257: Punt – Made in Ethiopia, by Invisible System

Invisible System (United Kingdom/Ethiopia)
Punt – Made in Ethiopia (2009)
12 tracks, 64 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Albums with lots of guests are usually a mixed bag – of qualities as well as styles. Just like with supergroups, it seems pretty accurate that the number of big names involved in the album-making process has a direct correlation with the likelihood that it comes out limp at the end of it. So when the back of the CD case for this album lists guest slots from no fewer than 19 musicians, you’d probably be forgiven for your misgivings. On the other hand, there’s me seeing the names Mahmoud Ahmed, Justin Adams, Juldeh Camara, Samuel Yirga, Count Dubulah, Mimi Zenebe, Neil Perch and Martin Craddick and just getting too exciting to hear all of their musical brains working together. What can I say, it’s a drug.

Luckily, with Invisible System guiding the ship, it all works to make an enjoyable trip (well, for the most part). Invisible System is the musicking moniker of Dan Harper, who works within electronica, dub and trance to create intelligent but dance-heavy fusions with African music. As an environmental worker, Harper lived for spells in both Ethiopia and Mali, two intensely musical cultures, and dove into the music scenes of both places, learning ways, making contacts and recording as much as possible. The Invisible System discography shows close work with musicians of both cultures, but for this first official release, it is Ethiopian music that takes the fore.

And, yes, it works. Maybe the track-by-track quality does fluctuate a little bit because of the supergroupification, but on the whole, the contributions of the Ethiopian musicians gel really well with Harper’s dubtronica, and it’s especially exciting when it bends towards the proggier side of things too. Because when this album hits its stride, it really hits. The third track, ‘Melkam Kehonelish’, is a stand-out for me. It brings together the old and new guards of Ethiopian jazz (legendary singer Mahmoud Ahmed and pianist Samuel Yirga, respectively), sticks Justin Adams providing trippy, atmospheric guitar in the background with Harper’s electronics providing a brooding dub – and bonus points for a wailing sax solo, the identity of whose performer evades me.

Harper himself is very vocal in reminding people that it was as part of the Invisible System project that Count Dubulah first connected with Ethiopian musicians, the meeting that eventually led to the creation of Dub Colossus. That Ethio-dub outfit ended up far eclipsing Invisible System in terms of popularity and success, and Harper’s perceived lack of recognition on the part of Dubulah remains an obvious sore point that seems to make its way to any mention of Invisible System’s output (although I’m sure Harper wouldn’t be happy with me putting it that way). I’ll be honest that it puts me off a little bit – for this project to be tainted with a palpable bitterness on the part of its main creator is a disservice. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t take anything away from the album’s most important aspect – its music. To turn the improvised jams of 20-odd musicians into an album that is not just coherent but tightly structured while still allowing a free-flow of creative ideas is an impressive feat that should not be overlooked.

256: Kwacha Malawi, by Body, Mind and Soul

Body, Mind and Soul (Malawi)
Kwacha Malawi (2009)
11 tracks, 43 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Body, Mind and Soul are not a group that have ever really ‘broken’ onto the international scene. I’ve worked in various roles within the world music industry for the past seven years and have been a punter on the scene for much longer, and I still find it hard to predict which artists are really going to capture the imagination and become superstars in the field and which, for whatever reason, never quite reach that level. Sometimes a group will come along obviously destined for greatness from the word go, and skyrocket to success in a very short amount of time as if it were fate (most recently, Songhoy Blues would fit this description); other times it feels like the other way around, where an artist’s huge and enduring success feels wildly out-of-proportion with their actual musical output (I’m not naming any names on that one!). Body, Mind and Soul are in a third – and probably the most frustrating – category. In this category, artists seem to have the right combination of factors, excelling equally in their music, style, story and charisma, but never seem to attract anything more than passing attention. It’s infuriating, and I think more than a couple of artists featured on this blog probably fit into that category too.

The first (and only) time I saw Body, Mind and Soul live was at the Africa Oyé festival in 2008. They actually played on both days of the weekend, and during their first set on the Saturday, I wasn’t paying a huge amount of attention. I think I went to get food, looked around some of the stalls, that sort of thing, but all within ear-shot of their set. After they had finished, and then all through the day, and through the night until the next day too, their songs stayed with me, repeating over and over in my head. For a group’s music to worm their way so thoroughly into your brain after only hearing each song once, from a distance and without paying particular attention is really impressive. You can bet I paid more attention the next day, and bought their record too.

