Cape Verdean singer Lura: intimacy and warmth

Lura
Eclipse

I saw Lura onstage for the first time when she was touring in support of her second album M'bem di Flora. My concert-going companion and I agreed that Lura's live performance had a magic that her studio recordings, good though they were, lacked. To me it was the almost entirely acoustic sound of her ensemble that accounted for the warmth, along with the fact of having the barefoot, utterly entrancing Lura there in person. Eclipse, the Portuguese-born Cape Verdean singer's latest, comes closest to capturing the intimacy she radiates live as well as being her most accomplished and varied work to date...

Read the complete review in RootsWorld

Oysterband singer goes trad:arr:solo

John Jones, the inimitable lead singer of the Oysterband, launches his first solo outing with the superb album Rising Road. Members of the Oysterband have, over their thirty plus year history, been given the latitude to pursue other projects: guitarist Alan Prosser has released albums under his own name, and longtime drummer Lee Partis recently left to pursue his therapeutic counseling work in prisons. Jones had apparently felt the itch to make his own personal statement, and on Rising Road he is joined by some of the young luminaries of the contemporary U.K. folk scene, including Seth Lakeman and Benji Kirkpatrick, as well as his old friend Alan Prosser and the multi-talented skills of producer and musician Al Scott...
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Latvia roots and rock with Ilgi

Jāņi is an ancient pagan summer solstice ritual that is observed into the present day in Latvia.So it's a no-brainer that Latvia's premiere folk-rockers Iļģi would put out an album of songs celebrating the rite. Their last few albums have been ritual-themed, using Christmas and marriage as jumping-off points for their explorations of ancient Latvian songs. They get a little crunchier on Īsākās Nakts Dziesmas than in the past, with grinding fiddles, wailing pipes, more assertive drumming, and thrashier guitars. This is not to say that they've lost the ethereal side that made earlier releases so appealing; they've just upped the ante a bit on many tracks...
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Boris Kovac and The LaDaABa Orchest
The Last Balkan Tango

September 14, 2001:

What do you say about music or art at these times? Strangely, just a few weeks ago, this recording came in and sat on my desk, awaiting my response. Last week I found myself listening to the mournful, almost plodding opening track, a sound both tearful and weirdly hopeful. These eight minutes of dark despair suddenly burst like a bubble, followed by a frenzied, thirty seconds of dancing, and then with a "Hey!" it's done. The Last Balkan Tango is a soundtrack for the decadence of one world cast against the furor of another; life vs. reality.

Yugoslavian minstrels Boris Kovac and The LaDaABa Orchest, residents of Novi Sad, celebrate life in the ruins, both concrete and psychic. For twelve more searing, lovely, bitter and explosive instrumental tracks, Kovac and company explore the folk roots of tragedy and the complex, modern composition of excess. They ask a simple, fathomless question: "Just imagine there is only one starry night left 'til the end of this world... what would we do?" and then proceed to answer it with the confusion that is this new century. God? Decadence? Hope? Despair? Wait for the random moment to choose for you? Be with those you love or just do a tango with whoever passes by? "Let god come with you, if he's up to it?" These songs pose the questions, ignore the obvious answers, and cut like a knife through the rubble of rhetoric without muttering the words.

That saxophonist Kovac and his orchestra of accordion, bass, percussion, reeds and guitar have spoken to their own situation is a marvel. That it translates so well and so unexpectedly to our own is scary and yet ultimately promising. They drag their exhausted partner across the marble floor. They kick up the dust in an unpaved street. They revel with the revelers at a wedding and mourn the interment of morning. In the final movement of The Last Balkan Tango, they board "The Orient Express" for a tour of the past and the future; a ride through the defiant dances of the Balkans, a tango in the midst of the fall of the old Europe, on a journey to "a better world," possibly this one, probably not. Kovac proves that we humans, in all of our utter oblivion, still manage to move the cosmos with our music, still find hope in our inner spirits, and seek a way out of the morass that might allow everyone else to come with us. He welcomes us into the new millennium, a time that might require us to be fatalistic, but might not have to be fatal. - Cliff Furnald

www.boriskovac.net

The CD is available at cdRoots

Lura's "Eclipse" is an intimate vision of Cape Verde

Lura
Eclipse
Four Quarters Entertainment (www.fourquartersent.com)

I saw Lura onstage for the first time when she was touring in support of her second album M'bem di Flora. My concert-going companion and I agreed that Lura's live performance had a magic that her studio recordings, good though they were, lacked. To me it was the almost entirely acoustic sound of her ensemble that accounted for the warmth, along with the fact of having the barefoot, utterly entrancing Lura there in person.

