051: Sweet As Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa, by Various Artists

Various Artists (Somalia)
Sweet As Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa (2017)
16 tracks, 86 minutes (LP version)
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

Here’s an album that I reviewed not too long ago for Songlines magazine (you can read that on my other blog); it only came out a couple of years ago, after all. I will try my best to find different things to say!

When I first heard about the existence of this album, I admit that I was a little put out. I’d been interested Somali music since I did my undergraduate in music, starting back in 2011. I loved the music for starters, how the use of pentatonic scales and florid vocal ornaments give it a unique flavour and sonically position it precisely in its geographical home in the Horn of Africa, right next to the Arabic peninsula. But there was an intrigue to it too: how could such a range of music have been almost completely ignored within the international music scene? So I held my little idea of maybe delving into the Somali music scene and bringing it to wider attention in Europe. But then this album came along.

Of course, Ostinato Records did a much better job than I could have done, to the point that this album was nominated for a Grammy. Now there’s Somali music being brought to wider attention. The story behind the album is undoubtedly compelling: the tracks having been sourced mostly from the Red Sea Foundation, who had collected (and sometimes even literally dug up) 10,000 tapes that had been hidden by Radio Hargeisa and others to save them from the Somali civil war. But what attracts me most is, as usual, the music.

This compilation brings together pop music by Somalis from across the Horn of Africa from the 60s to the 2000s. As seems to be the case quite often with this sort of compilation, the music skews to the funky – I guess the ‘rare groove’ label probably covers it the best. So there’s funk, there’s reggae, there’s disco, Bollywood music, rock’n’roll and soul in there too in varying amounts depending on the artist, but no matter what other outside influences are laid upon the tracks, the music always retains that strong Somali identity, those same ornaments, the same scales and the same distinctively Somali way of rhyming their poetry. There’s also liberal amounts of sorta-dodgy retro synths and Hammond organs; truly, this album is playing to my weaknesses.

I didn’t get to make that album of Somali music that opened international ears to these wonderful sounds, but I’m glad Ostinato Records did, and did it well. At least I can still set my sights on making that album of Chadian music that I've had on my mind at some point…oh wait a minute, they’re already working on it. Well.