It’s great, of course. Full to the brim with funk, with powerful reggae and gospel vibes when appropriate, and all based around the rhythms of the band’s native Mzuzu region in northern Malawi. Over all that is frontman Davie ‘Street Rat’ Luhanga’s singing, which is alternately soulful and staccato in his half-sung half-rapped style and brings in bits of scatting that work as a great balance to the funk. The sound is slightly rough around the edges as may be expected from their first real recording, but in a way that can be charming and can throw up interesting new ways of doing things – even to the tiny and endearing detail of starting the album’s title-track opener with a polite ‘hello.’ I love that.

I’m really interested in your thoughts about this. How do you tell whether a band is going to make it big? Are there any artists that you think tick all the boxes to become stars but mysteriously haven’t? And what do you think of today’s album by Body, Mind and Soul? Do they have the ‘it’ to hit the international world music scene with any force, or am I off the mark on this one? Let me know, but either way, enjoy the album!

255: The Contemporary Fortepiano, by the Rembrandt Frerichs Trio

Rembrandt Frerichs Trio (The Netherlands)
The Contemporary Fortepiano (2018)
15 tracks, 70 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

One musical cross-section that intrigues me in particular is the continuum of styles between Western classical music and jazz. It’s a meeting of two highly complex musical forms, each with their own, often rather antithetical, ways of performance, composition and ceremony, but which can permeate each other’s worlds with beautiful results. We’ve examined it a little bit before with the Modern Jazz Quartet and Miles Davis and Gil Evans as they voyaged the Third Stream in the 1950s and 60s, but today’s album shows how musicians are still exploring the jazz-classical continuum with exciting results in the 21st century.

To see them from a distance, the Rembrandt Frerichs Trio may look like your standard jazz trio – keys, bass, drums. But get a little closer, and really listen to those timbres, and the standard becomes unique: the instruments they play are all from the baroque era of European music. Bandleader Frerichs plays the fortepiano, an almost-forgotten cousin of the modern piano with a slightly more muted tone but with the ability to have a sharper attack somewhat like a harpsichord; Tony Overwater plays the violone, the forerunner of the double bass with six strings and frets; Vinsent Planjer plays a self-designed drum set called a ‘whisper kit,’ using historical drums and percussion whose sound is somewhat softer and more spacious than a standard drum kit. With these unusual sonic textures at their disposal, the trio can approach various musical styles from a different angle, and by doing so illuminate different and unexpected connections.

As such, it’s not just jazz and classical that the trio work within on this album. For the most part, they have created a tridimensional music that draws on the art music of three cultures, the European (baroque), the American (jazz) and the Arabic (maqam). There are further stylistic journeys throughout the album – through French musette, Latin jazz, Armenian folk music and more – but it is those three traditions that permeate and mingle most often, and in the most pleasing ways.

Just by bringing their instruments into play and playing classical music with jazz harmonies, or jazz melodies with a classical construction, would have been an interesting enough experiment, but the profundity of the trio’s music comes from a purposeful lack of distinction between the two artistic traditions. The pieces here are solutions rather than mixtures – they cannot be pulled apart into their component parts, too deeply entwined are they. Somehow by bringing in the third, Middle Eastern dimension, the jazz and classical elements are bound tighter, as all three styles can work with each other for mutual influence, like musical trigonometry.

Although it wasn’t the trio’s first album together, The Contemporary Fortepiano is an amazing statement for modern developments in jazz-classical music, musical fusions in general and, yes, a bold new contemporary repertoire for the fortepiano. The Rembrandt Frerichs Trio’s intelligent and subtle experimentation continues, too, with this year’s album It’s Still Autumn in collaboration with Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor solidly within my favourite albums of the year so far. They’re playing with Kalhor at London’s Southbank Centre in October; it’s sure to be a whirlwind of intense invention and brooding, twisting, worldwide art. I can’t wait.

254: Attish: the Hidden Fire, by Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali

Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali (Pakistan)
Attish: the Hidden Fire (1998)
6 tracks, 66 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali are a qawwali party from Pakistan of the Chishtiyya Sufi order. Nowadays, they’re one of the most famous exponents of the traditional qawwali style in the world, but back when this album, their debut, was released, they were emerging talents. Led by Rizwan and Muazzam Mujahid Ali Khan, their uncle was the great qawwal Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who had just died the previous year leaving an emptiness in his place that has still never been filled. Nevertheless, people were looking for the ‘next big thing’ in qawwali, and up stepped Rizwan-Muazzam, already fully-formed and raring to take on the international scene. They later went on to experiment with various international sounds just like their uncle, but with Attish: the Hidden Fire, they showed off their chops in a traditional setting with a modern attitude.

