where his music gets the hip-hop remix treatment, but it’s his First Recordings that I always come back to. As you’d expect, these 14 tracks were the first time Burnside had had his work put on tape, by George Mitchell in 1968. By that time Burnside’s playing technique and compositions were recognisably those he continued with in his later work, but here he’s in all-acoustic country blues mode. Recorded in an easy setting – at home in his living room and with a few crates of beer and some whiskey – gone is the bombast and in-yer-face masculinity. What remains is Burnside’s subtle and soulful vocals and nimble guitarwork.

I love the sound of that acoustic guitar here. When he gets a groove going, it’s as solid and unstoppable as a freight train, but when he picks out melodies, they’re incredibly evocative. To my ears, it sounds as if his guitar is really loosely strung, allowing him to get some mad bends going on as well as giving those low bass-notes a chunky, buzzy percussive element when they’re struck, almost acting like an exclamation point at the end of each riff. The first track, ‘Just Like a Bird Without a Feather’, is a great way to kick off the album and sets up the rest perfectly: heartfelt vocals that take in the whole of his range and some simple but elegant guitar that bends around so much you’d almost think he was using a slide.

First Recordings is a very different album from those that brought him fame in his late-60s and 70s. Those are very fun for a rollicking, headbanging time, but in many ways I think these raw, down-home recordings show off his musical talent even more. But no need to pit them against each other – both of his styles work in complement to each other, so let’s just enjoy more good music!

299: Sir Fôn Bach, by Llio Rhydderch

Llio Rhydderch (United Kingdom)
Sir Fôn Bach (2019)
9 tracks, 37 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Working in-office at Songlines magazine (as I have done since the beginning of the year) has meant that I have been listening to lots of music that I otherwise wouldn’t have even thought to pick up. I’ve been loving all the neat personal discoveries that this position has allowed me to make. Llio Rhydderch is one of them. I’d never heard of Rhydderch before, and when her album came in, it had no accompanying information. I could tell from her name and those of the album and the tracks that this was going to be Welsh music, but I expected it to be Welsh-language folk song. It wasn’t, but from the very beginning of the first track, I was completely captivated.

Rhydderch is the world’s foremost performer of the triple harp, a chromatic harp with three parallel rows of strings that is particular to Wales. She learnt the instrument completely by ear in true folk fashion, through watching, listening and copying, and she passes on the tradition in the same way. She is heavily invested in the preservation of this important Welsh heritage. To hear that puts one in mind of museum-music, pieces played the same way as they have been for centuries with reverential accuracy, but this album isn’t that, either.

Sir Fôn Bach is a completely solo album, just Rhydderch and her harp, and it is heavenly. The tone is so gentle and warm. The pace is never hurried, but never lags behind either. Each note is carefully chosen and executed in exactly the right way, all with a natural fluidity and supreme ease. The pieces in this set are based on traditional Welsh tunes or else composed in that same way, but Rhydderch is as much of an innovator as a preservationist. The music here is often somewhere between the extremes of folk and classical music, shifting to various points in that spectrum throughout the album. Different directions are taken, too. ‘Dychwelyd’ is an especially cinematic, impressionist piece; ‘Beth Yw'r Haf i Mi (Y Llawenydd a Fu)’ takes the ear to the realm of a medieval court; and the scales and techniques employed on ‘Anhawdd Ymadael’ are doubtlessly inspired by the Japanese koto.

If it weren’t for this album landing on my desk, I would never have stuck it into my CD player. The first impression formed by eye led me to believe this wouldn’t be my thing at all, and I was so wrong. I’ve barely been able to stop listening to it since. Sir Fôn Bach is without question my favourite album of 2019 so far, and I am delighted that I now get to explore the rest of this brilliant artist’s beautiful music.

298: Bayun Maata, by Abdou Salam et les Tendistes

Abdou Salam et les Tendistes (Niger)
Bayun Maata
7 tracks, 43 minutes
Awesome Tapes From Africa

And so we move from yesterday’s house music to today’s Hausa music! Hahahahahaha so funny.

The Hausa are an ethnic group from a wide region across Africa’s Sahel, from Côte d’Ivoire in the west and Sudan in the east. Around 70 million people (according to Wikipedia) identify as Hausa, with the biggest populations living in the north of Nigeria and the south of Niger. Abdou Salam Mamadou is one of the biggest musical stars in Niger, and his music has been described as ‘pan-Hausa,’ using influences and traditions from across the culture’s spread, as well as neighbouring cultures such as those of the Fula people. Most notably, his music uses drum patterns associated with the Tuareg tinde music – hence the name of his band.

With just a simple ensemble of gurumi lute (similar to a Ghanaian kologo), bass and drums (and occasional, low-in-the-mix guitar), Mamadou manages to make music with such a sweet groove. Lacking in any unnecessary accoutrements, it only has what it needs to make you sway and to get its musical message across. It is refreshingly free of overproduction; in fact, this particular tape has very bad sound quality, but that only adds to the charm.

On this album, courtesy of the ever-wonderful Awesome Tapes From Africa, Mamadou goes through several different styles, although I have to admit I wouldn’t be able to name them. For the uninitiated – and I count myself very much among them – this music echoes much further into other musical geographies. The title track sounds remarkably like music of the Moroccan Gnawa people, bluesy wailing vocals and all. This makes sense: the Gnawa are descended from sub-Saharan West Africans, and their music often makes mention of the spirits of the Bamana and Fula people, and so it’s not too hard to connect the Gnawa and the Hausa as deriving from the same ancient ur-culture. A more random connection is that at several points across this tape, I found myself inexplicably drawing the comparison between Mamadou’s gurumi and the Kenyan nyatiti lyre. But that one’s too tenuous, I think that’s just my brain connecting similar sounds without reason. Still interesting though.

As with so many Awesome Tapes, this album presents just tiny fragments of information – a band name, a photograph, the track listing and the music itself. Helpful commenters and some Google-fu reveals some more little details like some basic cultural background, instrument names and a Spotify listing with two more albums on there (always welcome). But then the trail goes cold. As ever, I find myself wishing I had more information. There are so many questions, but they’re probably only answerable by Nigerien people on the ground. One day I’ll get there, and I’ll find out the full story behind this great music.

297: Leftism, by Leftfield

Leftfield (United Kingdom)
Leftism (1995)
11 tracks, 70 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Leftism by Leftfield is one of the quintessential albums in house music, and one of the first to make a lasting impact as an album in its own right (as opposed to particular songs contained within).

