BANNING EYRE

Dub Colossus | A Town Called Addis

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:07:55 GMT

Real World (2008)
This one-of-a-kind project connects the real-life fireworks of old and new, urban Ethiopian music with the Rastafarian mythology

Kasai Allstars | Congotronics III: In The 7th Moon, The Chief Turned Into A Swimming Fish And Ate The Head Of His Enemy By Magic

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:38:38 GMT

Crammed Discs (2008)
The Congotronics franchise has succeeded in making the rawest of African traditional music hip.

Love during wartime

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:34:18 GMT

J.B. Mpiana brings his Congolese party machine to…Lynn?
J.B. Mpiana, one of the reigning stars of contemporary Congolese music, brings a 25-strong stage show to Memorial Auditorium in Lynn this Friday, November 7, at 9 pm.

Pan-African

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:06:14 GMT

Made In Dakar | Nonesuch
Far more than a nostalgia act, Baobab are one of the freshest and most exuberant African bands on the road today.

Carrying on

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:03:52 GMT

Andy Palacio’s gang regroup
Last year was an important one for the Garifuna musicians of Central America.

FALLEN STAR: The Garifuna musicians whom Palacio helped put on the musical map are touring in his memory.

Last year was an important one for the Garifuna musicians of Central America. The Garifuna, descendants of African slaves who were shipwrecked in the island of St. Vincent in 1635 and intermarried with Arawak and Carib Indians, are today a marginalized group struggling to preserve their cultural identity. Their fortunes seemed to rise when Andy Palacio of Belize scored an international hit with the album Watina (Cumbancha), an inspired blend of folkloric roots and smart, organic production. Palacio and the Garifuna Collective toured the world most of last year promoting that album (they did a show at the MFA), and they were getting ready to hit the road again when the 47-year-old Palacio died from a massive stroke in January. The Collective regrouped, and the tour — now a memorial to a fallen star — is on, with a stop at Johnny D’s this Saturday.

“Andy had been waiting most of his life for this moment,” says producer Ivan Duran from his studio in Belize. He’s holding two new music magazines and the new Belize Telephone Directory, all with Palacio’s picture on their covers. “Andy was supposed to be enjoying all this stuff right now.” Duran has been producing Garifuna music for more than a decade, and he deserves as much credit as anyone for the genre’s current cachet. He recruited three generations of musicians from Belize and Honduras to create the Garifuna Collective, and under his direction they created Watina.

The band’s current tour promises more than wistful nostalgia. Duran and his musicians have just released a sister CD to Watina; Umalali: The Garifuna Women’s Project (Cumbancha) is a rich collection of recordings Duran has been collecting and producing as soulful roots pop. Umalali goes back to Duran’s early days of recording Garifuna music. “I was working with all these female backing vocalists, and I realized that they knew more songs than all the men together. You would ask them to sing a song and they could go on for hours without repeating a single melody. Women have been the bearers of a lot of the musical traditions.”

Debashish Bhattacharya

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:45:56 GMT

Calcutta Chronicles: Indian Slide Guitar Odyssey
The maverick stylist plays a variety of slide-guitar variants here, in musical styles reflecting his experiences in the culturally rich Calcutta milieu.

Famoro Dioubate’s Kakande

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:58:44 GMT

Dununya | Jumbie
The inventive instrumental and choral arrangements add freshness without denaturing the music’s inherent roots appeal.

Aphrodesia

BANNING EYRE — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:43:32 GMT

Lagos by Bus | Cyberset
The band are tight and fluid, and their command of far-flung languages and musical genres is sure-footed without being reverential.

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

BANNING EYRE — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:50:27 GMT

Ilembe: Honoring Shaka Zula | Heads Up
It’s been two decades since Paul Simon ushered this South African a cappella group onto the world stage.

Middle man

BANNING EYRE — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:11:35 GMT

Youssou N’Dour bridges the gap
As Senegal’s pre-eminent pop singer, Youssou N’Dour has mastered the art of pleasing diverse audiences.

NEW TERRITORY: N’Dour’s latest CD looks for the roots of reggae, blues, and hip-hop in the folklore of the southern Sahara.

As Senegal’s pre-eminent pop singer, Youssou N’Dour has mastered the art of pleasing diverse audiences. His home-town crowd in Dakar tends to prefer the percussive crack of the mbalax sound that he pioneered in the late ’70s and has continued to tinker with by adding a more modern high-tech sheen. When he’s abroad, N’Dour’s fans are more apt to look to him for roots grooves spun as transcendent high art. As he tells me over the phone from London, “For us, here in the middle, it’s crazy.”