It’s qawwali, and it’s very high-quality, so I think there is little in general that I can say that I haven’t said before about the beauty of the style. Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali are perhaps a little unusual by the fact that they have two lead vocalists instead of a soloist, but that’s not unheard of by any stretch, and their recognisable voices add a novel element as the album progresses.

So this album is another one where I’m going to be focussing on one piece of music in particular. Specifically, the last track on the album and therefore, I guess, probably the one people are most likely to miss. It’s called ‘Ali Ali Khena’, a song of praise to Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law and the one through whom Chishtiyya Sufis trace their spiritual lineage. A few years ago, I was playing this album for the first time in quite a while, and this track absolutely floored me to the degree that I play it very often nowadays. The reason why has become a slight mantra for this blog, and so I hope you won’t be too annoyed when I say: BLUES! This track is as close to a blues qawwali as you’re going to get without some ill-advised cross-cultural fusions. It’s not just a slight hinting at it with one or two notes here or there either, when that refrain comes around, ‘dam dam dam Ali Ali khena madhe Ali Ali khena, it hits every single note of the blues scale, and doesn’t deviate from it either. The groove, even though it’s based on the typical qawwali rhythm, seems to roll along with a real strut, and the harmonium sounds like it’s being played by someone well-versed in Hammond organ at times, especially at the beginning.

I wonder how much of that track’s bluesiness is intentional. It is entirely possible that it’s a complete coincidence – the scale used (that corresponds with the blues scale) is very similar to the raga Puriya Dhanashri, perhaps it’s just a natural progression from there. Whatever it is, I love it. And there’s a lesson in listening: never drop that attention before the end of the album – you never know what surprises await in the humble last track.

253: Ouled Ghnou & Lâriche, by El Hanaouate

El Hanaouate (Morocco)
Ouled Ghnou & Lâriche
7 tracks, 44 minutes
Download from Awesome Tapes from Africa

It’s an album courtesy of that beautiful blog again, and this time it’s from the very north of the continent, from Morocco.

To be honest, I know incredibly little about this album or its artists, and the little bit that I do know comes from the comment section from when the tape was originally posted on AFTA. And even those comments are contradictory! The most accurate-seeming explanation comes from user K7al L3afta, who explains that the artists are a duo called El Hanaouate, who perform a style of halqa. Halqa – meaning ‘circle’ and named for the crowd of onlookers that inevitably form around a performance – is a type of improvised long-form storytelling based on the life of Sufi saints and marabouts; there are many styles of halqa and the stories can be told in many ways.

El Hanaouate are, for all intents and purposes, a comedy duo. Their performance of halqa is half-musical and half-spoken, setting the scene and the main plot points with song, and then getting to the finer points in dialogue. So this one is an interesting listen for someone like me, who can’t speak Arabic. I can (and very much do) enjoy the music – it’s a simple but effective pairing of the wtar lute, which sounds kinda like a half-and-half between an oud and a banjo, and the bendir, a frame drum with a gut snare that makes a gnarly, throaty rattle when struck, over which the duo sing bluesy, ornamented melodies – but then there are sometimes lengthy spoken sections that, of course, leave me very much out of the loop.

This is comedy! The words are all important and I’m understanding none of it. I reckon I’m only capable of appreciating about a third of the art this album has to offer…but that music third that I do get is really good, so imagine what the rest is like. If you know Arabic, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this album – who knows, maybe I’m best off not knowing what they’re saying! But for now, I’ll appreciate the Moroccan groove and revel in the mysteries of the storytelling of El Hanaouate.

252: Hot Shot, by Shaggy

Shaggy (Jamaica)
Hot Shot (2000)
14 tracks, 53 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

With Bob Dylan, making a point to listen to his lyrics as their own art-form for which the music was complementary but not strictly necessary was a revelation and greatly aided my appreciation of his work as a whole. For Shaggy…well, not as much.