A big reason for that is that it was one of the first to offer something that a single – up until then the standard currency in house music – couldn’t do, no matter how banging it was. Leftism took listeners on a voyage of discovery. Rather than just having a beginning-middle-end, fun dance around before moving onto the next track by the next artist, this album takes you to many places and headspaces, each flowing smoothly into the next like scenery outside a train window.

As well as refiguring the place of the long-playing album in electronic music, Leftism also helped to change ideas of what house music could actually be. Throughout the journey, the tracks roll through deep trance, ambient music, trip-hop and dubwise grooves along with a whole array of house styles, and samples and influences range from as far as Brazil, Bulgaria, India, Jamaica and West Africa.

It’s kind of amazing that when Leftfield first made this album, they weren’t happy with the results, feeling that it didn’t gel at all. I guess working on something for so long (some of the tracks had been in production for years) does give you a certain tunnel-vision, and it’s lucky that they decided to go ahead and release it anyway. Even though it was their very first album, it became their defining work. When I saw Leftfield live for the first time last year, it was Leftism that they played, beginning to end and much expanded, but it was a template that still drew the crowds in their thousands.

It’s rare that one album changes the course of music, but Leftism definitely did that, and electronic dance music of all styles has benefited from its legacy. Sounds just as fresh and just as get-up-and-danciful today, too.

296: Romantech, by New York Gypsy All Stars

New York Gypsy All Stars (USA/North Macedonia/Turkey/Greece)
Romantech (2012)
10 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify

Eastern European Romani dance music usually brings to mind powerful brass bands, frenetic fiddles or comically trotting cimbalom. The New York Gypsy All Stars take it in a very different direction.

While they keep Balkan Romani music at the core of their style, they look for connections in many directions. That way they find links in the Turkish and Greek music of their band members, and even further afield with sounds from India and Latin America. The two most prominent instruments of the quintet – Macedonian clarinet and Turkish kanun – are an unusual but ingenious paring, able between them to bend around the whole width of styles that this international exploration takes them through.

What really makes this ensemble special though, is the ‘New York’ right there in their name. They’re not just undertaking dry musical research into the roots and shoots of Romani music throughout Europe and beyond, they are a thoroughly modern and thoroughly cosmopolitan band. That means taking cues from jazz and rock, and a vardo-full of funk. Because as well as the wailing clarinet (played by Ismail Lumanovski from the Liquid Clarinets project) and tinkling kanun, it is the keyboards and bass that give the band their driving edge and add a specific acidity that they bring like no other group.

Where most presentations of Romani music on the world stage root the music in its people’s history, its folk traditions and its quirkiest aspects, the New York Gypsy All Stars prove that not only is this sort of music very much alive, but that it is also very much a part of and in tune with the plugged-in and international lives of the 2010s – and onwards.

295: The Rough Guide to Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years, by Ray Charles

Ray Charles (USA)
The Rough Guide to Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years (2017)
23 tracks, 69 minutes
Spotify playlist

During his time signed for Atlantic Records – from 1952 to 1959 – Ray Charles blossomed from a promising jazz and blues singer and pianist to a hero of R’n’B and arguably the inventor of soul music.

As with so many releases in the Rough Guide series (as we’ve covered here and here), this is just a stellar collection. Full marks to compiler (and top-tier music journalist) Nigel Williamson for putting it together, but one has to imagine that this was one of the easier Rough Guides to put together – by focussing on Charles’ eight-year stint at Atlantic, there’s not too much you can do to go astray. It was an incredibly exciting and fertile time for Charles’ music.

In fact, considering his long career, this compilation still manages to feature almost all of his biggest hits. The only two that would be missing would be ‘Hit the Road, Jack’ and ‘Unchain My Heart’, which were both made slightly later, for different labels. That this is a Rough Guide and not a ‘best of’ actually works in its favour, featuring tracks that would not usually get a look in otherwise. Although it only looks at a relatively short period, we get to hear how Charles explored his musical influences, maturing them into his own style and ultimately starting whole movements. We hear him experimenting with his sound, too: in small-band mode with tracks such as ‘What’d I Say?’, ‘Mess Around’ and ‘I Got a Woman’; with a big band for ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’ and ‘Let the Good Times Roll’; and eventually playing with a full-scale string and wind orchestra like ‘Georgia on My Mind’ and ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’. Nor are these ensembles used ‘just because’; instead, they serve only to heighten whatever emotion is being put across, from the rocking and rollicking piano-based small band stuff to the sentimental orchestral repertoire.

This compilation is so enjoyable and encompasses such a range of styles and approaches despite covering only a few years of Charles’ career that it is hard to argue the assertation that these ‘Atlantic Years’ were also Charles’ musical golden years. If you’re looking for an all-purpose, one-disc set of Ray Charles, you could do a lot worse than this album.

294: Sweet Baby James, by James Taylor

James Taylor (USA)
Sweet Baby James (1970)
11 tracks, 31 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

After a debut album that proved to be a commercial flop, James Taylor went back to the drawing board and came back, two years later with Sweet Baby James and solidified what quickly became, in the immortal words of Buzz Aldrin, his ‘unique brand of bittersweet folk rock.’

It was a defining work in many ways, and at least four of its 11 tracks remain on Taylor’s setlists to this day. The songwriting on display is just on another level. On the title track’s simple, romantic but lonesome cowboy lullaby and the rumination on a friend’s suicide that is ‘Fire and Rain’, he shows his ability to write in a truly affecting way, while still managing to also include songs with a sense of humour: in taking the piss out of boring white-man blues rock in ‘Steamroller Blues,’ he still somehow managed to make an amazing rhythm’n’blues song – he got to have his cake and eat it too, the lucky bugger. And he can flip between these different moods without interrupting the vibe one jot because the whole album shares a genius arrangement that marries country music, American folk and light rock in a stripped-down and laid-back fashion.

There are also so many amazing individual moments in the tracks, tiny things that turn good songs into remarkable ones. It’s the rich sound of a bowed double bass on ‘Fire and Rain’ and the weeping pedal steel on ‘Sweet Baby James’; the slight pause on ‘Lo and Behold’ that marks its flip from simple folk to a gritty gospel-blues and the smooth jazz chords behind the country standard of ‘Oh, Susanna’.

