135: Bwarouz, by Danyèl Waro

Danyèl Waro (La Réunion)
Bwarouz (2002)
14 tracks, 64 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

The first time I ever heard of maloya or Danyèl Waro was seeing him on stage at WOMAD in 2011 at about 1 in the morning. I was absolutely awe-struck. Here was a little man with crazy hair, large, strong glasses and strange, jerky dancing (a function of his playing the square kayamb rattle) looking very much like Not a Musician, but with the most captivating voice. The music was unknown to me, and I only had a vague idea even of where La Réunion was (it’s a small island in the Indian Ocean to the east of Madagascar, officially part of France), but there were so many connections with music all over the world that were pinging inside my brain. It was an amazing show, and I had to hear more – immediately after the end of his ovation, I dashed off to the CD tent to grab whatever they had. They were closed, so I had to wait until the next day, but that’s not the point. I ended up getting this album, Bwarouz, and the later Aou Amwin from 2010, and both are fantastic.

Right from the first moments of the opening track, ‘Boulouze’, you can hear why I like it so much. It starts with the shuffling rhythm of the kayamb, which you can tell even in the space of a few seconds is ever so slightly limping behind the beat. Then Danyèl’s beautiful voice comes in. It’s a curious voice, fragile but powerful at the same time. It’s high-pitched and reedy, and he wavers in his upper range. He sounds like he is always a fraction away from his voice cracking and giving out altogether, but of course it never does. The power comes not in the form of beefiness, although he can belt it out when he needs to; instead, it is a power that comes from a sense of deep wisdom held within. It all suffuses his voice with a capacity to acutely represent emotion, even to those who don’t speak Creole or French.

The music itself helps, too. It’s mostly a percussion-and-voice music, which means that the melody is super-important in driving the emotions of the piece. There’s actually a feature in the most recent edition of Songlines magazine, a beginner’s guide to maloya; in it, the writer Bastiaan Springer says that ‘maloya is often called the blues of La Réunion, although, musically speaking, there are hardly any similarities with the American blues, except its call-and-response structure,’ but I think that’s a bit of a mad statement to make. Just listen to Danyèl sing in ‘Boulouze’! Of course it is not exactly like the blues – the two styles developed thousands of miles apart from very different origins – and the way the melody is constructed is not like blues…but it is absolutely full of that blues emotion. The personality of blues music really comes from the blue notes – notes that are ‘between’ the standard notes of a scale, quartertones almost, and maloya is absolutely full of blue notes. You’ll know them when you hear them: they’re the notes that sound as if they’re pulling on your heart, aching to be resolved.

And I’ve not even mentioned the harmonies yet! The harmonies are used in an interesting way: usually when the rest of the band join Danyèl in his singing, they all sing the same notes in unison, but every so often, one singer will break away and make a simple harmony – maybe just a minor third over the last couple of notes in a long phrase. It’s so simple, but it gets me every time.

I’ve gone on a lot, and I’ve only really been talking about the very first song on the album. And it’s a great one, but it’s not alone on the album; where each of the tracks brings something new but all of them have that same power and fragility that Danyèl’s voice brings. In terms of sheer emotional reaction to one person’s voice, I would have to say that Danyèl Waro’s is definitely one of my favourite in all music. Listen to this and pay attention, but prepare to get your heart broken along the way.

134: 1.22.03. Acoustic, by Maroon 5

Maroon 5 (USA)
1.22.03. Acoustic (2004)
7 tracks, 29 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I believe that there is opportunity for good in every music, and pop music is no exception (although I admit you may have to look a little harder to find the good among the pap – but it’s there! Usually!). For a while at least, Maroon 5 were, in my opinion, making some of the best pop music out there. Their debut, 2002’s Songs About Jane, was a hit around the world, and the soulful melodies, band performance and lead singer Adam Levine’s voice all set them apart from the rest of what was on the radio at the time.

This album is something a bit different. It’s only a very short one, sort of an extended EP in a way, and as you can tell from its title, it’s an acoustic set (mostly). It was recorded live at the Hit Factory in New York, and the sound quality is…fine, I guess. It’s not the best recorded live album I’ve ever heard but it’s definitely far from the worst. But of course, it’s the performances here that are what makes this one special.

The songs included are mostly from Songs About Jane, but there’s something about this performance that really highlights both the band’s musicianship and their songwriting. Performing their songs on two acoustic guitars, piano, electric bass (cheats) and a bit of a badly-tuned djembe, together with Levine’s lead vocals and some nice harmonies here and there, it’s nice to hear the songs stand on their own without the added studio flashiness. The influences from Stevie Wonder, Van Morrison and the Beatles are clear (they actually feature a quiet cover the latter’s ‘If I Fell’ here), and somehow the acoustic setting also serves to bring out the latent funkiness of the band’s music, along with the standard soulfulness that coats all of the studio album. What interests me the most, though, is the piano - pianist Jesse Carmichael has a habit of adding quite a lot of extensions on his chord playing on most of the track, which even lends a jazzy flow to the set.