Hot Shot was on my list because when it came out, little 8- or 9-year-old me really dug it. It had a couple of big hits on it – ‘It Wasn’t Me’ and ‘Angel’ were both number ones in the weekly charts, and reached number one and eight in the year-end charts for 2000 too – that were fun and sounded good, and that carries on for the rest of the album too. There are some solid tracks on here; even lesser-known ones such as ‘Why Me Lord’, the coolly romantic ‘Leave It to Me’ and the Bollywood-sampling ‘Hey Love’ would be nice additions to appropriate playlists. It’s basically a nice collection of pop-dancehall with heaps of soul and R’n’B, which make it a little more palatable for the charts. It’s very Year 2000 but still good for a cheesy laugh and good vibes.

But, oh, the lyrics. Today was the first time I’ve properly given them my attention, and I sort of wish I hadn’t. Actually, that’s not strictly true: I once did a karaoke duet with a friend singing ‘Angel’. What a lovely song that is, I thought, all romantic like…except half-way through singing it comes the sinking feeling accompanied by a gradual realisation that the premise of the song is that Shaggy’s character has been abusing his ‘angel,’ went to prison for it and now she’s taken him back and he’s very appreciative. Grim. The awkward part is that the whole album is full of that crap too: tales of cheating, carrying guns, casual misogyny and the like…even when the lyrics aren’t offensive in their content, they’re not exactly enlightening or even particularly inventive either.

How depressing. Hot Shot is an easy listen and remains pleasant and enjoyable as long as you don’t pay too much attention. It’s not aged well in the 19 years since its release: for the music, that lends it a certain charm and adds to its nostalgia quality; for the words, though, it just ends up making the previously fun, happy-go-lucky character of Shaggy just seem like a creep. Sad. Does one outweigh the other? That’s your call.

251: Gili Yalo, by Gili Yalo

Gili Yalo (Israel/Ethiopia)
Gili Yalo (2017)
10 tracks, 41 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Diaspora music as a concept is something I find extremely interesting. The experiences of people who have grown up in one culture and living in a different one, or to have been born and raised by people of one culture while in the geographies of another, lend them a unique outlook on the world and a unique approach to the meanings and makings of music.

Gili Yalo’s self-titled debut album is a great reflection of that. Born to a Jewish family in Ethiopia, his family travelled by foot to the refugee camps in Sudan to escape religious persecution when Yalo was five years old. From there, he was brought to Tel Aviv as part of Israel’s Operation Moses. And so, growing up, he was immersed in Israeli life, and music: he listened to all the popular Israeli singers, and became addicted to funk, soul, rock and reggae from the Americas. He had little time for Ethiopian culture; it was, after all, the country that rejected him and his people. But then, a little older, he started to notice the systematic and structural prejudice against Ethiopian Jews in Israel. He got angry, and his anger manifested in refusing to be put down by racism, but to rise from it: he began to embrace his Ethiopian heritage like he hadn’t before. He polished up his Amharic and started listening to as much Ethiopian music as he could, mostly from the Éthiopiques series (as have we, here and here). “I discovered lively, exciting music with impressive progressions…on one hand, the beats are very, very authentic and characteristic of Ethiopia, and on the other hand, the scale is very minor – sad songs with a beat, and people dance as if there were no tomorrow. I connected with this music,” he later told Haaretz.

He was already a musician, but this dive into Ethiopian jazz and other styles from the 60s and 70s changed the way he thought about music, and when he went solo, it was obvious what direction he would take. His music reflects that cross-cultural life. Vintage Ethiogroove is at the heart of most of the tracks on Gili Yalo, but when he allows his other influences to take the fore, they come with as much skill, love and deep understanding, meaning that no matter which direction the album takes, it’s always down the grooviest avenue possible.

I’ve been following Gili Yalo for about six years now, just as he’d started to pick up steam as a solo artist. It was a little scrappy at first, but by the time this album came out, his sound was honed to perfection. When I reviewed it for Songlines at the time, I said ‘Play it loud and you’ll feel like the coolest person alive – after Gili Yalo, of course,’ and listening back to it almost two years later, I can confirm that it’s still the case. After keeping him on my radar for so long, it was great to see him live at WOMAD in July – his first ever UK date; he smashed it, of course, but that was expected. Listen to this debut album and revel in it: it was a whole life in the making.

