Sambe-Comores: Modern Traditions from Grande Comoro (2000)
9 tracks, 62 minutes
Nowhere to listen or download anywhere online, unfortunately. The closest I can point you is to AllMusic, where you can hear ~30-second snippets of each track. If you want to hear the whole thing, let me know and we’ll work something out.
I got a little obsessed with Comorian music a year or two ago, listened to as many Comorian albums as I could get my hands on and found out as much as I could about the islands’ musical culture. Which, as it turns out, is ‘not many’ and ‘not as much as I’d hoped,’ respectively.
I guess that’s a little understandable. The Comoros is a small country, made up of an archipelago in the Indian Ocean roughly sited between the northern points of Mozambique and Madagascar. There are three main islands and the whole country has a population of just 850,000 (although Mayotte, the third largest of the Comoro Islands but a part of France rather than the Comoros – it’s a little confusing – has another 280,000). So, with such a small population and its out-of-the-way position, it seems like the Comoros has been somewhat overlooked in terms of international music study and business.
Which is actually a little infuriating. The Comoros has a really interesting and unique culture. Its population descends from waves of settlers from all over the Indian Ocean, including East African Bantu, Arab, Persian, Malay and Malagasy people. The people are Muslim, and the country is the southernmost member of the Arab League – even though Arabic is only a minority language behind the majority Shikomori (a Bantu language similar to Swahili). As you would expect, all of this has an effect on the music of the country. That’s where this album comes in!
While there are all sorts of styles across the islands, this disc focuses on mshago music from the island of Ngazidja (the largest of the archipelago, also known as Grande Comore). Mshago is essentially the local pop music that developed directly from the classical style of twarab. Classical twarab is very much in the Arabic tradition, performed on oud, qanun, ney and as many violinists as you can muster and with melodies based on the Arabic maqam scales. However, after the dominance of twarab for about 50 years, in the 1970s, people wanted a different sound. Twarab already had many rhythms based on African ngoma music, but in making mshago, the musicians brought in sounds from everywhere to turn the classical style into real music for the dancefloor.
Mshago, then, has the guitars of Congolese soukous, the close harmonies of Malagasy salegy, rhythms from across Africa, Latin America and the Arabic world and other cues from reggae, Bollywood, rock and funk, all while keeping a strong Arabic root to the melodies and bringing in lots more influence from traditional Comorian styles such as sambe and twari. From a small group of islands, a world of music! This album also does a good job of showing the variety of mshago across five different groups – you can hear the difference between the Congolese-and-Cuban influenced Sambeco, the modern-day twarab of Belle Lumière (complete with synths galore) and the particularly strong South Asian vibes of Taanchik.
If you want to know more of the amazing and under-heard music from the Comoros, let’s make a difference! Recommend it at work, request it on the radio and tell your local discotheque to only book the prime exponents of Comorian music or risk losing your business. There’s literally tens (or at least, more than ten) of us, so let’s rock the boat a little bit. All being right with the world, every household will have their own small stash of Comorian music, and this album can serve as an excellent starting point in those collections.
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