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chorus He’s got the stick of the bluesman/ and seven heart attacks/ He was howling in cushion/ He is a cherry rose riff raff. No, me neither, but I guarantee that you’re going to find it stuck in your head for days.
Just occasionally they hint that they may be from the same part of the musical universe that produced Lo’Jo, but in a minimalist and much less studiedly pretentious way. You sort of think you’ve worked that out and then Trouble All The Time, Pt.2 and Mark Twain in their very different ways provide Holy Modal Rounders and Fugs straws to clutch at. By the time you get to Robert (“in which we console Robert Johnson and his broken heart”) you stop over-thinking them and decide that they’re just your favourite new discovery and as original as fuck. And then they finish up returning to earth with a quirky Ring Of Fire.
Probably not for the sort of people who go to Costa Del Folk, mind…
dixiefrog.com Ian Anderson Bâton Bleu
DUR-DUR OF SOMALIA Volume 1 & Volume 2 Analog Africa 27
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Two Niles To Sing A Melody: The Violins & Synths Of Sudan Ostinato OSTCD004
And so, with the last thirty years’ ‘crate dig- gers’ having thoroughly explored the ‘golden ages’ of recording in Mali/ Senegal/ Guinea and Congo/Zaire and the bottom of the barrel marked ‘Afrobeat’, the current wave of African music archivists, enthusiasts and crazy obsessives seem to have turned their attention to the hitherto more neglected North East.
We are blessed. With obvious exceptions, an ‘80s/’90s CD re-issue would probably have been in a cheap-looking plastic box with very little in the way of sound enhancement, information for the bewildered or design val- ues. Nowadays, many extra miles are gone: both of these are double CDs housed in lov- ingly designed hardback digipacks with extensive notes – entering the realm of arte- facts you want to own even before you’ve heard the music. And both utilise the master- ing and restoration skills of Michael Graves of Atlanta’s Osiris Studio – as does the third great East African re-issue of the year (according to our Critics’ Poll), Dust-to-Digi- tal’s exemplary Listen All Around. So they not only look good, they sound great too.
Chances are some of you will have first pricked your ears up to Dur-Dur Band on last year’s Ostinato Somalian set Sweet As Broken Dates. In common with, for exam- ple, Mali’s famed Super Rail Band, they were a hard- working hotel band who
took the international music that the guests and elites grooved to and many hours of playing had fine-tuned, used it to re-invent local folklore in local dialects, and found themselves massively popular as it resonated with a new generation. Dur-Dur’s musical schooling was in funk, disco, soul and reggae, with choppy wah-wahed guitar, ‘green’ organ and brass, but their three singers anchor everything locally. And they can do catchy as well as funkus-maximus. It’s no sur- prise to read that Yabaal (Blossom) sung by Sahra Dawal was the hit off the first album, or the loping reggae-tinged Diinleeya (Rid- dle) off Volume 2. Apparently there’s still a Volume 3 to come.
The Dur-Dur Band notes by Analog
Africa’s digger-in-chief Samy Ben Redjeb, the Banksy of world music, are his gripping tales of research trips, plus there’s a lengthy inter- view with one of the band’s singers, Shimaali Ahmed Shimaali. Two Niles’ notes also exten- sively interview singers, but the thrust is very much more about putting the music in the very difficult and sometimes downright dan- gerous context of Sudanese politics and reli- gious restrictions, not to mention local copy- right laws.
Back in the ‘80s in the UK, thanks to the efforts of Arts Worldwide’s Anne Hunt, we were very lucky to get vis- its by a number of Sudanese stars, particularly Abdel Aziz El Mubarak (who is included here) and Abdel Gadir Salim. Mostly they came with small-
er, acoustic ensembles but occasionally we’d get – when funding allowed it – the full Ara- bic orchestral monty with strings, some elec- tric instruments, keyboards, saxes, percussion. Spectacular gigs, when huge numbers of Sudanese (and Egyptians, Ethiopians and Somalis too) – vastly outnumbering our little pockets of ‘world music’ interlopers – would appear out of nowhere and interact with the singers, jumping on stage to have photos taken in their best clothes, and generally party. This fabulous set feels like it’s the soundtrack to such events back home.
Not for nothing did the assembled panel of Critics vote these into the top Re-Issue/ His- toric albums of 2018, with the Dur-Dur Band the overall winner. They know their stuff!
analogafrica.com
ostinatorecords.com
Ian Anderson
KINNARIS QUINTET Free One Own Label KQ001CD
First album from one of those groupings that occa- sionally emerge more or less fully formed out of the great melting pot that is the Scot- tish folk scene, and it’s a corker. Laura Wilkie and Fiona MacAskill (fiddle) join
forces with Aileen Reid Gobbi (5-string fiddle) and the established duo of Laura-Beth Salter (mandolin, tenor guitar) and Jenn Butter-
worth (guitar, stomp); all have served time with numerous other well-known outfits.
Most of the time the fiddles play togeth-
er, sometimes in unison, sometimes not, the sound lightened by a touch of mandolin, while the Butterworth rhythmic powerhouse pushes things on with a restless urgency that keeps you on the edge of your seat. They can do light and delicate (June’s Garden for example) but most of the time there’s a raw energy that gently pins your ears back with an acoustic wall of sound, almost like a per- petual motion music machine that’s nearly but not quite running away with itself – Gor- tavale Rock/The Road To Poynton is a good example, which you can hear on this issue’s fRoots 71 compilation. The tunes are self- penned or from other modern but tradition- ally rooted musicians, but a conventional album of Scottish tunes this certainly isn’t.
The band’s intention was to try and cap-
ture the unity, cohesion and enthusiasm of their live gigs, and having seen them live before hearing the album, Free One must be regarded as singularly successful in that respect. Five superb musicians utterly in sync musically, beautifully recorded and clearly having a ball – who could ask for more?
kinnarisquintet.com Bob Walton Abdel Aziz El Mubarak – Nile melodies
Photo: Jak Kilby
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