I should probably also mention the bonus, non-acoustic track, a cover of AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’. It’s a bit amusing but doesn’t make for great listening, and it’s basically an unnecessary addition to the end of the album. Ah well. Ignoring that bit though, I think they were really onto something with this album. The live setting leaves it a bit lacking, but there’s great ideas here; it would have been great if they’d have used the live experiences to record proper acoustic versions of the set in a studio, ironing out the kinks and making the sound extra sparkly while leaving the organic feel. But they didn’t. Again, ah well.

It was really disappointing to hear Maroon 5’s descent from a promising band navigating the pop world with something different in their sound to basically making electropop that sounded like everything else that was out there. Perhaps their album tracks were somewhat different, but I wouldn’t know – their singles definitely didn’t reflect that. Luckily, that doesn’t take away the pleasure of listening to their earlier stuff, and Songs About Jane and 1.22.03. Acoustic both still stand up, proving that pop music – sometimes – can be really good.

133: Ténéré, by Groupe Tinarwen

Groupe Tinarwen (Mali)
Ténéré (1993)
8 tracks, 39 minutes

You’ll notice I’ve not put up any download or streaming links up at the top, because there just aren’t any. This is a cassette from Tinariwen, recorded in 1992 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire and released in 1993 for a West African, especially Tuareg, audience. That was eight years before they made their first international release, and this cassette fell into obscurity. It’s never been reissued in any capacity; the most I can really do is embed this YouTube video of the album’s opening track:

I actually did manage to find a download for the whole thing ages ago, but that seems to have disappeared now – get in touch if you want to hear the whole thing.

So what’s so special about this then, compared to the album Amassakoul that I wrote about in March, or any of their other six albums that have made them famous around the world? Well, just listen. Those albums don’t have drum machines, piano loops and layered synths all over them for a start. Nowadays, Tinariwen are known for their moody, stripped-back and atmospheric grooves; this mad cheesy production sounds completely bizarre in comparison and I absolutely love it.

Those production elements are only on the first side of the album, with the second four tracks being closer to that classic essouf sound – the mixture of Tuareg traditional music with elements of rock and Algerian raï that Tinariwen are believed to have invented – which gives an idea of how that sound evolved, but of course it’s those first four tracks that intrigue me the most.

I actually asked Justin Adams, producer of several of Tinariwen’s earliest international releases, about this particular tape a while ago. From what the band had told him, the keys and drum machines were the idea of the Ivorian producer tasked with making the album, as he felt it would make for a more attractive commercial product for that market. And I think that’s what I like about this album, it sort of explodes the rather popular idea that Tinariwen’s music is a sort of lost-in-time sound, a mummified ancestor to the blues that was discovered caked in desert sand; that their use of cheap and gnarly electric guitars was their only concession to the century as it existed outside of the Sahara. There’s no doubt that Tinariwen’s music draws on deep histories, but when they first became famous among the Tuareg it’s because they were essentially a pop band. Their lyrics were the most important thing to their Tamasheq-speaking audiences, but the way they played and produced their music was shaped by ideas on what would sell the most tapes. And when it came time to make records to sell abroad, their sound changed subtly to be most attractive to that market as well.

I can see why this album has gone unacknowledged by the band’s European/American record labels to this day – it does break down a part of the mythos that is, by now, sure to have been quite carefully curated, and let’s face it, it’s not really in keeping with the musical brand they’ve got going on nowadays. But I reckon if they reissued this tape, it would get people’s attention and sell well for that. Here’s hoping, at least.

132: Straight Outta Compton, by N.W.A

N.W.A (USA)
Straight Outta Compton (1988)
13 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Haha what a contrast with yesterday’s album, I love it. This is another one of those bona fide classics that have already been written about ad nauseam, so I doubt I’ll be bringing anything particularly new to the table, but I’ll give it a go anyway.

I was actually quite late to listening to this one all the way through as an album, as opposed to hearing tracks randomly here and there. When I did finally listen to it, it actually struck me as quite funny. Straight Outta Compton’s reputation preceded it as the record that solidified the moral panic around hip-hop and rap, especially with its stand-out track ‘Fuck tha Police’, but listening to it now, it seems rather tame. For starters, the rap style that was characterised as ‘hyperaggressive’ at the time seems nothing of the sort now; it’s not quite the nursery rhyme style that was around a few years earlier, but the rhythms are still quite simple and slow and the rhymes nowhere near as complex as they would become in the next decade of hip-hop. Even the lyrics – much criticised for their violent content – seem over-the-top in a cartoonish, rather than scandalous, way.