Eclipse, the Portuguese-born Cape Verdean singer's latest, comes closest to capturing the intimacy she radiates live as well as being her most accomplished and varied work to date. For every track that treads the melancholic landscape that Cesaria Evora made famous (the title piece and "Terra'L" among them) there's a surprise like the distinct Arabic feel to the opening "Libramor." Shades of Angola and Mozambique cover "Maria," "Na Nha Rubera" sounds like equal parts Cape Verde and Cape Town and the galloping beat of "Tabanka" shows that Lura can sing just as ably against backgrounds not particularly lush. Actually she's in great voice throughout, her tones not merely charming but ever more confident as she makes her way through material that goes further beyond Cape Verde than she's yet gone. Where Lura's first two albums hinted at the arrival of a major new star in Cape Verdean music, Eclipse is that arrival. - Tom Orr

The artist's web site includes a nice selection of full tracks from the CD

CD available from Amazon

Jewish world-weariness with a jazz frenzy

Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird
Partisans & Parasites
Oriente Musik

I first encountered Daniel Kahn's music from his participation in 'The Unternationale' project, a group comprised of avant-klezmer musicians with a penchant for punk and cabaret music. The Unternationale's 2008 CD was a multi-lingual affair, with songs alternating between lyrics sung in Yiddish, Russian, and English: often within the same song. Further, Kahn and his compatriots Psoy Korolenko and Oy Division dug deep into Jewish labor songs, Zionist history, and religious texts, skirting the very thin boundary between postmodern irony and heartfelt sincerity. A wink and a nod here, a wry smile there, The Unternationale's debut was post-hip and reveled in Jewish outsider status.

One could argue that Daniel Kahn's latest project, Partisans & Parasites, offers more of the same, but the punk-klezmer-cabaret shtick has been honed to a fine blade. Kahn serves up dollops of East European Jewish world-weariness, and his band The Painted Bird cooks up a frenzy. Expect plenty of Kahn's wheezing accordion, and killer clarinet and horn arrangements courtesy of Michael Winograd. Frank London, the trumpeter of Klezmatics fame, also sits in on a few numbers, and Psoy Korolenko returns to contribute vocals as well. You could be excused for being reminded of Tom Waits' eccentric cabaret albums; but while Kahn does not share the raspy, late-night croon of Waits, The Painted Bird flirts with similar shadowy soundscapes. If Slim Cessna's Auto Club ever converted to Judaism and hung out at the circus, this would be their shambolic offspring.

But let's turn to lyrical content, where Kahn indulges us in apocalyptic Ashkenazi tales. Partisans & Parasites begins with "Yosl Ber," the tale of a Jewish soldier drafted into the Czar's army, but deserts, claiming that "…sir, I am indeed a faithful soldier! that's why I ran away from the front! I hate the enemy so much, I don't even want to look him in the eye!" The title track "Parasites" is a very long exegesis on the life of Toxoplasma Gondii as it invades host after host after host. Kahn relishes describing the life of the parasite and its use of each of the hapless organisms it inhabits, and The Painted Bird join in wailing, "Now you are living as a parasite/Ain't it easy living as a parasite?/You can make a living off another's life/When you are living as a parasite." Winograd's clarinet is especially effective here, soaring above the klezmer breaks that punctuate each upcoming verse. Of course, one could take "Parasites" as one enormous analogy for some parts of the human condition, in all its guts and exploitation. High marks must go for "Khurbn Katrina," a song that Kahn and his compatriots adapted from early 1900s Yiddish tunes, one of which memorialized the sinking of the Titanic. The Painted Bird cross Jewish melodies with New Orleans funeral band music, making for a memorable tribute to the ruin of the hurricane.

Kahn also serves up Kurt Tucholsky's 1931 "Embrace the Fascists" which slyly suggests not rocking the Nazi boat, while simultaneously undercutting that sentiment by warning that to give in to the Fascists would be ones' own fault. Another example of gallows humor surfaces on the spoken tale "A Rothschild In Your House": "A Jew goes to the Jewish cemetery in Paris/goes to see Rothschild's grave, with a beautiful gigantic monument./The Jew looks at the grave and says to his friend,/'see, Yankl? That's living!'"

