Africa music reviews

Everything in the album is excellent .Your music is longlasting and factual . Excellent videos and well combined fluent instruments. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK .

Everything in the album is excellent .Your music is longlasting and factual . Excellent videos and well combined fluent instruments. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK .

Salif Keita won international acclaim in 1987 with his masterpiece Soro, a brilliant fusion of the Malian musical tradition with modern technology. The follow-up, Ko-Yan, was disappointing since his voice seemed to have been sacrificed to insensitive production. It's therefore a pleasure to report that Amen was a great return to form, featuring highly melodic, hook-filled tracks with a sense of space, variety and danceability in which that mellifluous voice comes into its own. The tracks address contemporary issues such as the quest for democracy in West Africa in the song Waraya, but there are also beautiful love songs like the boyant Yele N Na, the rousing Karifa and the trilingual N B'i Fe. Throughout the album, producer Joe Zawinul harmoniously reconciles Keita's voice with breezy arrangements and the technical expertise of the jazz fusionists who assisted Keita in creating this rivetting slab of sound.

One insomniac night in 1995 listening to BBC World Service I heard a track which made me sit up & glue my ear to the muffled MW signal to desperately catch the name of the artist. Remember that feeling?! I scribbled it on piece of paper & ordered the album the next day. It was from 'New Moon' by Abdelli, a Berber musician exiled in Belgium. If you can wear out CDs, my copy needs at least a buff-up with the Brasso. So at last, 8 years later, more music from this man with the one-off voice. 'New Moon' had a character all its own, combining rhythmns and scales from an ancient tradition with contemporary keyboards and western instruments. Above it all, Abdelli's soaring, imploring voice as the extraordinary commonality. 'Among Brothers', 3 years and 4 continents in the making has quite a different character. It eschews overt western sounds for a broader, richer palette of strings, woodwinds, reeds & percussion, recorded outdoors in many cases using specially-developed microphones. The result is a more diverse-sounding album but with a new edge of colours and sounds. I would also say with more consistent, developed material than 'New Moon'. It is, in truth, a fantastic recording, full of the detail Peter Gabriel hints at but here it's all real, from a real world. Neat eh? I know I'll play this record for years. How can you put a price on music like this? In a world where 'soul' music now lacks that very essence, music like this created with such love, joy, sadness, yearning & fun is literally priceless. Thanks to all the 'brothers' who played on this; thanks Thierry Van Roy for producing & playing, and thanks again Abdelli for your eternal voice.

This CD is a perfect introduction to Mbira music, one of Zimbabwe's great gifts to the world. Ephat Mujuru was a master. He set the standard for all mbira players in Zimbabwe until his tragic death in 2001. Thus album will give the listener a good idea of why Ephat was so loved, and how he used his music to bring people together.

I first heard the song Mona Ki Ngi Xica in a cafe in Paris. It is really popular in France, and though I have no idea what the lyrics mean, the song is very moving. If anyone has any idea of the translation please let me know.

In l963 I moved from Monrovia, Liberia to a small village upcountry in Liberia called Toweh-ta. The people of the village are called Gio in Liberia, however in Cote dIvoire they are the Dan. For a full year I heard the music of the Dan in its various forms through the rainy season into the dry season. The Dan are an extremely musical people. They don't do anything without music. Rice, Death, Marriage, Birth, Weather are all celebrated with music. When I came back from Africa I ran across this album in New York City. When I heard the album I was transported right back to Toweh-ta. The rythmns were the same, the subject matter the same. The drums sounded as if I were right back listening to music in Liberia. When I went out into the rice fields to watch the harvest in 1963 they sang the same music. When one of the bush devils came out to play, they played the same music. There is something very distintive about Dan music. It is my favorite of African music, probably because I lived there, yet I hear the music in American music as well. The roots of American music are well founded in Africa. I recommend this album to anyone who is searching for interesting music that is still sung and played in the villages of Liberia, Guinea and Ivory Coast. It will transform you to a very different way of life, but will show the roots of jazz and rythmn and blues.

An incredible cd of bands most of us in the states have never heard of. South Africa had a very diverse cultural scene in the 50's and 60's. This cd features 13 bands playing some awesome jazz. Afribeat (production company) did a great job of even finding these recordings. All the tracks are solid, my favorites are A Prelude to a Kiss, by Dollar Band with Sathima Benjamin, The Rock, by Les Vbros, and Don't Bother by Cool Cats. This is a great addition to any cd collection.

In 1949, Arthur S. Alberts and his wife drove 4000 miles all around West Africa recording the people's varied music along the way. The original release of these tapes (only about 2% of what was recorded) was hailed as a landmark recording achievement. Nearly 50 years later, the Library of Congress opened their vault for a sequel to that release and it's absolutely breathtaking. You can hear the roots of everything from Jazz to R&B to hiphop embedded deep within these songs. By recording tracks amongst different tribes in Nogeria, Ghana, Zaire and more, he got a varied taste of what music was coming from the land. This ranged from "talking drums" to choral songs to fishing songs to religious chants. Each one has been remastered so exquisitely, you could swear you were right in the middle. The liner notes describing the journey is impeccable. Listening to this draws you in and entrances you to listen to every note made by the native instruments and people. The call and response is so strong, you may actually find yourself singing too. That's the power of fantastic music.

Save yourself the expense of buying all those early CDs from Mickey Hart and RYKOdisk's "The World" series. The best of it is all concentrated in this wonderful (and very inexpensive!) anthology.
Lots of surprises, and I challenge you not to get up and dance to Diga Rhythm Band's "Sweet Sixteen".

An overwhelming amount of wonderful music for the price of lunch, this is a deal not to be missed. There's samples from most of Rykodisc's excellent World series, with tracks handpicked by Mickey Hart. Nearly everything here is top-rate, but special favorites are Raga:Banshree and the awesome Sweet Sixteen. Really, at this price, you can't afford not to get this disc.