At more than 30 years since its first release, it’s no surprise that the record has aged somewhat. It’s not all turned more light-hearted in the interim though. For example, while some of the ways the group refer to women were shocking when it first came out, the deliberately provocativeness of the language has faded and now they just sound sad and disgusting, and to be honest a bit embarrassing in retrospect. What is still shocking, though, is ‘Fuck tha Police’, not in how much it has aged, but how much it hasn’t. It is clear how much black people, especially black men and boys, are the target for so much institutional racism from police forces (in the UK as well as the US), being so much more likely to be stopped by police, searched, arrested, beaten up and murdered by police for no reason other than the colour of their skin, with almost always zero repercussions – this is in 2019. It is absolutely disgusting and – again – embarrassing that a piece of music written more than 30 years ago can so accurately describe the exact same problems facing a huge portion of the population then as they are now, and seemingly nothing at all has changed. It’s pathetic.

…but politically-induced emotions aside, this is still a fun album. The music is funky – due in a large part to the many samples of straight-up funk used to create the instrumentals – and the lyrics are witty and clever, even if the rhyme schemes aren’t that complex. There’s no doubt that the controversy around N.W.A and Straight Outta Compton helped to elevate it to popularity at the time, and into legendary status since, but it is pleasing to know that the album still stands up now that the controversy has (mostly) died away.

131: Medieval Music, by Gerald English with the Jaye Consort

Gerald English with the Jaye Consort (United Kingdom)
Medieval Music (1967)
25 tracks, 44 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I first got this album from the estimable News From Nowhere, an excellent radical bookshop in Liverpool which also has a great music selection, and (on this day at least) a bargain bin of old LPs for 50p each. At that price, of course I raided it for a load of music I would never have heard otherwise, and this was the best of the bunch. Although I have had a fringe interest in early music for quite a while, I chose to pick this one up in part for its cover, which features a bunch of reconstructed medieval instruments. Several of the instruments bear a strong resemblance to those played in other parts of the world, which I find fascinating – what catches my eye the most is the lute in the foreground which looks remarkably like the Central Asian long-necked lutes, specifically the Kyrgyz komuz. Much as I was going on about the other day with Matthaios Tsahouridis’ Pontic lýra, I love being able to see and hear how music changes across cultures, geographies and time, and the organology of instruments are a very clear way to see this.

The music contained within is also full of those sort of connections, although more temporal than geographical. The repertoire that the Jaye Consort perform here covers quite a range, encompassing pieces from about the 13th century to the end of the 15th and from all across Western Europe, mostly Britain, France and Germany. A span of 300 years and half a continent is a lot in terms of musical history (for comparison, what we refer to as the ‘Classical period’ of Western art music lasted only 90 years), but because we are so far removed from that time culturally, it all does sound musically contiguous, to non-educated ears like mine, at least. What is fascinating is that at the time these pieces were written, the line between folk music and art music was far less defined than it is now, and you can really hear that in some of the pieces. Take the 14th century Italian piece ‘Lamento di Tristano’, which, depending on how you orchestrated it, could pass as an orchestral piece or a folk song even today.

There’s a lot of interesting pieces all the way through this album, both in how they sound and their historical context, but there’s one in particular that I want to mention. One of several estampies (dances) in this set (the one on track 9) is played on an interesting instrument, which you can see on the cover: a portative organ, which is a hand-pumped keyboard instrument like our modern-day harmonium, but using pipes to create its sound rather than reeds. That’s already intriguing, but the piece itself is particularly historic – it is the first known piece of keyboard music of which we have record. There were doubtlessly pieces beforehand, but this is the earliest piece of written keyboard music that we know of, from the Robertsbridge Codex, written around 1360. The manuscript is actually slightly damaged at the bottom of the pages, which is probably why the ending sounds so abrupt. I just love how there is music that is so old, that we can recreate almost exactly as was intended when it was written.

Of course I recommend this album for people like me, because I like it, and I reckon it is a good and pleasant introduction to medieval music. However, as I’ve stated, I know very little about early music, so there may well be much better examples out there than this one that I just don’t know about. Please, do recommend if there are others I – and we – should be listening to!

130: The Rough Guide to Asian Underground, by Various Artists

Various Artists (United Kingdom/South Asia)
The Rough Guide to Asian Underground (2003)
15 tracks, 78 minutes
Another one that can’t be listened to or downloaded online for some reason. Here’s a Spotify playlist I made, but it is missing a few tracks, unfortunately. You can still buy the CD at the World Music Network, or even more cheaply second-hand on Amazon.