I know I bring this sort of thing up a lot, but Taylor was only 21 when he recorded this album, and that absolutely blows my mind. The lyrics are so mature and insightful, the music so understated to the perfect degree and filled with special moments. How can a 21-year-old come out with that sort of stuff? Baffling, but all the better for the musical world that he did.

I’ve also got a personal reason for choosing this album as well as it just being Last month I talked about John Prine’s ‘Diamonds in the Rough’ as being a song that I adored as a little kid, even though I subsequently forgot what it even sounded like. Well, a similar thing happened with ‘Sweet Baby James’, except I never forgot it. I was obsessed with it when I was little. I even went as far as to proclaim it ‘my song,’ which would make more sense if it weren’t for the fact that my name isn’t actually short for James. Regardless, it sure is a beautiful song, once again proving that I have never had anything less than an impeccable taste* – and apparently a particular fondness for country music that I am only now making a proper effort to rekindle.

With Sweet Baby James, James Taylor not only struck upon the gentle country-folk formula that would stand him in good stead for the rest of his career, but also managed to capture that particular turn-of-the-decade sound that would come to epitomise a certain branch of acoustic-based post-hippiedom and from there the whole ‘singer-songwriter’ genre for generations to come.


* Let’s ignore the S Club 7 period.

293: £00T, by Filastine

Filastine (USA/Indonesia/Japan)
£00T (2012)
13 tracks, 46 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Raised in the US and living with his body in Barcelona and his headspace in the sounds and smells of the world’s every corner, sound artist and producer Filastine creates intelligent music that is as nourishing for the brain as it is for the limbs. £00T is an album based on doom-laden, glitched-out and dirty dubstep, techno and dub, and suffused with all sorts from Javanese gamelan, cumbia, Arabic string orchestras, Thai music, Gnawa and found sounds, with valuable contributions from alternative hip-hop artists Nova (from Indonesia) and ECD (from Japan).

Filastine and his collaborators use their music to get messages across – anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, environmentalist and pan-globalist themes are all explored through lyrics, music and sound collage. Recording this album across six countries and using samples from even more, the understanding and respect that Filastine has for these many different styles and musicians allows him to patch together a work of rich and inhabited soundscapes that remain entirely uncluttered. The musical cultures that are used together in these pieces complement rather than contradict, strengthening the core message of strength in diversity and power in numbers.

Despite a menacing atmosphere and political bent, however, there is a sense of fun about it all. This is not po-faced music. This album is worldwide rave, after all; you can’t commit to such a party if you’re going to be deathly serious about it all the time. Being able to keep so many influences and important topics afloat in music that has a suitably weighty tone while still making it a proper blast to listen to marks Filastine out as an incredibly talented producer. This is one name we should be hearing about more often – spread the word!

292: GP, by Gram Parsons

Gram Parsons (USA)
GP (1973)
11 tracks, 39 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

After short, musically successful stints with various country-rock groups and as a volatile muse to the Rolling Stones, Gram Parsons cut his debut solo album, GP, released in 1973. And, to be fair, what a wonderful album to make your big debut. He moved away from the rockier side of things that he’d explored with The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Byrds and let the full-on country and western vibes lead the way – albeit with little bits of gospel and rhythm’n’blues to smooth things along. It’s all there: jangling acoustic guitars, fiddles, banjos and some luscious pedal steel guitar (I’m an absolute sucker for pedal steel and it’s used especially well here).

The most important elements, though, are the lyrics and their delivery. Parsons’ writing, and the covers that he chooses, all reflect the typical country themes of love, heartbreak and the simple and familiar aspects of working-class American life, but he suffuses the poetry of each one with a real bittersweet beauty. His performances only serve to heighten that. He sings the songs with a small smile, but one tinged with sadness, his voice delicate but full of soul. Then there’s Emmylou Harris, whose vocals are such a stand-out in this album that it really should be double-billed. Their two voices are very different but combine so well, they’re like chocolate with salt. When they sing together, the harmonies are exquisite, and when they sing to each other, there is such emotion to them, and such intimacy, that they inhabit their characters completely. It’s not hard to believe that they’re singing these songs directly from the heart.

The sweetness of GP sheds no light on its chaotic creation. It was by all accounts a fiasco, with Parsons himself barely able to function due to severe anxiety and his regular binges of alcohol and cocaine. It’s amazing how none of that translates to the sound of the album – and lucky, too. It could so easily have turned out a mess, but instead it’s a beautiful, touching work that is simultaneously so country and yet moved the scene in a radically different direction. In the end, it was the only solo album he ever saw released in his lifetime. Gram Parsons died of an accidental overdose months after GP came out, aged just 26. What an impact he had in such a short time, and what a wonderful body of work to leave behind in spite of the turbulence that plagued him.

291: Mockroot, by Tigran Hamasyan

Tigran Hamasyan (Armenia)
Mockroot (2015)
12 tracks, 58 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

It’s easy to describe Tigran Hamasyan’s music in a sentence and difficult to explain it at length. He is a jazz pianist, widely hailed as one of the greatest and most inventive players of his generation, who draws heavy influence from the music of his native Armenia as well as metal, electronica, prog and classical music. See, easy, right?

The tough bit is explaining why exactly it works so well. I’ve lots of jazz that incorporates music from the Middle East, and even lots of jazz specifically from the Caucasus, but none of it really comes close to the interconnectedness of style that Tigran Hamasyan achieves. What he creates is not jazz folk or folk jazz; it is something that is entirely both in an inseparable way. Fjoalzkz, you could say (I doubt you could say that).

The Armenian music that finds its way into Hamasyan’s style sounds incredibly ancient. He draws upon folk songs and church music and classical poetry that date back to the 9th century. Because the Armenian church was one of the very first organised Christian denominations (dating back even further to the 4th century), it is no surprise that the music it used in its worship and ceremony acts as a blueprint for many of the oldest Christian styles – and thus the classical music that descended from them – throughout Europe. When the beautiful, ornamented melodies from these Armenian traditions find a home within the ultra-extended harmonies and highly technical rhythms of contemporary jazz, all in one keyboard and the ten fingers of Hamasyan, they don’t sound like a collision of modern and ancient but instead like music that is both simultaneously.