250: M’Bemba, by Salif Keita

Salif Keita (Mali)
M’Bemba (2005)
10 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Salif Keita has spent his career at the top of his game. His first real engagement as a singer of the Rail Band, one of the two big dance bands of Bamako of the 1970s. After a few years of lighting up the Bamako scene with his golden voice, he left the band…and joined Les Ambassadeurs, the other big dance band of Bamako. In his spells with these two bands, he played with some of the biggest talents in Mandé music – Mory Kanté, Djelimady Tonkoura, Kanté Manfila, Cheick Tidiané Seck, Amadou Bagayoko and Kélétigui Diabaté to name just a handful.

Then in the 1980s, he moved to Paris to pursue a solo career and smashed that too. His first solo album from that period, 1987’s Soro, was a huge international hit that defined the terms of Afropop: this was dance music for the discerning listener, full of all the mod-cons but with a distinctive Malian flavour. At the dawn of the ‘world music’ boom, the album made Salif Keita a superstar. After more successful albums throughout the 90s, 2002’s Moffou changed the game again, with a more down-to-earth production and much more focused on Keita’s own take on Malian traditions as opposed to pushing the boundaries of African pop. While there were still upbeat tracks on the album, it was the quieter, more contemplative and acoustic songs that really grabbed the attention, and Keita had another hit on his hands.

So now we get to M’Bemba from 2005 and it is, for me, a career high point for Keita. For this one, it feels as if he’s amalgamated all of the different aspects that made each of his previous sounds so special, turning them into one masterful sound. In his dance band days, the music was based on traditional Malian styles – especially that of the griots – but vamped up with a Cuban edge; then his style went to pop and disco, and the production turned his music into international dancefloor hits; in his later, more introspective work, he went back to his roots, using mostly traditional instruments and wrote music that connected with ancient pathways. In M’Bemba, the sound is stripped back and mostly acoustic, but the way he approaches the compositions gives them a real bite that keeps them perfect for dancing.

He made this album in the studio he built himself in Bamako – it’s the first album he’d made there since his Ambassadeurs days. That’s not the only return, either, as the lead guitar and arrangements on the album are provided by Kanté Manfila. The involvement of Kanté and other musicians including the legendary kora player Toumani Diabaté give this album a real traditional edge while still creating something excitingly new.

Of course, the highlight of the album is Keita’s voice. Over 35 years into his musical career and his voice belts somehow even more powerfully than ever. It’s an immediately recognisable sound with that indefinable quality that separates great singers from unbeatable ones – he has all of the subtlety and techniques that you could ask for, but what makes him special is…I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the particular shape of his vocal cords that sets him apart, or something equally minute, but whatever it is, it certainly works. It’s what he sings, too: as a member of the royal bloodline, he was never supposed to sing, that’s a job for the griots, so when he did sing, his own vocal style imitated the griots in so many ways but with the freedom to change things up, bringing elements of other types of voice and musical styles into his performance.

Considering his string of international successes, M’Bemba is never really viewed with the same reverie among fans as Soro or Moffou in Keita’s discography. But for me, it shows exactly why he is such a special talent. His voice is a Malian treasure all by itself, but his gorgeous balancing of the very serious and traditional alongside fun, danceable and internationally-conscious side of music leaves this album with something for all his fans regardless of what era they prefer, while still maintaining a coherent, beautiful sound throughout.

249: Violent Femmes, by Violent Femmes

Violent Femmes (USA)
Violent Femmes (1983)
12 tracks, 44 minutes (1987 CD version)
Spotify ∙ iTunes

If you prefer your punk to be high-brow, intelligent and insightful, the Violent Femmes’ is not the album for you.

The songs on Violent Femmes are immature dipping into childish. They whinge and whine about trivial stuff and get unreasonably angry about general facts of life. Listening to it as a not-17-year-old-boy, when I listen to these lyrics, I think ‘wow this guy sounds like a tedious, dangerous loser.’ I mean, the highlight of the set, ‘Add It Up’ could literally be the incel anthem, if incels had any notion of art or culture or beauty. But guess what? I was actually a 17-year-old boy once, for my sins. And although I didn’t agree with a lot of what frontman Gordon Gano is singing about, I definitely understood the emotional core of it, and I still do, really. The words are basically silly teenage edginess but performed in a really relatable way – there’s a real catharsis in listening to this album that makes that 17-year-old inside me feel spoken to at least a little bit. Everyone’s inner 17-year-old deserves a bit of understanding now and again.