For a really long time, the Rough Guide series from the World Music Network was one of the most valuable resources in world music, providing impressively in-depth and well-rounded introductions to music scenes by region, culture or genre in the space of a single CD each, often with short but informative essays and track breakdowns in the sleeves. There were so many excellent Rough Guide compilations that I had to be careful not to fill this blog up with them. It’s a shame that lately, although WMN still puts out Rough Guides, they are nowhere near the standard they once were – nowadays they seem to mostly be excuses to repackage material from their sister label Riverboat Records, and there’s not a sleeve note in sight. Ah well. This is a blog for Good Albums, so let’s look at one of them, then.

The Asian Underground scene was quite a big deal in the UK of the 1990s, and must surely have been one of the most exciting musical movements to be a part of (although I cannot speak from experience – I was a little kid growing up in the middle of nowhere in the north-west, but still). UK-based musicians and producers with backgrounds from all over South Asia were diving into the latest styles of electronica and dance music, as well as hip-hop, jungle, new age, dub and punk, and bringing along a unique Asian spin on things by introducing elements from what they heard at home: Indian classical music, Bollywood songs, qawwali, bhangra and all sorts.

The Rough Guide to Asian Underground has all of the factors that made the Rough Guide series so essential for listeners of good music from anywhere. For starters, it was compiled by DJ Ritu, who was one of the key players in the scene herself and responsible for a lot of the attention that came its way – who better suited to give the most succinct yet detailed introduction to it?

All the obvious and most well-known names of the scene are here of course, such as Asian Dub Foundation, Black Star Liner, the State of Bengal and Fun^da^Mental (whose track ‘Ja Sha Taan’ is probably the best on here, making excellent use of samples from the qawwali of Nawazish Ali Khan and the 1940s jazz-blues of Hot Lips Page). But there’s also some interesting and unexpected entries here. The album starts with ‘Streets of Calcutta’, a great track from sitarist Ananda Shankar from all the way back in 1975 that shows how deep the roots of Asian Underground go; there’s also some of Talvin Singh’s earliest work under the moniker Mahatma T with the track ‘Jihad’ from the 80s – he would later go on to be one of the biggest names in the Asian Underground scene, even making it overground as the first (and so far only) British-Asian winner of the Mercury Prize in 1999. And then there’s also a handful of tracks that were as-then unreleased, including one by another big name, Joi.

Now that is how you introduce a musical scene in a way that can get newcomers hooked and show them what they need to know while also including new bits and pieces to interest those already familiar with it. Bravo, DJ Ritu; World Music Network, take note.

129: Peace of Love, by Zarbang Quartet

Zarbang Quartet (Iran/Greece/Afghanistan)
Peace of Love (2011)
8 tracks, 52 minutes
Not only can I not find this album anywhere online to stream or buy, I can barely even find mention of it. As far as I can tell, it was also released with the tracks in a different order as Dance of the Sea, but even then, barely any information anywhere at all. Bizarre. I’ve stuck it on Google Drive for you to download it, though.

Some collaborations just make you think ‘what on Earth made you think to combine these musical elements in this way?’ Usually, projects that beg that question end up falling flat and losing the best bits of every style involved. That’s not the case with the Zarbang Quartet.

Zarbang are actually quite a well-respected Persian percussion group based in Germany, playing with many different line-ups over the years, but in this quartet form, they’re a little different. Zarbang founders, percussionists (and brothers) Behnam and Reza Samani, are the two in the four that represent Iran, and welcome Afghan percussionist Hakim Ludin and Greek player of the Pontic lýra (bowed lute) Matthaios Tsahouridis to their sound.

There’s something really cool about the way the quartet is set up, the massed percussion backing one single melody instrument. The percussion mostly consists of hand drums of various shapes – the tombak goblet drum, the large daf frame drum and the small riqq tambourine, as well as occasional cameos from the cajón box drum and the udu water pot – which are all capable of stunningly complex rhythms and overlapping harmonics, but they never overpower the lýra.

The way Tsahouridis plays the lýra (and sings) traces the influences to and from the Pontic tradition, reflecting the cultural identity of the region of Pontus as a Greek settlement in what is now Turkey. In his hands, the instrument’s position in a long temporal and geographical chain becomes apparent: not only is the lýra’s connection to other Greek instruments clear, it also resembles the Turkish and Persian kemençe/kamancheh and the Arabic rebab, and then onto the kobyz of Central Asia and the sarangi of India, as well as the gusle and the gadulka in the Balkans, in the other direction. It’s amazing how the most subtle playing techniques, a melodic twiddle here or a rhythmic flick of the wrist can imply so much history and geography.

I find it really strange that this album has almost completely disappeared from the internet’s knowledge. It’s a really great listen, and it definitely deserves more notice than the absolute zero that it has at the moment. Why not do the world a favour: give this album a listen, and if you like it, tell someone else about it too!