For sheer chutzpah and controversy, however, probably nothing competes with "Six Million Germans," Kahn's recounting of Abba Kovner's endeavor to kill six million Germans in retaliation for the Holocaust. Kovner was a partisan from Vilna, the capital of Lithuania where Jews organized against the Nazis. Kahn details Kovner's plan to poison the water supply, from his trip to Tel Aviv, to his arrest by the British navy on the way back to Vilna. Some of the poison eventually ended up in bread served to SS prisoners. Kovner, though, became active and worked towards building Israel. Kahn presents Kovner's story as a cautionary tale, acknowledging the rage that Kovner and his compatriots felt at the genocide of WWII, the all-encompassing power of seeking revenge. Can revenge arise again? Should it? Kahn encourages the listener to "Six Million Germans" to tread carefully. Still, I can't imagine what the reaction to this song might be in Germany, where Partisans & Parasites was partly recorded.

Political, thought-provoking, and not afraid to stir up ghosts, Daniel Kahn and The Painted Bird's Partisans & Parasites offers up challenging avant-klezmer that confronts the beauty, horror, and wit of being human. - Lee Blackstone

Listen to "A Rothschild In Your House"

More audio and CD available from cdRoots

Kaila Flexer & Gari Hegedus: inspired by the Arabic, Balkan, Greek, Jewish and Turkish music

Kaila Flexer & Gari Hegedus
Teslim
Next Village Music (www.kailaflexer.com/teslim.htm)

Kaila Flexer plays the violin and viola, and Gari Hegedus knows his way around more instruments than I'm about to list here. Along with a few guest players, the duo have put together an album of instrumental pieces inspired by the Arabic, Balkan, Greek, Jewish and Turkish music they've embraced and put their own stamp on. Ranging from peppy to melancholic to mystical, these unplugged and unencumbered tracks prove to be both lovely and engaging. But quaint they ain't. These players have chops and don't hesitate to show them, particularly on the fevered "Petalouda," where they absolutely rock out (believe me, I wish I had a better term for it). Flexer's deftly emotional bowing squares off against whatever stringed acoustic axe Hegedus chooses to wield,be it oud, baglama or what have you, creating matchups that could sound at home anywhere from a ballroom to a Gypsy encampment. The disc's title refers to a Turkish term for a recurring musical theme, and Flexer and Hegedus have sought to cross cultures and ethnic distinctions to find themes that bear repeating. I'd say they've succeeded. Despite claiming in the liner notes that they will "always be students of these styles," it's hard to imagine them having learned their lessons any better. - Tom Orr

CD available from Amazon

Got Mariachi?

The longstanding presence and continuous growth of the Mexican-descent population in the United States has fostered an autonomous and dynamic sphere of cultural expression in which the folk music traditions of Mexico play a prominent role. For those seeking more than liner-note lite, Mariachi Music in America draws upon decades of field research, extensive knowledge of mariachi history, and enlightening interviews with ensembles on both sides of the Rio Grande, tempered by long experience as a mariachi performer himself. The result is a concise, well-informed and clearly written monograph that should interest practitioners, students, and fans alike. Also included is a glossary of Spanish-language terminology, historical photographs, a bibliography, a discography, an index, and an accompanying 26-track CD that illustrate the book's musicological and sociocultural observations. Michael Stone looks at this book and recordings of some fo the greats (and not so greats) of maricachi music...
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Ferran Savall : Mireu el nostre mar

Ferran Savall is the son of the renowned early music conductor, composer, and musician Jordi Savall and revered singer Montserrat Figueras. Mireu el nostre mar marks a bit of a departure for the Savall family's Alia Vox label, as the focus is not on the interpretation of early music or classical masterworks in the traditional sense. Instead, Ferran Savall presents a program of folk songs, many from the Catalan tradition, as well as Jewish song and the lyrics of poets. At first listen, you would be forgiven for thinking that Mireu el nostre mar was a lost gem of breezy South American pop as interpreted by the late Jeff Buckley. However, Ferran Savall's album is an indication of how broad and centuries-spanning are his musical interests...
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Levi Romero: poet of languages, lowriders and the people