N’Dour has been producing concept albums for the international world-music market ever since the UK’s Folk Roots magazine named him “African Artist of the Century” in 1999. Nothing’s in Vain (2002) was N’Dour stripped down to an acoustic setting; the Grammy-winning Egypt (2004) was a masterful orchestral meditation on Islam. His latest, Rokku Mi Rokka/Give and Take (Nonesuch), looks for the roots of reggae, blues, and hip-hop in the folklore of the southern Sahara. N’Dour and his band, Super Étoile, play the Somerville Theatre on December 10, in a World Music event rescheduled from November 24.

Rokku Mi Rokka isn’t the first disc to source New World black pop genres in the African desert — Baaba Maal and Taj Mahal have done the same. N’Dour, however, homes in on the border region of Senegal, Mali, and Mauritania, the zone where his ears tell him pop music’s most potent DNA lies. American pop has always been part of his mix — he covered the Spinners’ “The Rubberband Man” back in 1985. But when it comes to African roots, his muse has been the propulsive sabar drumming and soaring vocal lyricism of Wolof griots —sub-Saharan sounds. So it’s a welcome surprise to hear him rhapsodizing in the folksy idiom of the nomadic Peul (“Pullo Ardo”), trading verses with the keening, northern voice of Toucouleur singer Ousmane Kange on “Sama Gàmmu,” and veering toward Mauritanian trance music on “Létt Ma,” a story about romance in the desert.

“I cannot say that this is my music,” N’Dour concedes. “But this is the music of West Africa. And when someone plays this music, you don't know anymore whether they are a Senegalese, a Malian, or a Mauritanian. I think there is a very interesting, and very emotional, dialogue going on among these peoples.”

Habib Koité and Bamada

BANNING EYRE — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:24:09 GMT

Afriki | Cumbancha
That and his velvet voice complement the introspective mood here.

Konono Nº 1

BANNING EYRE — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 19:59:29 GMT

Live at Couleur Café | Crammed Discs
This band’s amped-up likembe (thumb piano) trance music put the trendy world-music subgenre known as Congotronics on the map.

Party and prayer

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 14:22:08 GMT

Andy Palacio rescues the sound of the Garifuna
For Palacio, the road from a rural Garifuna childhood to the recording studio was not an easy one.

The story of Central America’s Garifuna people begins in 1635 with a shipwreck. The survivors — West African slaves — swam to safety and freedom on the island of St. Vincent, where they interbred with Carib and Arawak Indians. Their descendants now live in Belize, Honduras, and a diaspora of communities around the world. Mostly poor and disenfranchised, the Garifuna fear the disappearance of their hybrid culture. But veteran singer Andy Palacio of Belize has dedicated his career to preventing that from happening. With a new, multi-generational band, the Garifuna Collective, and an enchanting debut release, Watina (Cumbancha), Palacio, who plays at the Museum of Fine Arts this Wednesday, is making headway at last.

Born in a small village of 200 people in Baranko, Palacio says he was exposed to rural Garifuna culture among people who lived off “subsistence farming and fishing. We spoke Garifuna,” he continues, “but on the school grounds we were required to speak English.”

Partying and prayer are African music staples. Garifuna music is a reflection of that. As Palacio details, “Within the Garifuna community, there are musics for festive occasions, like punta and paranda, and also for healing ceremonies, like hüngü hüngü.” But Garifuna songs are unique: their mournful melodies and reedy vocal harmonies echo mysterious, and now-extinct, Caribbean Indian cultures.

For Palacio, the road from a rural Garifuna childhood to the recording studio was not an easy one. “In my pre-teen years, I picked up my father’s harmonica. He also had a guitar, and he loved to sing. But he grew up in the colonial period with the church choral tradition. He didn’t sing in Garifuna. Garifuna music was not seen as worth recording.”

Garifuna culture was paid little respect until the rise of the party-pop genre called “punta rock” in the late-’70s. The craze hit Belize City just as Palacio was launching his career, and he embraced it. As he rose to become one of the region’s most popular singers, he mixed punta, reggae, and pop into an increasingly electric and hard-hitting sound. A few years back, Ivan Duran of Belize’s Stonetree Records encouraged Palacio to try out a more acoustic, rootsy approach with both young and older Garifuna. The musicians lived together in a fishing village for weeks, composing and arranging. The vocal harmonies they developed recall early Bob Marley and the Wailers, as do the laid-back rhythms. But from the punchy beat and sensuous, growling vocal of the title track to the searing balladry of “Ayu Da” — Garifuna elder Paul Nabor’s tribute to a boyhood friend who perished on a fishing trip — these songs create a sound and a mood of their own.