128: Songs of Paapieye, by S.K. Kakraba

S.K. Kakraba (Ghana)
Songs of Paapieye (2015)
6 tracks, 33 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

SK Kakraba plays the gyil, a xylophone of the Dagaare people. It’s not that big – only about a metre to a metre-and-a-half long, but the sound it makes is immense. The wooden keys are amplified with calabash gourds which are stretched over with spiderwebs, which gives every note a harsh buzz. This buzz serves to amplify the sound, but it also obscures the sound in the exact same way as distortion does, highlighting obscure harmonics and adding a whole load of grittiness to the purely acoustic tones.

When you get someone like SK Kakraba, a master who can hold the most complex polyrhythms in his head while his hands skate across the keys at a million miles an hour, it means that those layers of buzz accumulate into something overwhelming. The whole effect is hypnotising and, although the gyil is used to play all sorts of music, it’s easy to see why its sound is considered sacred in the hands of the most proficient.

At just over half-an-hour long, this isn’t the longest album, but that length is pretty much ideal – enough to really dig that intense sound of the solo gyil and leave you wanting to explore more, but without the risk that the almighty buzz will set up home in your brain forever, rendering everything in psychedelic noise.

127: Jazz Greats: Summertime, by Sidney Bechet

Sidney Bechet (USA)
Jazz Greats: Summertime (1996)
20 tracks, 63 minutes
Spotify playlist

When talking about Sidney Bechet, the album that you’re listening to is really neither here nor there. That’s because most of his best work was recorded in the 1930s and 40s, before albums were really a thing, so to get the most listening pleasure, you’re probably going to have a ‘Best Of’ album, like this one. As it happens, this particular album is from a long-defunct magazine called Jazz Greats, and features two bonus tracks on the end by Jimmie Noone and Duke Ellington, but there are hundreds of compilations out there. So instead of talking about this album specifically, I’m just gonna bang on for a bit about a few of the tracks and Bechet’s style in general.

Today, the most well-known musician of the Dixieland jazz era is Louis Armstrong – for good reason – but for my money, it is the clarinettist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet whose music is the more exciting. A lot of his repertoire was adaptations of songs, and this allowed him to show off the lyrical quality to his playing; he could play the breakneck lines of ragtime music excellently, but he could also play the slower, more emotional songs with such subtlety and nuance as to rival the best singers. His version of ‘Summertime’ is rightly remembered as a highlight of his career, and it’s probably my favourite version of the song that has been covered and adapted by basically everyone.

I know that Dixieland and ragtime jazz – or, as it’s called when they’re played nowadays, trad jazz – have a reputation within the jazz scene as being quite naff and the reserve of mouldy figs with no appetite for the adventurousness that came with later jazz styles, but that’s a bit of a mad position to hold when you listen to, for example, Sidney Bechet’s recording of ‘Weary Blues’. The leading trio of two clarinets and a trumpet (Bechet, Mezz Mezzrow and Tommy Ladnier, respectively) all play in that polyphonic way such as we were talking about the other day. None of the three are really playing the tune – they are all improvising in and around it so that the melody sounds obvious to us, even though it is basically only implied among this group improvisation. That is insane! The level of musicianship is such that they don’t even have to play the tune any more – instead they’re programming your brain so that it will play it instead. Amazing.

There’s also a track on this compilation that is really pioneering, even though you may not be able to tell on first hearing. While all of the other tracks here are Bechet playing with various ensembles of his own or others’ direction, his version of ‘The Sheik of Araby’ is different: it was recorded by the Sidney Bechet One Man Band in 1941. As far as I can tell, this is the first recording of a multitracked ‘one man band,’ with Bechet playing clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophones, piano, bass and drums all by himself by recording them all on separate masters and mixing them down together. The sound quality suffers a little due to the equipment available at the time, but the music is still tip-top. It actually freaked out the American Federation of Musicians enough that they banned their members from using this pioneering technique for years out of a fear that it would put musicians out of business.

So there you are, just a few semi-random musings on Sidney Bechet all from a free covermount CD from a magazine. The moral: take good music wherever you can find it!

Oh, actually, one more quick, half-formed musing: when the Sherman Brothers were writing ‘I Wanna Be Like You’ for The Jungle Book (released in 1967), I wonder if they were taking cues from Sidney Bechet and Muggsy Spanier’s ‘That’s a Plenty’, recorded in 1940. Give it a listen! Okay, I’m done now.

126: Move Upstairs, by the Como Mamas

The Como Mamas (USA)
Move Upstairs (2017)
11 tracks, 39 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

I have become seriously obsessed with the Como Mamas over the last couple of years, and they’re just my favourite artists of the moment. So, of course, I’ve already written about them, when I had the massive honour last summer to be able to sit down with them before their first – and so far only! – concert in England – you can read that article on my other blog, and I’ll try not to repeat myself too much.