That’s more than enough to wrap your head around during his solo piano pieces – such as the track ‘Lilac’ on this album (which also has more than a hint of Satie to it) or the entirety of his 2010 album A Fable – but on the rest of Mockroot he isn’t content with that. This is where the trio set-up comes in. Together with drums, bass and a load of synthesisers and other electronic effects (and a couple of guests too), this intricate, elegant jazz becomes the host for a very different monster. Crazy time signatures that overlap across various instrumental parts; basslines that wouldn’t be out-of-place in dubstep; 8-bit-style drum patches and synth runs; aggressive and irregular staccato chords and heavily compressed drum rhythms. The two closing tracks, ‘The Grid’ and ‘Out of the Grid’ are the ones you need to get this full-on mutant jazz vibe. I’m not the first to compare Hamasyan’s more out-there compositions to the extreme metal genre of djent, but that soundworld is so clear to me on pieces such as these. He even prepares his piano to get that classic metal palm-muting sound.

Even in combining traditional Armenian folk and religious music and jazz, Tigran Hamasyan creates something unique but with such a delicacy that keeps each style entirely intact. Then to bring in different styles that are in many ways antithetical to the gentleness of this fusion, to ramp it up to headbanging extremes and to still have each style involved upheld with equal integrity is an amazing feat of composition and performance from all involved. One of the greatest and most inventive players of his generation indeed. Simply stunning.

290: Introducing Shiyani Ngcobo, by Shiyani Ngcobo

Shiyani Ngcobo (South Africa)
Introducing Shiyani Ngcobo (2004)
14 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Maskanda (or maskandi) is Zulu music of the travelling bard. At its origins, it is the perfect mobile music: its steady beat is at walking pace, and the solo musician (traditionally male) accompanies their quick-fire poetry on guitar, concertina or fiddle. Its usual comparison is as ‘the Zulu blues,’ but while the lyrics indeed talk of the struggles of an itinerant lifestyle, its perked-up playing style makes it more akin to country music to my own ears. Where 21st-century maskanda is more likely to sound like a generic pop style, complete with huge synthetic backings and various influences from hip-hop to reggae, Shiyani Ngcobo was a powerful force for preserving the original flavour of this unmistakable sound.

Introducing Shiyani Ngcobo was the only full-length album he made before his death in 2011, but it could just as easily be called Introducing Maskanda. He was known to brag about being a master of ‘eight to nine’ different maskanda sub-styles (which vary by region and dance style), and he shows off many of them here. In the traditional mould, Ngcobo is a guitarist and singer. His voice is a compelling mixture of sweet and sandpaper, both warm and welcoming while still being quite high-pitched and scratchy. It’s his guitar playing that sends me reeling. Maskanda traditionally starts with a short section on which the musician shows off their instrumental chops, and it does a great job of drawing the listener in. There’s always at least two things going on with Ngcobo’s guitar at once – one second he will be playing a melody to a rhythmic drone, the next he will be playing two melodies in harmony, and the next he will be playing melody on the high strings and a bass part on the low, and he switches all these up any-which-way before settling into a circular riff that incorporates all these techniques and which serves as the basis to his singing. It’s mighty impressive – especially when you bear in mind that some of the tracks are recorded on a homemade igogogo guitar, a five-string instrument built out of an oil-can and (if my ear doesn’t fool me) doesn’t have any frets.

The solo tracks (such as ‘Sevelina’) are my favourites from this album, but the ones with his ensemble ain’t half bad either. It variously includes fiddles, whistles, concertinas and a second guitar, but most importantly an electric bass guitar, from Aaron Meyiwa, which plays a valuable role as yet another interlocking melody alongside Ngcobo’s guitar. Then things can change up completely, such as in the track ‘Ijadu’ which is a cappella save for a simple shaker, the group’s four voices blending in a really lovely and pleasing manner that still rings with all of the maskanda groove as the rest of them.

Shiyani Ngcobo was one of the last champions of the acoustic style of maskanda in both senses of the word. Acoustic maskanda does still exist on its own and blended into the modern electric styles, but there is none as versatile and virtuosic as Ngcobo – this album is a fantastic run down of just what he was capable of.

289: Hip Harp, by Dorothy Ashby

Dorothy Ashby (USA)
Hip Harp (1958)
7 tracks, 36 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes…just £2.49!

Finding out about good music you’ve never heard before is a drug. Sometimes it can be in a totally unexpected place like being dragged around a high-street clothes shop and hearing them pumping out groovy Sudanese pop (that happened, turned out it was Sinkane. Thanks Bonmarché); sometimes it’s a friend hipping you to something they know you’ll like. Other times, it can literally be an idle thought that turns into a YouTube search.

One day for me, that idle thought was ‘I wonder if jazz harp is a thing.’ Of course it is. Within seconds I was listening to Hip Harp by Dorothy Ashby, which had been uploaded to YouTube in its entirety. Wow!

I had heard jazz harp before, but that was in the hands of Alice Coltrane, and while her music takes you on a spectacular spiritual and orchestral journey, this album hit me in an entirely different way. From the very first piece, ‘Pawkey’, it was exactly what I had in mind – the classical harp used as a solo hard-bop instrument, with just as much verve as a saxophone or trumpet but with its own unique characteristics.

In Ashby’s hands, the harp lends the bop a slinky and silken edge. Her melodies are elegant and dignified, often bringing in classical elements (such as on the flowing cool jazz version of ‘Moonlight in Vermont’), but she’s not afraid to make it dirty when it needs to be by digging out some deep blues or teasing insistent dissonances out for as long as possible before resolving them with a playful flick of the wrist. As an additional bonus, this album was made alongside flautist Frank Wess, whose impish lines also reflect Ashby’s slight classical inclination.

Hip Harp is probably not as well regarded as Ashby’s more experimental records such as Afro-Harping or The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby (where she also plays the koto), but for me, it’s the one that stands out for its ultimately chilled vibe. It’s a really fun album, made with passion and skill and an evident joy in its music – it’s hard to imagine worries when you listen to this. And if you’re ever in a place where you simply need to hear some hard-bop harp, this album will hit exactly that spot.

288: World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Vol. 3: England, by Various Artists

Various Artists (United Kingdom)
World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Vol. 3: England (1955)
30 tracks, 48 minutes
iTunes

A couple of days ago, I discussed field recordings in relation to the Ocora series in general, and the album Burundi: Musique Traditionnelles in particular. Field recordings, and the spheres of anthropology and ethnomusicology at which they’re normally aimed, are very rightly often accused of ‘othering,’ looking at other cultures in terms of their opposition to Western cultures. Sometimes this is in a paternalistic way, sometimes in a clinical way, and very early work is sometimes downright insulting, but the common theme is that the recordist or researcher is positioned as an aloof, educated and superior observer, more akin to a wildlife documentarian than a fellow music enthusiast meeting with equals*.