But before I make myself sound like an unforgivable dickhead, let’s talk about the sonic element of the album as well as just the poetic. When it comes to cathartic music, punk has got to be one of the best styles for it, and so it is here. The music is played with much more emotion than perfection, the scruffiness of it all only adding to its charm. But where the majority of punk uses electronic noise to aid in the sonic chaos, the Violent Femmes take it in a different direction. Nowadays they call themselves ‘acoustic punk,’ and while that was less true of their first album (there are electric guitars and basses for one thing) it still undoubtedly has an acoustic feel to it. The jangly strumming of the acoustic guitar is central to their sound, and the earthy tones of the xylophone and violin make it hit home. It’s interesting because it allows for a different side of punk to be heard – it hints at a vulnerability behind the bluster, and the aggression just shows itself as the flip-side of fragility. Gano’s voice helps with this too – slightly androgynous and not-quite-post-pubescent, he certainly sounds like the immature lad he portrays through the lyrics, even though he was 20 years old when the album was recorded.

While there are echoes of all the expected punk influences at play – the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Dead Kennedies – I also hear connections from other artists from either side of this album, whether out of genuine musical connection or just some indefinable quality. I hear Doors, Kinks, White Stripes, There Might Be Giants, even Beefheart on occasion. This is why the album still has so much depth despite its immaturity. It speaks on so many levels, from inventive musical settings to angsty, emotional performances to, yes, teenage bluster. There is something to be gained by listening from each angle, and I reckon that’s why this unsubtle, flawed but incredibly ‘real’-sounding album is still regarded as a classic.

248: Sambe-Comores: Modern Traditions from Grande Comoro, by Various Artists

Various Artists (Comoros)
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.

247: En Mana Kuoyo, by Ayub Ogada

Ayub Ogada (Kenya)
En Mana Kuoyo (1993)
10 tracks, 40 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Kenyan nyatiti (eight-string lyre) player Ayub Ogada didn’t make too many albums in his career, but En Mana Kuoyo (recorded for Real World Records) is undoubtedly the most famous one. There are lots of lovely tracks on the album, including ‘Kronkronhinko’ and ‘Wa Winjigo Ero’, and the production is quite minimal, although what there is is very 1990s (it’s dripping with reverb, but that’s alright).

Today though, I just want to talk about one piece in particular. ‘Kothbiro’ is really the hit of the whole album. While the rest of the tracks are nice, ‘Kothbiro’ stands out by a mile for its sheer breath-taking beauty. Ogada had previously played the track with his rock band Black Savage in 1976, where they’d adapted it from a traditional song. A good song, but its mood was very different, a solid Afro-groove:

And now the En Mana Kuoyo version:

It’s so much simpler, and with it, so much deeper. Starting with just Ogada and his nyatiti, his voice is haunting. Here that 90s production really works for it, creating and highlighting the resonances of his voice so that they seem to ring out into the distance. He’s joined by double bass, guitar and piano, but they’re all so subtle – even when the piano takes a solo – that they seem to be drifting away even as they’re played, as if Ogada is being accompanied by the whistles of the wind. The overlaid harmonies are fragile but spot-on, and even though there is quite a full sound by the time everything has built up, it still feels stark and quite lonely. It’s easy to see why the song in this form became Ogada’s signature piece, and even went on to be used in several films and TV shows. Peter Gabriel said of the track: ‘In the early days of WOMAD and Real World Records many people weren’t interested to listen to music from other cultures and whenever I was trying to convince them I would play Ayub singing ‘Kothbiro’ and invariably win them round.’ – a testament to the piece’s real power.

Ayub Ogada died earlier this year at the age of 63. His death was felt strongly within Kenya and throughout the African music scene around the world, but En Mana Kuoyo and ‘Kothbiro’ will make sure that his music will be heard and revered in the future generations.

246: Fat Possum: Not the Same Old Blues Crap, by Various Artists

Various Artists (USA)
Fat Possum: Not the Same Old Blues Crap (1997)
11 tracks, 44 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

We heard from Fat Possum Records right at the beginning of this big mad project, back in the third week with Takes One to Know One by Elmo Williams and Hezekiah Early. The awesome power of that record was not a one-off – today’s album gives the proof.

This compilation is a label sampler – usually quite dull affairs that come free with magazines and give you a pleasant tour around the catalogue whatever record label coughed up the price. Not this one. Not the Same Old Blues Crap, aside from just being a simply glorious title, says it all: it’s three-quarters-of-an-hour of messy, noisy and impolite blues.