The Como Mamas are Della Daniels, Angelia Taylor and Ester Mae Wilbourn. They’re from the small town of Como, Mississippi, and they sing gospel music, and they sing it hard. All of the albums on this blog are Good, but this one is SO GOOD YOU GUYS. I mean seriously. Right from the opening of the very first track, my heart starts beating extra hard and I just want to punch the air – this music really gets me somewhere inside. The lyrics and the harmonies are gospel, but everything else is raw blues.

The Mama’s previous recordings had all been a capella – they’re really interesting too, and definitely worth checking out: that’s the album Get an Understanding from 2013 as well as a handful of songs on the 2008 compilation Como Now: The Voices of Panola Co, Mississippi – but for Move Upstairs, Daptone Records paired them with their house band of guitar, organ, bass and drums, and it takes the music to the next level. The band is actually really understated, which is how it should be. There’s no solos, and they mostly chug along in the background, and this allows the Mamas to bring their full power to the fore without leaving empty space behind them when they do so.

Each of their three voices are very different from each other in terms of timbre and range, and so they each bring something else to the sound, making it a well-balanced meal. That said, I am absolutely in love with Angelia Taylor’s voice. Hers is a low voice that comes roaring from deep in her chest. The amount of emotion she puts into the notes as she bends, growls or shouts them, simply blows me away. Every one of the songs on the album is catchy and touching, but the songs that Angelia leads – ‘Move Upstairs’ and ‘He’s Mine’ – take me to another place.

I’m not religious, but the sheer power of these songs and this music and the reaction that they create in me does make me ponder on the essence of the divine – whether that’s from a higher power or just some exactly-measured dose of brain chemicals. Whatever is happening, it feels great. The Como Mamas are really, really special. The concert that I saw was one of the best I’ve ever been to. If you get the chance to see them perform, jump on it – you owe it to your soul.

125: Enregistrés Pour Yehia le Marabout, by Super Onze de Gao

Super Onze de Gao (Mali)
Enregistrés Pour Yehia le Marabout (1994)
2 tracks, 47 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Super Onze are the masters of takamba music. It’s a style with an interesting history, having originally been associated with the nomadic, Sahara-dwelling Tuaregs, over time, it became popular with Songhai musicians in the north of Mali, who brought in their own influences and made it their own. Now takamba is mostly known as a Songhai style, but one that retains the signature lope and slightly Arabic sound from Tuareg music.

At its heart, takamba music is one rhythm – always the same, it’s the takamba rhythm – played on two calabashes or, less commonly, one calabash and a metal drum (such as a cooking pot or a jerrycan). For those of you who understand TUBS, here is the rhythm as described by Banning Eyre:

|: X.X...X.X... | X...X...X... :|

Here are Super Onze’s percussionists playing the takamba rhythm, and improvising on it:

On top of that rhythm, the melody is provided by at least one kurbu, or as we often call it, an ngoni (Super Onze have two). The kurbu plays a short riff that repeats on as long as you want, often improvising on that riff and providing endless variations. The vocalist uses all this musical information to create an epic improvised sermon of praise – sometimes sung, usually recited – to whoever the patron happens to be, perhaps the bride and groom of the wedding party, the host of the political event, or even the person who commissioned the tape, which is the case on this one, in honour of a wealthy holy man (or marabout) named Yahia.

So that is takamba. But it doesn’t really tell you what’s so electrifying about Super Onze du Gao. For starters, it’s because they are electrified – their kurbus are hooked up to amps and the whole thing is run through bullhorn speakers. Then it sounds like it was direct onto a tape deck, and then transferred from there (probably after quite a few cassette copies) to digital. Distortion is added at every step along that journey, so by the time you’re listening to it, those lutes sound like some of the dirtiest punk blues guitars, and the calabashes sound like cracks of electricity. Their improvisations on just the one short rhythm and super bluesy riff last for the entirety of a two-sided cassette – just over 20 minutes per side – and you’ll fall into a deep desert blues trance if you’re not careful. It’s all so raw that I’m surprised it hasn’t been picked up in other situations: for me, this music is crying out to be looped and sampled, and used for the basis of a hip-hop track. Get on it, producers.

Takamba is huge in the north of Mali, but it’s not really permeated outside of the country to any significant degree. Considering how popular Malian music is in Europe and the Americas, perhaps that won’t be the case for very long. I hope that Super Onze will be the ones to bring this amazing sound to the world.

124: Møya og Myten, by Eplemøya Songlag

Eplemøya Songlag (Norway)
Møya og Myten (2012)
10 tracks, 43 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Norway is probably the most stunningly beautiful place I have ever been. The forests and fjords, the beaches and the cliffs of Rogaland feel like they’re straight out of a fairytale. It wouldn’t have surprised me to just catch a wandering bard or a wizard strolling around the countryside there. What’s perfect is that Norwegian folk music has exactly the same vibe. Its melodies are melancholy, and its lyrics similarly so; the timbre of its most iconic traditional instrument, the hardingfele, a fiddle with many sympathetic strings that is usually played double-stopped, sounds so spacious that it echoes the vastness of the landscape. It all sounds suitably ancient – if you caught a wandering bard or a wizard strolling around the countryside, this is the stuff they’d be whistling.