De-colonized

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 17:29:20 GMT

Francophone acts bring it home on Bastille Day
For the 32nd consecutive summer, the French Library’s Bastille Day Street Dance promises to be a world-music highlight.

ROOTS MUSE: Ricardo Lemvo’s “mission” is to explore connections between Congolese and Cuban music.

For the 32nd consecutive summer, the French Library’s Bastille Day Street Dance promises to be a world-music highlight. Haitian diva Emeline Michel returns, and Boston-based Senegalese percussionist Lamine Touré presents his Afro-mbalax band Group Saloum. The headliner, Ricardo Lemvo, is Congo-born, with Angolan roots and a deep connection with Afro-Cuban music, in part because he’s lived most of his life in Los Angeles. What these artists share is the French language, and the inheritance of intertwined cultural histories, a legacy they express in beautiful, complex, danceable music.

Senegalese percussionist Lamine Touré has made his home in Boston for years now, and anyone trawling the clubs where African pop bands play has likely caught his multi-genre dance band, Group Saloum. On the evidence of their bracing homonymous debut CD, Group Saloum merge funk, jazz, reggae, and more into the characteristic percussion-driven pop of Senegal, mbalax. Emeline Michel is a passionate modernizer of Haitian vodou roots, as she proved on her 2004 Rasin Kreyol (Times Square). She possesses an explosive singing voice, and her stage performance morphs soul review and cathartic ritual, mixing Haitian musical styles with reggae, gospel, and even Congolese dance pop.

On the new Isabela (Mopiato Music), Ricardo Lemvo and his band Makina Loca go back to what he calls his “root mission,” which is to explore connections between Congolese and Cuban music. “There’s nothing wrong with experimenting,” he says over the phone from LA, “but on recent albums, I believe I strayed from the mission.” Isabela finds him back in form, singing comfortably in Lingala, Kikongo, Portuguese, and Spanish, and working with Congolese legends: singers Nyboma and Wutu Mayi and guitarists Huit Kilos Nseka, Bopol Mansiamina, and especially Papa Noel, who Lemvo feels has never received his due. “When you talk about great Congolese guitarists, you talk about Franco and Dr. Nico. Papa Noel should be as popular as Franco. I cannot even compare him to the new generation of Congolese guitarists.”

Lemvo’s work is full of historic references. “Kasongo Boogaloo” features Huit Kilos playing a guitar solo borrowed from Dr. Nico, who first played it on the early-’60s African jazz hit “Kayi Kayi.” That song was itself an adaptation of a contemporary Cuban hit, but Nico’s solo takes its inspiration from yet another, “Seis lindas cubanas,” a celebration of Cuba’s six provinces that includes oblique references to the Cuban revolution and its famous black general, Maceo. These layers of influence are a deep delight, marrying montuno vamp, piano, percussion, brass, and distinctly Congolese guitar and vocals.

Tcheka

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 18:08:02 GMT

Nu Mondo | Times Square
The latest talent to emerge from the Cape Verdean archipelago adds new power and sophistication to an alluring national genre.

Bokoor Beats: Vintage Afro-Beat, Afro-Rock & Electric Highlife from Ghana

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:53:24 GMT

Bokoor Beats: Vintage Afro-Beat, Afro-Rock & Electric Highlife from Ghana | Otrabanda
Pop music in 1970s Ghana was a collision of lilting highlife.

Erol Josué

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 29 May 2007 18:37:11 GMT

Régléman | Mi5
A vodou priest since his teenage years in Haiti, this singer-songwriter combines mysticism, groove, and myriad sonic surprises.

Lura

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 18:47:47 GMT

M'Bem Di Fora | Times Square
This young Cape Verdean diva explores animated genres from her remote, African archipelago home.

Salif Keita

BANNING EYRE — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 21:13:44 GMT

M'Bemba | Decca
Mali’s most celebrated singer, Salif Keita, has long been a musical shape shifter.

Vusi Mahlasela

BANNING EYRE — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:14:05 GMT

Guiding Star | ATO
Mahlasela is among Africa’s best singer-songwriters, and here he delivers 16 largely acoustic-based tunes that span kwela, reggae, swing jazz, mbaqanga, and rock.