…nostalgia gleams with the dull brilliance
of a chrome airplane on the rusted hood
of a '56 Chevy
..daydream's of walking bare foot
on the soft grass
down by the river
where dragonflies buzzed all day
have now decayed
like the fallen cottonwoods
along the gnarled paths
of the Rio Embudo
where free form poetry
mixed with cheap beer
on warm nights by the riverbanks
and stories of lowered '49 Fleetlines
with flame jobs and spinners
were cast into the dark wind…"

Bill Nevins explores the work of a poet of languages, lowriders and the people, Levi Romero

Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara Tell No Lies

There must be multitudes of world music fans who are pleased that Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara only waited about a year to follow up their first collaboration. Their new Tell No Lies retains the refreshing jolt of the previous collaboration, offering up Bo Diddley-infused jams, meditations with a lighter swing) and even a blistering excursion into Latin rhythms that the first album left unexplored...

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The Harris Brothers Balkan Band on WPKN

The WPKN "Live From Where? / Sunday Brunch" concert series continued today with some great Balkan music from right here in CT. Live on the air and at the Kasbah Garden Cafe in New Haven - The Harris Brothers Balkan Band

Archive of the show:




More pics on Flickr

Harris Brothers Balkan Band on Myspace

National Day in Iceland

June 17 is National Day (Þjóðhátíðardagurinn) in Iceland (Lýðveldið Ísland). This is the birthdate of Jón Sigurðsson, a noted Icelandic independence figure.

Like most places, it is celebrated by community parades.

But I prefer to commemorate it with musical art, of course:

Anna Palina and the band Draupner sing the traditional "Ásu Kvædi." Listen!

Klakki is a contemporary ensemble led by Icelandic singer Nina Björk Elíasson. Listen!

Read more about Icelandic musicians on RootsWorld

Buy Icelandic music at cdRoots

Tinariwen release free download from their new CD

Touareg desert rockers Tinariwen release their latest CD the end of June, but The Guardian in London is offering a free track from it today.

Listen

Find out more about the new CD at the band's web site

Get the rest of the recordings at cdRoots

Read a review of their live concert DVD in RootsWorld

Trio Mio stakes out new territory in the Danish folk music scene

Take a look at the Danish folk music scene and you will find a wide variety of subspecies. Folk musicians throughout the country specialize in many different types of folk music, so, though it's a small country, an unusually broad selection of musical styles is represented. Some musicians travel around with bands designed specifically to play concert series in Danish schools, others are so knowledgeable about the many musical traditions in Denmark that they can offer precisely the right drinking song or dance tune to weddings or harvest parties in any given region . And of course there are a good many bands that specialize in playing the clubs and little venues round the country and abroad, actively spreading the word about Danish music and culture.

The Danish-Swedish group Trio Mio falls into this latter category. The trio began in 2004 when violinist Kristine Heebøll recorded her first solo album, Trio Mio - the album title simply became the band name. Trio Mio play mainly their own compositions, giving a Scandinavian sound to their traditional Danish and Swedish, jazz and classical inspired music. Five years on, the three musicians can look back on three critically-praised albums featuring an imposing list of Danish and Swedish guest musicians, six Danish Music Award statuettes and a long series of concerts in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Holland, Italy, England, Ireland and Canada.

Read the rest of Morten Alfred Høirup's interview with Trio Mio and listen to some of their music in RootsWorld

Two new looks at the ancient tarantella

Rione Junno
Taranta Beat Project
Rai Trade/CNI (www.cnimusic.it)
Listen: http://www.rootsworld.com/audio/rionejunno.html

Mimmo Epifani
Zucchini Flowers
Finisterre (www.finisterre.it)
Listen: http://www.rootsworld.com/audio/zuchinni.html

It's amazing that the pizzica, a centuries-old folk music from an obscure part of southern Italy, not only has survived but now thrives, as both a living tradition and as a foundation for some exciting and forward-looking new music.

The pizzica (also known as pizzica pizzica and pizzica taranta) originally was the music of tarantismo, a cultural phenomenon that emerged in the southern Salento peninsula of the Puglia region. Music and dance were employed in a symbolic ritual to cure peasants, mainly women, from illnesses purportedly caused by the poisonous bite of the tarantula.