Eplemøya Songlag are a trio of singers, Wenche Losnegård, Anja Eline Skybakmoen and Liv Ulvik, and they bring an interesting take on Norwegian folk music. Of the three, only Ulvik comes from a folk singing background; Losnegård and Skybakmoen are both jazz singers. These different approaches allow them to update the traditions in their own way, while keeping the essence and sonic meaning of the style very much rooted in place. Considering that 66% of the group have their feet in the jazz realm, it would be a real stretch to call this music jazz in any capacity; in fact, even the elements that they bring to it don’t scream jazz, either. I think what that experience in jazz does bring the trio is an ability to look at the traditional music from a different direction, to hear where there may be space for innovation, sometimes in the smallest places, like a melodic flick or an otherwise unexpected note in a chord. There’s also points where they allow the music to stray into different territory, sometimes bringing in a classical influence, sometimes using joik, a song style of the Sámi people indigenous to the far north of Scandinavia.

Even though this album is entirely a capella, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the instrumental side of the tradition is completely abandoned. The trio’s voices often come together in a way that evokes the hardingfele. It’s especially obvious in a piece like ‘Skjoldmøyane’ – the way their voices dance around the tune, form drones that drop in and out and even make little onomatopoeic noises resembling pizzicatos, all give the impression of three voices as one singular instrument.

Usually, traditional Norwegian folk music appeals to me specifically because of how ancient it sounds, but Eplemøya Songlag’s skill is really impressive: they make their songs sound at once ancient and cutting-edge, and like they wouldn’t feel out-of-place in a modern-day music club or in that fairytale world of my imagination. And they do it all with their voice.

123: Feel Like Going Home, by Martin Scorsese, dir.

Martin Scorsese, dir. (USA)
Feel Like Going Home (2003)
110 minutes
I’m having trouble finding anywhere to watch this online in the UK – legally or otherwise – but if you know anywhere, please let us know. Americans can probably watch it on the PBS Vimeo page, and non-Americans can watch the trailer there instead. However, it is really cheap to buy on DVD second-hand on Amazon.

Okay, controversial: this isn’t an album. It’s a film. But it’s a film about music, with tons of great music in it that you’re not gonna be able to hear elsewhere, so I’ll allow it. Because it’s my blog and I get to allow things like that.

Feel Like Going Home is the first of seven films collectively known as Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, where different directors – from Wim Wenders to Clint Eastwood – were drafted in to look at different aspects of the blues, and they all have their different methods, with historical documentary, contemporary interviews, reconstructions and even a fiction screenplay. For the first of the series, though, Scorsese took the reins himself, for a dive into delta blues and its roots.

The film follows bluesman Corey Harris as he travels around the Mississippi delta getting to grips with the story of the blues, from his own contemporary take, to the delta guitar styles and even further back to fife and drum music and field hollers. And then even even further back, with a trip to Mali, where he meets Salif Keita, Habib Koité and Ali Farka Touré. It’s interesting and entertaining as it should be, but the reason I’m including this film on an album blog is really because of the music. There’s a bunch of cool archive footage of blues legends such as Son House, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, but the real draw is the performances recorded especially for the film, and Harris is often involved too. We see and hear him jamming with old bluesmen Sam Carr and Willie King in Mississippi, with Otha Turner and his fife and drum band, and, most thrillingly, with Ali Farka Touré in Niafunké in Mali. You can watch a little bit of that section here, where they play a beautiful mash-up of the classic ‘Catfish Blues’ and Touré’s song ‘Mahini Me’:

The idea of West African music – especially Malian music – being the starting point for the evolution of the blues is a really attractive one, although a literal ‘Malian music → blues’ timeline, such as is presented in Feel Like Going Home is a little too over-simplistic. Nevertheless, collaborations between the two never cease to be intoxicating for me, as long as they’re done well, and this jam between Harris and Touré most definitely is. I wish I could have been there under those trees with them! Makes you wonder what other stuff they played together that never made it into the film.

There are absolutely tons of music documentaries out there, covering every sort of music you can imagine, but Feel Like Going Home is one of the best I’ve ever seen. The story it tells is fascinating and touching, and the arguments are compellingly made (even if I don’t wholly agree with them), but the music is something else. If there ever was a film that you can listen to as you would an album, it would be this one.

