Rolling Global Outernational Non-West Non-English (Some Exceptions) 2018 Thread Once Known as World Music

I think Huda Asfour is gonna do some shows in Egypt and Lebanon this summer. She's on Bandcamp if you want to check out her new album. Her more traditional 2012 instrumental album Mars is also on Spotify.

Still so many afropop episodes for me to catch up on.

Seeing votes on that best albums of 2018 so far thread for Hailu Mergia, Tal National, and Ebo Taylor

Amadou & Mariam and then Noura Mint Seymali are gonna be in the Washington DC area on successive nights in June. Fun live acts

UK electronic dance duo Disclosure have a new single "Ultimatum" that samples and credits Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara.

Fatoumata deserves the attention.

Angélique Kidjo is releasing a full-album cover version of Remain In Light next month (She's been doing it live for a year now). Videos of some of the songs on the Talking heads classic or dud thread

went to a party yesterday with an Angolan trio jamming out, great stuff - is Bonga a good point of entry to Angolan rock?

Most of the Bonga stuff I have heard is more mellow like Brazilian samba.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_music_in_Angola

Also, Congo singer Sam Mangwana lived in Angola. He did some rocking groove filled efforts

https://www.npr.org/2011/02/02/130076680/funk-before-war-in-angola

thx!

Malian singer Kassé-Mady Diabaté died last week:
https://face2faceafrica.com/article/mali-mourns-music-icon-kasse-mady-diabate-who-died-aged-69

went to a party yesterday with an Angolan trio jamming out, great stuff - is Bonga a good point of entry to Angolan rock?

I've never really heard any Angolan artists described as Rock - keep in mind it was a Portuguese colony until '74 (the Portuguese regime being relatively hostile towards Anglo-American music; even in Portugal most of the pre-74 Rock bands were rich kids who could afford to fly off to London and buy records), and after that (which I guess would be prime Afro-Rock time in Nigeria and other places) the country was launched into a bloody, decades long civil war. I met a lot of Angolan musicians from that generation when I lived in Portugal and they certainly counted Rock bands amongst their influences, but the connection to Brazil was much stronger.

I could see classifying Waldemar Bastos as Rock, though more in a singer/songwriter vein than, like, Acid Rock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szTWcNFWX6s

New Yorkers should go see the great Mauritania singer Noura Mint Seymali and her band led by her husband guitarist who plays cool African psychedelic licks, for free at the Lincoln Center Atrium Thursday June 7. They’re in Washington DC the next night ( not free but not expensive)

xp thanks for the info Daniel

quite digging that Bastos

https://analogafrica.bandcamp.com/album/african-scream-contest-vol-2-benin-1963-1980

Volume 1 was good. Will check this one out.

So I was in Houston, Texas and at Afrikiko restaurant I saw a poster for Zaiko Langa Langa coming to Dallas and Houston in July. So apparently that legendary Congolese band is now back together. Not sure who's in the group at this point.

had the great pleasure of seeing Hailu Mergia live this Sunday, a trio with an extremely solid rhythm section (bass player quite unbelievable really, played disco stuff, Sly Stone style, some very fast jazz things, 5 strings all used a lot) on top of which mr. Mergia did his unique thing on rhodes, digital Nord organ, melodica, accordeon

a very simple, driving soundstage, dancing music no doubt, it would be the ultimate wedding band

his style is so interesting, naive, unpredictable - who do you reckon his points of reference are? there's perhaps a bit of Monk, maybe Augustus Pablo?

really want to get that Africa Scream Contest album

The label does a nice job with liner notes and photos which makes me want to get a physical version of it, but I listened to it on Spotify tonight and it sounds great.

x-post -- seen some mentions of jazz organist Jimmy Smith re Hailu Mergia's style

nice, checking out some Jimmy Smith

saw mdou moctar at an instore performance and really enjoyed it -- he really cranks the volume on those solos!
also i heard that at the official concert performance (which i did not attend) there was some egregious and awful dancing in the audience.

The Mdou show I saw was very loud.

egregious and awful dancing in the audience.

Ha. A number of west African acts I have seen invite folks onstage to dance-- that's where I dislike the awful dancers. Invariably, some goofy dancers insist on going onstage. Thankfully they are usually balanced out by the skilled dancers, able to shake their hips and do other movements in an impressive artistic fashion.

I saw Amadou & Mariam last night in a tables and chairs sit-down place, but they encouraged everyone to get up and dance at one point. I was near the stage. I hope no one thought my movements were egregious. It was a good show too btw. I like Amadou's guitar playing and Mariam's vocals. Plus their backing singer/dancer is good. I don't know the material from their most recent album but it sounded good, along side the older cuts I do know. Last time I saw them Amadou stretched out some guitar solos in a way that was not interesting, he was more concise last night.

Saw a video of a Noura Mint Seymali and band song at Tropicalia in DC last night plus one from the night before at
Lincoln Center in NY. A powerful voice and her husband on guitar has such a cool sound. They’re from Mauritania

Love the two Noura Mint Seymali albums I own.

saw Orlando Julius & the Heliocentrics live this Saturday

both crowd, venue and weather could have been better, but band was very groovy, and I enjoyed it

Orlando seemed quite tired, though, not strong in his solos, outshined by the young trumpeteer :/

Listened to the Turkish Ladies comp out on Sony. Gorgeous packaging and the music fluctuates between traditional styles and a more Disco take. Would've liked more of a breakdown of the scene in the liner notes - genres are mentioned but not contextualized, singers brought up within the essay but not really given their own spotlight. Translated lyrics though, which is nice.

listening to 2017 from high-pitched, slightly nasal (but in a unique good way) singer Leila Gobi from Mali. Her uptempo rhythms from her band are impressive too

I like the Leila Gobi one a bit more than Bombino’s latest Deran. Deran is good too though. He’s got that North African desert guitarist style down.