That’s why I was so fascinated when I first listened to this album, part of the superb World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series. This was the first time that I’d ever heard ‘my’ culture presented in the same way as music from everywhere else in the world has been recorded for study. These are field recordings from England, presented in a series alongside music from across Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas. The music here shows the sound of English folk – that is, English people – from the late 30s to the early 50s; the pieces were recorded up and down the country (and just over the border into Wales too) in pubs and village halls, at fetes and in the street and in the homes of regular, musical people. A wide range of styles and functions are covered, from chanties to ballads to dances and drinking songs. Equal importance is placed on the rhythm and rhyming games of schoolchildren and the mumming plays of Dorset pubs at Christmas as on recordings of famous singers such as Ewan MacColl, Bertie Lloyd and Isla Cameron. The accompanying notes give detailed context for each piece, noting its participants, dates and locations as well as the histories of the pieces or cultural artefacts from the perspectives of both the performers and of researchers. In short, it is an amazing collection of anthropological recordings presented in the exact same way as music from any other, ‘other’ culture**.

It really gives a glimpse into the lives of non-urban English people of the time. At this point, folk music wasn’t something that was the result of revivals, songs learnt from recordings and performed in concerts or in folk clubs one night a month above a pub. This was entertainment and heritage, passed through by oral tradition. It was performed at work, at home and out-and-about or even – shock horror – in the downstairs of pubs. It was just part of what you do, music as life. It’s not just the contexts that make this interesting either. The music itself is fascinating, and a fair chunk of it is even good to listen to! Isla Cameron’s version of ‘Died for Love’ bowled me for six the first time I heard it; such an agonising and emotional song with a performance to boot, and with such a seemingly simple melody. This is the English blues. That recording is still one of my all-time favourites.

In his notes accompanying the LP, Alan Lomax – who compiled the album with Peter Kennedy, edited the entire series and even recorded a lot of the music himself – writes, ‘The vigor and charm of these living English folksongs may surprise most listeners; perhaps most of all the British.’ After all, these were the traditions of the countryside, the village and the small towns – they had already all but vanished in the big cities. This album and those like it were some of the catalysts of the second big English folk revival that came to a head in the 1960s. Nevertheless, I feel the album can still have the same impact on listeners today. The world that is captured in these recordings doesn’t exist anymore – or if it does, in very quiet ways. Listening to this album brings it to life once more. It also allows English people like myself to appreciate our own culture as an outsider, in much the same way as we listen to music from other cultures. A valuable listening exercise from many perspectives.



* These fields of study have improved upon this stance in the last 30ish years, making leaps and bounds in considerations to academic ethics, positionality and decolonisation of theory and practice, although there is undoubtedly a long way still to go. However, the popular imagination of anthropologists, ethnomusicologists and field recordings is still much as I have described, despite their advances.

** Well, almost. Most of the performers here are credited by name except in the instances of large group or ensemble recordings; in other volumes of this series (especially those not recorded in Western Europe or North America), performers are more likely to be anonymised – ‘woman from the such-and-such village,’ or ‘man singing and playing lute,’ for example. It was still the 1950s after all.

287: Passion, by Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel (United Kingdom, with a worldwide cast)
Passion (1989)
21 tracks, 67 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Passion is Peter Gabriel’s not-quite soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ. It’s not-quite because he actually continued to work on the music for months after submitting it for the film, adding extra tracks and developing the material to make sure that the experience of listening to it as an album was an artistic encounter all of its own.

Gabriel’s aim for the sonic setting of the music was to root it in the oldest sounds of the Middle East and North Africa, the folk and classical styles of that region. As such, there are musicians and samples from Turkey, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Armenia, Iran and Kurdistan. From that basis, he adds many ambient textures and small flavours of his own brand of prog rock. He also uses influences, musicians and samples from a wide range of other cultures too, from Pakistan, India, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia and Ghana, in beautiful and inventive ways. With this album containing many impressive guest stars – Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Youssou N’dour, Baaba Maal, L. Shankar, Billy Cobham and Kudsi Erguner to name just a handful – it’s possibly more accurate to credit Gabriel as composer; this is much more than a ‘Peter Gabriel album.’

That probably plays a big part in why I enjoy this album so much. As much as I deeply respect his work in the promotion and recognition of music from all across the world with WOMAD and Real World Records, I have never really been able to dig his own music. Here, though, the atmosphere is very different. The scope is epic – and cinematic – but the performances themselves are very intimate. For every intense, percussion-driven section, there is a solemn and introspective section, periods of quiet reflection led by flutes or bowed strings. In bringing in music from across the world, he is very respectful without being overly reverential, allowing the different styles to mingle and create new possibilities.

More than most, I think this album benefits from being heard in one go, from beginning to end. I had heard tracks from Passion before, which gave hints as to its beauty, but the first time listening to it all the way through was a revelation. It was helped by the fact that it was at the WOMAD Festival, remastered and on specially-cut vinyl, played on one of the world’s most intricate surround-sound systems on a warm morning as I ate my breakfast. To not only listen to the music and the amazing quality of sound, but to do it together with about 100 other people was a very special experience. The engaged and focussed listening of the album as a whole really brought out its magnificence and highlighted its status as a complete and self-contained work of art.

In a nice touch, this album was released alongside Passion Sources (Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes), a compilation album of music that was used in Passion (whether as samples or recorded especially) or that provided inspiration during its creation. It’s a great companion piece, and a great way to begin to delve into the roots of this wonderful music.

286: Burundi: Musiques Traditionnelles, by Various Artists

Various Artists (Burundi)
Burundi: Musiques Traditionnelles (1967/1988)
Original: 11 tracks, 32 minutes;
CD reissue: 17 tracks, 65 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Once recorded music really took off as a widespread and household form of entertainment in the West, the first way that people really heard the music of other cultures was in the form of field recordings. Field recordings are, understandably, music made ‘in the field,’ a slightly over-academic way of saying that the music is captured in its intended context as opposed to being recreated in the acoustically precise but culturally sterile recording studio. These sort of recordings were often made of traditional music, primarily for the use of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists for close study of the cultures of which they represent, but they quickly found a market among non-academic listeners who wanted to explore the world in sound. These field recordings marked one of the earliest inklings of the future phenomenon of ‘world music.’