The afflicted would dance, to the point of collapsing, to the frenetic rhythms of the pizzica songs (usually in straight or accented 6/8 time) played by a small group that included tamburello (large tambourine), violin, chitarra battente (a large four- or five-string southern Italian guitar), and organetto (a type of accordion).

The spider's bite, however, was a metaphor for other conditions, such as grief, depression, and sexual frustration. Dancing the pizzica was a culturally-sanctioned and collective way for poor, politically disenfranchised peasants to act out and exorcise individual psychological conflicts.

Nandu Popu of Sud Sound System, a band that mixes traditional Salentine styles with reggae and rap, has called pizzica "the music of our grandparents, who were slaves of the aristocrats."

Tarantismo has pretty much died out, albeit relatively recently; psychotherapy has taken its place. The pizzica "has acquired a new function, that is, to represent the cultural identity of Salento," according to ethnomusicologist Tullia Magrini.

But not only Salento: the pizzica long ago spread to other parts of Puglia, mixing with various local idioms. The tarantella, the "spider's dance" common throughout southern Italy and Sicily, developed from the pizzica taranta.
Today there are musicians who specialize in traditional repertoire and performing styles (Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, Uccio Aloisi Gruppu, Tarantolati di Tricarico), those that perform new material in traditional styles (Officina Zoe, Aramirè), and others that fuse pizzica with global sounds, mainly reggae and dub, rock, rap, and techno (Nidi D'Arac, Sud Sound System, Ammaracicappa). Since 1997, pizzica has been the drawing card at La Notte Della Taranta, an annual event held in the Salento town of Melpignano that has become one of Europe's major music festivals.

In 2000, the Neapolitan singer-songwriter Eugenio Bennato founded Taranta Power to promote the pizzica and other southern Italian music, through concerts, recordings, and music education initiatives. The Taranta Power project, says Bennato, aims to counter "the unfortunate backward image that the tarantella has assumed in the world's collective imaginary, conveyed by lame folkloric groups and by banal musical expression totally divorced from the raging reality of the taranta ritual."

Bennato hails Rione Junno, a new sextet made up of young musicians from Monte Sant'Angelo, a city in Puglia (but not Salento), as exemplars of the Taranta Power ethos. Eschewing "backward-looking folklorism," they instead are "part of an alternative and contemporary wave in ethnic music…one of the most outstanding representatives of the new music rooted in tradition but looking toward the future."

Tarant Beat Project, their first album, for the most part justifies Bennato's praise. As the title suggests, the rhythms of pizzica are the main focus. The band uses traditional instruments -- chitarra battente, tamburello, and zampogna, southern Italian bagpipes -- but also electric bass and programmed beats. Recorded in Naples, the album's chief auteur is Vinci Acunto, of the Neapolitan rock band Bisca, who produced, arranged, and mixed Taranta Beat Project, as well as programming the electronics on every track.
Rione Junno - named after Monte Sant'Angelo's Junno neighborhood, the city's ancient historic center - don't have a charismatic frontman like Nidi D'Arac's Alessandro Coppola or virtuosic instrumentalists. With no one personality dominating the band, the ensemble sound - lean and beat-y, rooted in tradition but definitely non-folkloric -- is the thing.

A roster of guests joins the core band on most tracks. Sha-One from the Neapolitan rap group La Famiglia shows up for "23 Marzo," which recounts the violent police repression of a 1950 workers' demonstration. Guitarist Elio "100 Grammi" joins his Bisca bandmate Vinci Acunto on several selections.
Eugenio Bennato's on board, too, singing lead on "Sponda Sud," one of his recent songs about "zingari ed emigranti" (gypsies and emigrants) traversing the seas of the global South. Several African vocalists who've worked with Bennato, and other Italian artists -- Mohammed el Alaoui, Assane Diop, Samir Toukour, and Zaina Chabane - augment the band's singers, who favor the plaintive monody typical of much southern Italian folk and folk-derived music.

Rione Junno's first record is a bit thin - nine tracks, plus three re-mixes. The group's identity doesn't quite seem fully formed.

But if the band isn't yet as commanding as Nidi D'Arac, whose brilliance was evident on their first recordings, Rione Junno is nonetheless a promising new addition to Puglia's rich musical scene.