The front cover advertises it as ‘cheap price sampler,’ but I reckon they’re playing a delicious irony with that one. Samplers are usually inexpensive and a bit rubbish, but this one sounds cheap – it’s lo-fi to the extreme, the instruments are old, the performances are imprecise and the amplifiers sound like they’re just about to give up, and that’s exactly how it’s supposed to sound. This ain’t no haute couture, it’s dirty, covered in grit and tastes like smoke and moonshine.

Not the Same Old Blues Crap is still a representative distillation of Fat Possum’s early output, when they shone a spotlight on the new music of the old musicians of Mississippi. So Williams and Early are there, and the label’s most successful names of R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough and T-Model Ford and others such as the Jelly Roll Kings and Hasil Adkins, who all play that modern-day delta sound that leans very close to punk through some sort of convergent evolution. Also featured are a couple of younger-generation punk-blues bands such as 20 Miles and The Neckbones to complete the circle; they fit in perfectly.

Nowadays, Fat Possum’s output is less exciting (to me at least), focussing on more standard rock and indie stuff. But their early releases, as so brilliantly illustrated here, really exploded notions of what down-home Mississippi blues was and could be – and that the old bluesmen were still, and always had been) edgier than any blues-cock-rocker could hope to be. This wasn’t the same old blues crap, and it’s still an exciting, powerful listen today.

245: Seize the Time, by Fun^da^Mental

Fun^da^Mental (United Kingdom/Pakistan)
Seize the Time (1994)
14 tracks, 84 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

From the very beginning of the album, you know Seize the Time is not going to be a comfortable listen. To start the first track of your debut album with a truly disgusting and horrific 30-second-long answer-machine message from a cockney racist, full of P-words, N-words and C-words and ending in a chilling death threat. It’s a really affective opener, shocking, and it’s an inspired way to start the album. Because it shouldn’t be a comfortable listen; these are not comfortable topics.

And that’s the way the album continues. I usually find ‘unapologetic’ a weird word to be applied to artists going against the mainstream – why should they ever be ‘apologetic’ in the first place? – but I think it’s quite well-placed for Fun^da^Mental, and Aki Nawaz in particular. They are not here to make polite requests; they’re not here to give you pleasant, comfortably unfamiliar Asian music to boost your progressive cred. They’re not going to sit around and allow you to put them in the world music box, or the Asian underground box, or any box at all. They’re difficult, and fuck you for thinking your opinion matters.

The uncompromising lyrics talk about what it was like to live life while being young, Asian, British and Muslim in the early 1990s without pulling any of the punches, and they still – sadly, angrily – hold too much weight even 25 years later. They’re all held together by a supreme musical tapestry that similarly reflects the soundscape of Britain for young British-Asians: it’s very much in the old school hip-hop mould, but the instrumentals are full of quotes and inspirations from Bollywood, bhangra, South Asian classical music and other folk music, as well as jungle, dub, electronica and lots of punk in both sound and attitude. There’s also a liberal dousing of spoken samples, from the inspirational (Malcolm X) to the rage-inducing (predictably-Tory MP Alan Clark). The group’s place in the fledgling world dubtronica scene is felt with the inclusion of Transglobal Underground’s Tim Whelan, Neil Sparkes and Nick Page.

It’s always maddening when art made through injustice retains its meaning with very little change over such a long period of time. The great thing about music, though, is that it helps – awareness is heightened, people get angry and the groundswell continues. Seize the Time is just as important to listen to now as it was in 1994 – revisit it if you’ve not for a while, and listen and learn if you’ve never experienced. Get furious. We need that now.

244: Samora Machel, by Shalawambe

Shalawambe (Zambia)
Samora Machel (1989)
9 tracks, 44 minutes
YouTube playlist

Zambia is one of those countries whose music doesn’t really get much attention from the rest of the world – not helped in this case by being surrounded by musical powerhouse neighbours such as Zimbabwe and the DR Congo. In cases like that, I’m always keen to dive into their musical culture with my ears; I really believe that there is no place that good music cannot be found.