Ocora (now Ocora Radio France) was – and remains – one of the most valuable sources for listener-friendly field recordings of music from all over the world with an astounding breadth of catalogue, releasing albums since the 1950s. One of the releases from those early years was Burundi: Musiques Traditionnelles and – and this is a claim for which I have absolutely no proof – I would guess that it is probably the most popular album they’ve made. Certainly one of the most influential – as I’ve mentioned before (now that I think of it, I should have left this nugget of revelation for this post, but I obviously didn’t think that far ahead), it was this album that introduced the world to the royal karyenda drummers whose sound went on to inform the music of Joni Mitchell and new wave artists such as Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow.

This album is more than just drumming, however, and features all sorts of traditional Burundian styles. Almost every track shows off a different instrument or ensemble – inanga (trough zither), umuduri (musical bow), indingidi (one-string fiddle), ikembe (lamellophone) and an unfortunately unnamed but very cool fife-like flute are all featured, as well as several different vocal techniques. It’s these vocal styles that I find the most intriguing, as some of them sound unlike anything else. Two of the tracks feature greeting songs by young girls, one solo and one a duet; the sound that they make is astounding. I think it is like yodelling – where the voice flips from chest voice to head voice and back – but very rapidly and without changing what note is being sung, for a really uncanny effect. When the two girls sing in a very close canon, the effect is magnified so much more. Then there are two tracks demonstrating the ubuhuha technique that I honestly have no idea how it’s made, and even less idea on how to describe it. Maybe it could involve buzzing one’s lips into a cupped hand, or perhaps singing into a reed-like leaf? I would love to know.

With the near-ubiquity of produced and polished studio recordings for music all around the world, field recordings are falling out of fashion for their dry, academic gaze. Nevertheless, these on-the-ground recordings offer a very different way to listen to, experience and appreciate music, including styles and instruments that have never been (or can never be) recorded otherwise. If you’re looking for a place to start, the Ocora Radio France catalogue is a wonderful resource, and Burundi: Musiques Traditionnelles is a particular highlight.

285: Learning How to Fly, by Tuck & Patti

Tuck & Patti (USA)
Learning How to Fly (1995)
13 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Most jazz is cool. In fact, jazz is clearly the epitome of cool. Tuck & Patti’s Learning How to Fly is jazz, but it’s not cool. But that’s okay. It’s still a Good Album.

It’s a brave album to make. The sound is sparse. For 12 out of the 13 tracks, it’s just Tuck Andress on clean-toned electric guitar and Patti Cathcart on vocals. It’s not just song and accompaniment either – these are the duets of two highly accomplished musicians. Tuck’s guitar is incredibly intricate and technical without becoming robotic and Patti’s deep soul-infused voice gives echoes of Sarah Vaughan. Together they approach a variety of styles from jazz funk (‘Live in the Light’) to bossa nova (‘Learning How to Fly’)

The covers here are some of the highlights. Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Up From the Skies’ is turned into a fun bounce-along with Tuck playing a different crazy jazz chord every beat, and ‘Yeah Yeah’ (made famous by Georgie Fame) is a smooth groove with nice – although miniature – solos from both musicians. It’s ‘In My Life’ that is my favourite. It’s a very poignant song however it’s played, but Patti’s rich, soft voice brings out so much more emotion, elevating it into a temple of the bittersweet – it maybe even gets to me more than the Beatles’ original. Is that sacrilege? To top it off, Tuck’s classical-style guitar provides beautiful backing and manages to perfectly recreate the original’s harpsichord solo with astonishing technique.

So for all that, why do I say it’s not cool? It sounds really dated. Not in Tuck or Patti’s performances (although that smooth soul-jazz certainly had a vogue), but the production. There is so much reverb on it all, and it doesn’t even sound like a natural reverb either. It puts the whole thing incredibly squarely in the 1990s, and not really in a good way. Tuck’s signature long perm doesn’t do many favours in terms of datedness either.

If 12 tracks are just Tuck & Patti on their own, then what is the other? Well, that’s the last track on the album, a remix with incredibly reverby drums, keyboards and saxophone. It’s achingly cheesy. I’d say the additional instrumentation means that this track doesn’t fit with the rest of the album, but its atmosphere actually does. It’s just that the cheesiness is more apparent with more musicians. It’s less impressive than the duets though.

If it’s at all possible for you to listen past the 90s production values, please do. There are some captivating performances here from two great musicians. It’s just a shame that the intervening years have added a substantial amount of mustiness to it all. Ah well. We’ll all sound like that looking back in 25 years’ time.

284: Pixvae, by Pixvae

Pixvae (France/Colombia)
Pixvae (2016)
8 tracks, 45 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

There so many fusions, combinations and admixtures all across the world of music. We’ve considered a fair few on this blog, and there will be many more to come. Some fusions are incredibly effective and frequently successful due to many inherent and obvious similarities in their constructions – think jazz hip-hop or West African blues. Some take such wildly disparate styles, smush them together and fall flat on their face to the surprise of hardly anyone. And then you have fusions between musical genres that should never work, from very different times, places, and culture, but that end up creating mad, previously unthought-of mid-point that sounds so natural and potent you feel a fool for ever having doubted it.

To that end, stick Pixvae in your ears. Their music is Afro-Colombian math rock with a death metal jazz edge. The band is actually a six-piece collision of two groups, with guitar, drums and baritone sax/synths from the group Kouma and three voice and percussion from Bambazú. Why does it work? I don’t know, but it does.

The Colombian element is currulao, a style from the Pacific coast of the country. It is based on percussion polyrhythms and interconnected vocal lines that duck and dive over each other as well as making sweet harmonies. Having developed among the Afro-Colombian population, the music still retains a strong African vibe. In the original style, it is all held together with the marimba xylophone, but instead, in Pixvae, that place is filled by noise.

Great noise, mind. The ‘math’ element of the rock means that even more complex polyrhythms are added to those of the currulao, meaning at some points there can be three or four different beats going on at the same time, all shifting in and out of phase with each other. The guitar, saxophone and synths are very loud and all have their own rawness to them – the reedy honking of the sax, the overdriven distortion of the guitar, the sawtooth waves of the synth – but they still manage to add to the sound in a subtle way, mostly focusing on short and interesting riffs that loop around and around. Again, these riffs are usually of differing lengths but played simultaneously so that the effect is ever-shifting and evolving.