Back in the end of May, folks were writing about Angola here. Just remembered that writer Jonathan Bogart put a guide to Angolan pop circa 2016 on Medium & he has been tweeting occasionally YouTube videos of Angolan pop.

https://www.voanews.com/a/leo-sarkisian-voa-music-time-in-africa-program-dies/4432645.html

Sarkisian who died at 97 led such a cool life. I saw him speak at the VOA in DC in 98. He traveled in the Middle East and then from the 1960s on to ? With his wife and his reel to reel tape recorder in a number of African countries. He hosted the VOA’s Music Time in Africa program that was very popular there. A nice guy who invited the audience at the talk I was at, to come back to his office and see some of the memorabilia he collected over the years.

He was an Armenian American who spoke multiple languages and was also a musician himself

When he retired at age 91, this article was published. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pioneering-collector-of-african-music-retires-from-voice-of-america/2012/09/28/a9c10744-0998-11e2-afff-d6c7f20a83bf_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.80ea44d6179c

I

Saw on twitter that some Sarkisian projects are now being digitized. He recorded Fela way back when, wonder if that’s available.

Haitian band Tabou Combo are on a 50th anniversary tour. I like their older stuff that melded Afro-Caribbean rhythms with James Brown funk. Gradually they have followed Haitian trends and added more syrupy and schmaltzy keyboards, and modern r'n'b. But I haven't heard them in awhile. I want to check out some videos and such and see what the current version of the band is like (have a conflicting event and can't see them this Saturday in Maryland).

young energetic Zimbabwe band Mokoomba are touring the US again. Great live, and pretty good on albums

Gonna see Mokoomba again tonight in DC at a special 6 pm gig.

Mokoomba were fun—great harmonies, grooves, dance steps and more.

The annual free Smithsonian Folklife Festival outdoors on the national mall in Washington DC is starting now, and they are featuring music and culture from Armenia and Catalan. Alas, I am not excited. Been never wowed by music from those locales. Maybe I will go and have my mind changed. Catalan fireworks tonight too.

Liking the latest Fatoumata Diawara album.

Oh, turns out the Catalan fireworks were not last night. They're on Saturday. Saw a Catalan rap-rock ska bnd who had to play without their Algerian born bassist who could not get a visa. Also saw Armenian jazz and Catalan harmony folk. Just ok. All of it

Still liking the Fatoumata Diawara album. Some nice poppy melodies

From another obit of Leo Sarkisian (see up for earlier obit post by me). This one by record collector, compiler Ian Nagoski https://canaryrecords.tumblr.com/

[I]At night, he went out and listened to music and drank and blew his wages in jazz clubs in the Village listening to Artie Shaw, Lionel Hampton, and Vido Musso, Benny Goodman’s Italian tenor saxophonist. Leo had always been a clarinetist himself and played jazz. Then there were the “oriental” clubs up and down 8th Ave, where music in Turkish, Greek, and Armenian thrived among the immigrants - The Egyptian Gardens, The Brittania. The music there was close to the music from childhood in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where the older Armenian men played oud, violin, zurna, and dumbek and sang Ottoman folk songs in Turkish, listening to Marko Melkon and “Sugar Mary” Vartanian, and Louis Matalon, Sephardic Jew at whose side Leo often sat, watching him play the 72-string dulcimer, the kanun. That was when Leo wasn’t throwing money at the dancers or ordering another drink.
And it was like the fleeting, fun nights in Rabat and Casablanca when Leo had heard Arabs playing the same instruments with bellydancers. There was one night when he had been chased off by the French police because the music “stirred up the locals.” There was another when he had a moment of stardom because he, an American G.I., had gotten up and played oud and rocked the house. A bellydancer had wrapped her arms around him because played a song he knew from back in Lawrence.
The nightclubs in New York were for the weekends. Weeknights were all in the New York Public Library. Four nights a week, Leo read anything about music from Asia and Africa. There he saw patterns of expansion of instruments and ideas. The kanun and its scales travel from here to there. One instrument travels to another place. A local instrument replaces it, but the idea of how it’s played remains. There is a connection from the Ottoman Empire to the Arab world. Then, Africa to India and China… There is a deep musical connection among all of these people, including a boy from Lawrence, Massachusetts who feel compelled under the city’s lights to understand how his own feeling of music connects so many other people.
“I don’t know why,” he told me in 2014, when he was 94 years old. “I’m reading, reading all this stuff. There was something in me that I had that feeling that whoever wrote those books didn’t really have that feeling… Even if someone does get a degree in music and stuff like that, there’s something between – under – inside of you. They can’t get that.”

He knew how to live. Sarkisian made it to 97

Congo's Jupiter and Okwess have a new album Kin Sonic out, that Jon Pareles of the NY Times likes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/arts/music/jupiter-okwess-kin-sonic-review.html

I was just reading this New York Times story on Bombino:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/arts/music/bombino-desert-blues-deran.html

and this line caught my eye:

"North African desert blues ... has become arguably the most successful world music genre to break through since reggae"

What do you think? Agree? Disagree? What other "world music" genres are in the conversation?

Among 1) non-Latin musics, 2) in America 3) over the past decade, none.

Compared to Latin American genres, from Buena Vista Social Club type stuff to Ranchero, Tichumaren is pretty minor.

There was huge soukous and related post-rhumba afropop movement that penetrated further in the late 80s and early 90s than desert blues does now, especially in France. Every Kanda Bongo Man and Loketo album seemed to receive as much press in American sources as desert blues does now.