I’d actually known about Shalawambe for a long time before I heard their music. That’s because of this (click to enlarge):

Yep, a poster for the WOMAD festival at Carlyon Bay in Cornwall in 1988. Unfortunately, being born when I was and with the linear nature of time in the dimension on which we exist, I didn’t get to attend this one – the poster is actually my mum’s but it’s been on my wall ever since I left home. What a great line-up though. Bit pricey at £24 for the weekend, mind, but then you do get to see Ali Farka Touré AND Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and camping is included, so fair enough really. But the poster itself has fascinated me, and I always catch myself studying it. Yes, there are the big names on there and even some that still wow festival crowds 31 years later, but it’s the ones that either didn’t survive or otherwise dropped off the radar that interest me the most: who are Lo Jai from France? Or Yemaya, a group obviously named for the goddess of the sea, but what were they about, and why are they listed as being from the very vague ‘S. America’? And since when did the Proclaimers play with dub-hip-hop syndicate Tackhead Sound System?

As I mentioned at the top, music from lesser-heard countries always intrigues me, and so it was always Shalawambe from Zambia that stuck out to me. Who were they and what did they sound like? All I knew was that they’re not around anymore. And that’s as far as I got until I found this album while digging through my work’s archive. I soon as I saw the name I snatched it up and…yup, it sounded brilliant, because of course it does – a band from the heart of Africa who played at WOMAD in the late 80s, they couldn’t not be brilliant.

They sound…pretty similar to how I expected them to sound actually, considering their geography, a bit like a mix of the guitar pop styles that were big in Zimbabwe, DR Congo and Tanzania at the time. I’d say it’s most like the jit made famous by the Bhundu Boys, but with less influence from the traditional Shona mbira style in the guitars and a more obvious 4/4 beat. Like all of those guitar pop styles, Samora Machel (the album, not the first president of Mozambique for whom it is dedicated) is a delightful collection of bright, springy guitars, carefree vocals and tight harmonies, and enough Vitamin D to keep you going for days.

In researching this album last night, I found out that Shalawambe were actually one of John Peel’s favourite bands, and that 1988 was a bumper year for them: they recorded a Peel Session a few days before WOMAD and it ended up being voted by listeners as one of the ‘Festive 50’ for that year. What a great time for African music in the UK it was.

I don’t know what became of Shalawambe, but it seems like they dissolved at some point in the early 1990s. They remain the Zambian band to have had the most success in the UK, and to be honest, very little has come to challenge them in the intervening years. Let’s always hope for more, but at least Samora Machel is, and will always remain, a beautiful album to jive to in the sun…or anytime, really.

243: Call of the Soul, by Raza Khan

Raza Khan (India)
Call of the Soul (2011)
3 tracks, 41 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I’ve mentioned qawwali quite a few times here but we’ve not had a proper album of the style yet. So, with this album, it’s probably a good time to ask…what is qawwali?

Qawwali is a style of sung poetry popular in South Asia, originating in the 13th century with the works of the poet and musician Amir Khusrow. It is a devotional form sung by followers of a mystical branch of Islam called Sufism, and its words talk of an all-consuming love of God and the Prophet through often deep layers of metaphor, often evoking erotic love or intoxication on wine (Sufis are also responsible for many incredible musical and artistic traditions around the world, from the Bayefall and Gnawa of West Africa to the Mevlevi of Turkey to the Qasidah of Indonesia and lots in between). Musically, qawwali is descended from many sources, with Indian and Persian classical music, Punjabi and Rajasthani folk and Arabic music all contributing to the sound. The modern qawwali ensemble consists of one or two soloists and a chorus of between six and ten, with one tabla and a couple of harmoniums being played between them.

And so we go back to Call of the Soul and Raza Khan. As you’ve guessed, Raza Khan is a qawwali singer, a Sufi and a Christian.

…wait, what? How can he be a Sufi AND a Christian? Because the world is just bloody excellent, that’s how. He applies Sufi teaching and practice to his Pentecostal beliefs and just gets on with it. And part of just getting on with it is apparently becoming a master qawwal. His voice is simply stunning. The ease at which his voice caresses the poetry that he sings – and the wordless syllables he improvises with – as if they are made of silk. His fingers move across the keys of his harmonium with a sharp dexterity, and the range of his voice at least equals the instrument’s. When he breaks from the rolling groove to soar into the sky, the heights he reaches are incredible…and then he goes even higher.

Qawwali is intense music and a spectacle for the ears and the heart. Naming the album Call of the Soul is no overstatement. When you listen to this music, it transports you, spiritually, to another place, whether you’re religious or not. And Raza Khan proves that the religion of the singer doesn’t matter too much either; it doesn’t matter which gods and prophets are being praised, this music brings them a little nearer to us.