When both of these come together, they fit together in a really pleasing way. They don’t always fit together easily – there are lots of crunchy dissonances created in all of the different overlapping vocal and instrumental patterns – but the shifting nature of the melodic and rhythmic cycles mean that each piece contains waves of tension and release. Even the sweetness of the vocals against the noise of the instruments provide a juxtaposition that doesn’t need a resolution, they’re just two very different flavours that nevertheless combine perfectly, like chocolate and salt.

Afro-Colombian folk music and heavy math rock jazz seem too far removed to birth a successful fusion, but Pixvae found the elements that link them and exploit them to the grooviest ends. Maybe no musical fusion is too ambitious to work, perhaps it just needs the right musicians to find those connections. Pixvae do it in the most exciting way possible.


N.B. In my research for this album I came across the review in Songlines Magazine…and they gave it a one-star review! Bollocks to that. What do music journalists know anyway?!

283: Sabhuku, by Jonah Sithole

Jonah Sithole (Zimbabwe)
Sabhuku (1995)
10 tracks, 70 minutes
YouTube

In this blog, we’ve looked and listened to some of Zimbabwe’s most joyous and danceable pop music in the forms of the jit of the Bhundu Boys and Biggie Tembo and the sungura of the Four Brothers. Those styles are guitar-based and heavily influenced by Cuban music (via the Congo and Kenya) and were – in their time – the music of the bars and beer halls of Harare. Today’s artist – a guitarist – had a great impact on those styles, but was also foundational in the creation of another most important Zimbabwean style.

We need to go back a little bit first, though. The mbira is the iconic instrument of Zimbabwe. A lamellophone, it is constructed from tongues of metal attached to a wooden frame, which are plucked with the thumbs and fingers in an interlocking pattern – first plucking a note with one hand and then the other. This way, the mbira creates wonderful rolling tunes that can go on indefinitely. When played acoustically, it is usually covered in cowrie shells (or bottle caps) whch shimmer and resonate to create a buzz when the tongues are plucked. It is very easy to ‘fall into’ the sound of the mbira, and its main historical purpose for the Shona people of Zimbabwe was to induce trance; mbira is said to talk to the ancestors and bring their spirits to commune with the living. As such, it is an incredibly important and powerful instrument.

During the colonial period, the music and esoteric powers of the mbira were seen as Satanic by British and later Rhodesian rulers, who banned its use. While the practice of mbira in spirit ceremonies persisted in an underground fashion, far fewer people learnt to play the instrument – especially for non-religious reasons – and the tradition began to die out.

That’s where Jonah Sithole comes in. Based in Harare, Sithole was a guitarist in soukous bands including the famous Lipopo Jazz Band, where he styled his playing on the great Congolese guitarist Franco. During his time with the Lipopo Jazz Band, however, he also began experimenting with his own style. He would translate traditional mbira pieces onto guitar, using the strings in the same interlocking manner as the tongues on the mbira. By playing in this manner in the context of the soukous band, Sithole became one of the main pioneers of mbira guitar. In doing so, the ancient and culturally iconic sounds of the mbira became a popular sound once again, and the (secular) tradition was carried on in the open, on the medium of guitar.

Sithole’s most famous work was made alongside the singer Thomas Mapfumo. Mapfumo’s music was a radical new genre called chimurenga – struggle music – and Sithole’s guitar-work was key to the sound. Chimurenga was music of protest, against minority rule and for black liberation. The lyrics were obviously all important, but the music was different too. It was still heavily influenced by the Latin sound, but unlike jit and sungura, had much more rock’n’roll to it and often used mysterious minor keys rather than the sunny-sounding majors. But it was also deeply Zimbabwean. By incorporating Sithole’s mbira guitar and replicating the distinctive 6/8 rhythms of the hosho gourd shakers on the hi-hat, Mapfumo and Sithole invoked these powerful symbols of Zimbabwean resistance alongside the political lyrics. It’s a potent sound even today.

He worked with Thomas Mapfumo and his band the Blacks Unlimited for stints of varying lengths from 1975 until his death in 1997. He also worked with other bands and, as is presented here, recorded solo material too. Although the chimurenga music of the Blacks Unlimited is probably the definitive context for mbira guitar, I chose this compilation of Sithole’s solo music because it has elements from all across his career. The mbira guitar is the main element, of course, but here you can hear it across different styles from soukous to jit to chimurenga, and even alongside real mbiras too. Jonah Sithole isn’t as well-known as some of the bigger names in Zimbabwean music such as Thomas Mapfumo, Oliver Mtukudzi or Biggie Tembo, especially abroad, so it’s only right that he gets his own recognition. In creating a unique way of playing the guitar, he helped to save the music of a very different instrument, and an incredibly important symbol of Zimbabwean and Shona heritage.

282: Maghreb United, by AMMAR 808

AMMAR 808 (Tunisia/Algeria/Morocco)
Maghreb United (2018)
10 tracks, 36 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Together with the last two entries, this week has become a trio of modernised North African sounds, each putting their own unique stamp on the traditions. AMMAR 808 goes probably the most left-field of them all.

AMMAR 808 is Sofyann Ben Youssef, Tunisian producer and synth player and the owner of an incredibly wide range of musical expertise: jazz, metal, rock, Tuareg music, classical music of Arabic, Western and Indian flavours and all sorts of electronica – they’re all in Ben Youssef’s wheelhouse, and they all go towards the headspace that flowers into his work as AMMAR 808.

Maghreb United is Ben Youssef’s first album under this particular moniker, inspired by the upheaval of political systems and societies in the Maghrebi countries – Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco – over the past decade. In this period of revolution and subsequent rebuilding, people are looking to radically different ways of doing things, and with Maghreb United, Ben Youssef takes it to the extreme, creating a musical sci-fi that is indelibly rooted in the region’s musical styles. To create this style of ‘Maghrebi bass,’ he enlisted three singers from different spheres across the region, each adding their own sound and style: Cheb Hassen Tej, a specialist in Targ music from Tunisia; Sofiane Saidi, Algeria’s star of nu-rai; and Medhi Nassouli, a Gnawa musician who also plays the guimbri lute, from Morocco; also involved on several tracks is Tunisian gasba (flute) and zokra (bagpipes) player Lassad Boughalmi.