122: Introducing Kenge Kenge, by Kenge Kenge

Kenge Kenge (Kenya)
Introducing Kenge Kenge (2007)
8 tracks, 68 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I’m writing today’s post a couple of weeks ago (it’s always nice to keep a bit of a buffer innit). It’s a balmy evening during the Easter bank holiday weekend and I have a tin of cider with me. I reckon this is probably the ideal setting for the music of Kenge Kenge.

Kenge Kenge are a band from Kenya whose musical style takes the guitar-based benga back to where it started, with the musical instruments and traditions of the Luo people – it’s similar in this way to the album Luo Roots that we’ve talked about before. That compilation showcased a number of different approaches to benga roots, and Kenge Kenge have their own, too.

They use mostly traditional instruments such as the oporo horn, the asili flute and the nyangile box-and-ring (as well as a bass guitar), but their sound is most definitely built around the orutu. The orutu is a one-string fiddle that (for Kenge Kenge at least) is almost always played in pairs. The harmonies that they describe are always open fourths or fifths, but the melodies that they play are always so major, it just makes it all sound so jolly, all of the time. The actual timbre of the orutus is interesting, and the first time I heard it, I couldn’t really tell what it was. It sounds quite hollow and wooden to the degree that it sometimes sounds more like a flute rather than, for example, a violin, but its scratchiness and imprecise tonality sets it completely apart. This impreciseness just adds to its charm, and together with everything else makes Kenge Kenge’s music perfect for a sunny day.

That holds true to all of the tracks on this album, it’s all good. But my favourite song by Kenge Kenge is actually a stand-alone track that was released slightly later than the album. It’s this one, 'Obama for Change':

When Barack Obama was running for president, it’s no surprise that most of Kenya was behind him, and Kenge Kenge had that extra incentive – Obama Sr is also Luo, and from the same region, Alego, as the band. Their song to aid his campaign is an uplifting message of hope and solidarity: ‘American people all vote for Obama’ and such. And it worked! He probably won because their song was so infectious. Shame they didn’t write one about Hilary Clinton.

If it’s still so warm and sunny by the time this post goes live, well for one, global warming, let’s do something about it, but also, there’s your excuse to stick on Introducing Kenge Kenge dead loud, open a tinny and appreciate this sonic joy.

121: Balling the Jack: The Birth of The Nu-Blues, by Various Artists

Various Artists
Balling the Jack: The Birth of The Nu-Blues (2002)
21 tracks, 68 minutes
Nowhere to stream or download this by the looks of things, but you can pick up a copy of the CD for dead cheap on Discogs…but here’s a cheeky Spotify playlist with most of the tracks on it, if you want to get the gist.

This album is a compilation that makes the case for blues music as a living genre – not just reserved for old men in Mississippi or young white upstarts in 1960s London. The music included here spans a huge range, from field hollers and electric delta blues to modern reinterpretations of the genre through the lenses of punk, hip-hop and the avant garde.

Balling the Jack was compiled by the tireless champion and promoter of off-kilter blues, Joe Cushley. I met Joe first when I was a fresh-faced 15-year-old when he was the manager of Seasick Steve. As well as letting me backstage to meet the man himself, he slipped me this CD too. At that time, I was well into my old blues, but I didn’t really have much of an idea of what had been happening in the style since the 1960s. This compilation changed that. It was my first exposure to many artists, including Diamanda Galás, Reid Paley, Bob Log III and maybe even R.L. Burnside; I can’t believe these legends ever evaded my ears. Listening through this album for the first time was an absolute revelation.

As well as opening my ears to those blues boundary-pushers, this album also gave me my first time hearing music recorded on Alan Lomax’s Southern Journey. In fact, for all the genre-bending stuff on this compilation, I think ‘Murderer’s Home’ by Henry Jimpson Wallace and his group, recorded on Parchman Farm prison in 1959, probably had the most profound effect on me. It’s only 50 seconds long, but it’s absolutely devastating. There is so much emotion, despair in those men’s voices, and the way they sing it is haunting. That track gives an interesting comparison to yesterday’s album, actually: the polyphony works in quite similar ways: Jimpson sings the main line and everyone else follows with almost the same melody but in their own time, so that their voices and their notes are all overlapping like echoes over each other. Marvellous stuff. To stick this on a compilation between tracks by Tom Waits and Chris Thomas King is some genius curation.

This is a great album for those looking for a new direction of listening. It’s a perfect place to start if you want to hear blues warped in any which way. Because there’s so many different styles and time periods represented here, you probably won’t enjoy all the tracks, but I would be surprised if there isn’t something here for you. If my count is correct, Balling the Jack led directly to me buying, finding or otherwise digging out albums by eight of the artists featured – that’s 38%, a ridiculous amount for a compilation album. And from those starting points, it guided me into a whole new world of madness, from the Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir and T-Model Ford to Son of Dave and Dogbreath, and, and, and…It’s basically everything you want from a compilation album. Thanks, Joe!