These musicians all gave their own musical perspectives on each of their respective styles (all but one of the tracks on the album are derived from traditional songs), and from them, together with a studioful of synthesisers, drum machines (especially the fabled Roland TR-808) and a fair few extra samples, Ben Youssef juggles all these influences together to create the new traditional music of the pan-Maghrebi space colony. This is deep bass and dark techno as if they were traditional music, evolving in the urban metropolises and arid deserts over a thousand years or more. Ben Youssef’s personal connection to these styles means that his application of electronica is in perfect harmony with their original musical intentions, while creating music that reaches beyond club banger. The scale is so epic as to render the dancefloor irrelevant – it will hit you where you stand, take you out of your mind and throw you into a world of booming trance, making your limbs move and emptying your brain of all but that most essential reverberating sound.

This is Afrofuturism, North Africa style: a utopian vision of a Maghreb post-revolution, post-nation-state, and definitely not Earthbound. In an exciting time for Maghrebi music in general, AMMAR 808 is a game changer. Maghreb United is just the beginning. Ben Youssef is currently recording album #2, with Tamil musicians – this space journey is set to take a different course. I can’t wait.

281: Lalla La’roussa, by M'hamed Dammou

M’hamed Dammou (Morocco)
Lalla La’roussa
4 tracks, 35 minutes
Awesome Tapes from Africa

More Moorish music! Yesterday we looked at the modern sounds of the Bidhan people of Mauritania, today we’re going a little bit further north to Morocco, and the music of the Amazigh – or Berber – people.

In particular, this tape is a set of wedding music. Most modern Amazigh weddings now usually feature music that is heavily influenced by chaabi and rai music and made using heaps of synthesisers and drum machines, M’hamed Dammou instead brings a modernisation to the traditional Amazigh sounds. All instruments on this album are real – lotar (lute), electric guitar, ribab (one-string fiddle) and another higher-pitched steel-stringed lute that I can’t identify creating the accompaniment for Dammou’s song, and tbilat (bongo-like drums) and iron scraper holding down a delicious swinging rhythm.

I’m particularly interested in the instrument that Dammou is playing on the cover of this tape. Namely, what is it? From his online presence, his usual instrument appears to be the lotar (although I’ve also found pictures of him playing the banjo and guitar), so I assume it is some adaptation of that instrument, but in a way that I can’t seem to find anywhere else. It’s a sort of inverted trapezoid – or even triangle – with a handle extending from the instrument’s neck to its body. Looks cool, whatever it is, and maybe it’s even that mystery lute I’m hearing too – makes sense – in which case it sounds cool too.

This is definitely music that would get me up onto the dance floor of a wedding much quicker than any Abba tune would – in fact, so would all of the other wedding music I’ve already covered on this blog so far, from Kurdistan to Bulgaria to China to India – and it’s always inspiring to hear traditional music forms kept alive in their original contexts by bringing them into modern parameters. Synths have their place, but that place should be alongside – not instead of – the wonderful music that already exists.

280: Arbina, by Noura Mint Seymali

Noura Mint Seymali (Mauritania)
Arbina (2016)
10 tracks, 41 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

In February, I featured the album Moorish Music from Mauritania by Dimi Mint Abba and Khalifa Ould Eide. That album is a classic of Mauritanian music, in the griot style of the country’s Bidhan (Moorish) people. Mint Abba’s voice is legendary, and the accompaniment of ardin (bridge-harp), tidinit (lute) and very occasionally electric guitar brought forth the sound of the Sahara. The repertoire on that album was in a very traditional style.

Apart from Mint Abba, however, and especially after her death in 2011, the international music scene had a real dearth of Bidhan musicians, such a shame considering their unique musical style. That was until Noura Mint Seymali exploded onto the scene with her 2014 debut album on Glitterbeat Records, Tzenni, and this follow-up from 2016, Arbina.

Mint Seymali is the step-daughter of Dimi Mint Abba, but unlike her elder and mentor, she isn’t content to stick to playing her people’s traditional music. With her guitarist husband Jeiche Ould Chighaly, the music they create together is an altogether more rocking affair, but one that retains all of the most intoxicating elements of the centuries-old styles. The result is one that is still undoubtedly from that magical crossroads between the Mande, Songhoy, Tuareg, Amazigh, Arab, Gnawa, Saharawi, Fula and Wolof people that surround the Mauritanian Sahara from all sides. Mint Seymali’s voice has that beautiful mix of Arabic ornamentation and the bluesy, pentatonic feel of the music of the slightly further south.

The band here is a modified rock set-up. Of the four musicians, there is drum kit, bass guitar, electric guitar and vocals, with Mint Seymali also adding the ardin – the indispensable instrument of female Bidhan griots. The bass and drum kit are far from traditional Mauritanian instruments but nevertheless create a groove that is based on the rhythms of the tbal drum, as well as the rock greats – I’d have bassist Ousmane Touré in my fantasy funky blues band any day, his lines are so solid. Ould Chighaly’s electric guitar really helps anchor the music in place. This isn’t your standard electric guitar, it’s a Nouakchott speciality – for every one fret that yer bog standard blooze player has, Ould Chighaly has two. That means he gets to access the notes in between the notes, and it’s these quarter tones that allow him to so accurately convey the nuances of the tidinit to the axe, with as much or as little distortion as appropriate. Just these three musicians alone could create melon-twisting music as a trio – like Cream if they were fuelled by Saharan sand and campfire tea rather than blues and cocaine. I actually also get a proper 60s folk rock thing from them at points – check out the song ‘Ghlana’ with its wailing slide guitar that could be straight out of early Tull – yowch! And that’s all without even taking into account the spectacular and spellbinding voice of Mint Seymali up front, roaring incredibly intricate melodies with utmost dignity.

I’m really glad that Noura Mint Seymali came around when she did. Coming on the same wave of mainstream appreciation for the rockier elements of that Saharan sound including Tinariwen and Songhoy Blues, Mint Seymali and her musicians give the Mauritanian griot style an important look-in. When a musical tradition is so unique and instantly recognisable as this, it would be a crime to let it go unheard. It also helps that it sounds amazing played as loud as possible by musicians unafraid of cranking up the drive dial and sinking fully into that fist-pumping groove.