I like to think of Mimmo Epifani, a terrific musician from San Vito dei Normanni in Salento, as the Yomo Toro of Italian roots music. Like the great Puerto Rican cuatro player, a stalwart of so many classic Fania salsa records of the 1970s as well as a solo artist, mandolinist Epifani is rooted in folk tradition yet hardly limited to it. Like Toro, he's a virtuoso and a bold improviser. Now that Epifani has grown a mustache and has given up his shiny black pompadour for a shaggier 'do, they even resemble each other.

Epifani has collaborated with some top Italian musicians -- Roberto de Simone, the esteemed musicologist and founder of La Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare, vocalist Massimo Ranieri, Eugenio Bennato, Avion Travel, jazz pianist Danilo Rea, and Tuscan rocker Piero Pelu. He released his first album as a leader, Marannui (Forrest Hill Records), in 2004. A wide-ranging but cohesive mix of pizzica and other styles (there was even a jazz ballad), Marannui ranks as one of the best Italian recordings of the past decade.

There was a good story to go with it, too. Mimmo called his band the Epifani Barbers because he'd learned to play mandolin and mandola in a barbershop owned by Costantino Vita, a musician well versed in traditional Salentine music. Vita, along with Peppu D'Augusta, who led several pizzica groups, schooled the young Mimmo in pizzica and other local styles. Following his apprenticeship under Vita and D'Augusta, Epifani studied mandolin at the Padua Conservatory.

His new record, Zucchini Flowers, continues Marannui's blend of tradition and innovation, but it's even more adventurous. Produced by Fausto Mesolella, the guitar wizard of Avion Travel, the album's 12 tracks give Epifani plenty of space to display his remarkable technique on mandolin, mandola, mandoloncello, and guitar. His instrumental versions of Domenico Modugno's "La Donna Riccia" and "Lusingame," a fine if lesser-known canzone napoletana by Nino Taranto, are dazzling but not show-offy; Epifani's embellishments serve, and enhance, the songs.

Epifani sounds even more self-confident as a leader than he did on his debut. On Marannui he shared vocal duties with several singers. He handles most of the leads on Zucchini Flowers, and his singing is as distinctive as his playing - a big, earthy voice with a pronounced vibrato. Sometimes his vocals have a bleating quality that sounds Balkan, not surprising given the longstanding Greek influence in southern Puglia and the region's proximity to Albania.

Listeners used to smoother and less rustic Italian vocal styles may be in for a shock. But to me his vocal attack is as bracing as a glass of good primitivo, Puglia's best-known grape.

He shares vocals with flautist Giorgia Santoro on "La Pizzica delle Fate," an a capella number that's the album's most unusual track. "Fate" is Italian for "fairies," and Santoro's breathy lead sounds like it's emanating from some ethereal being. When Epifani leaps in, the piece becomes something else altogether - an encounter between the otherworldly and the material world, the latter incarnated in Epifani's gritty voice.

"Cucuzza e acqua," "Lu Sittaturu" and "Garbato e Saporito" should make his teachers Vita and D'Augusta proud of their former pupil- they're pizziche that demonstrate Epifani's mastery of the traditional form and his gift for making the ancient idiom sound absolutely up to the minute. "Lu Sittaturu" starts off slow and mournful before exploding into an up-tempo rave up, Epifani playing and singing like a man possessed. "The raging reality of the taranta ritual" that Eugenio Bennato misses in lesser artists' work is fully present here.
Sud Sound System's Nandu Popu, noting that the pizzica was born out of poverty and oppression, has expressed the hope that "we will come to sing fewer songs of suffering and more hymns of freedom."

There's not much that's hymn-like in Mimmo Epifani's zesty music, but there's definitely the sound of freedom, and a lot more. - George De Stefano

Listen to Rione Junno
Listen to Mimmo Epifani

Artist' web sites:
www.rionejunno.com
www.mimmoepifani.it

CDs available via cdRoots

Read more about Italian world music at RootsWorld

Someone suggested this video in a follow-up comment.

Ethiopia's Mulatu Astatke goes to England

Mulatu Astatke/The Heliocentrics
Strut Records (www.strut-records.com)

You can hear the creative sparks flying on this self-titled collaboration between renowned Ethiopian instrumentalist and bandleader Mulatu Astatke and The Heliocentrics, an innovative musical collective from the UK. The Heliocentrics backed Astatke on a rare live appearance in London in 2008 and joined him a few months later to capture in the studio some of what had worked so well on stage. It’s a good thing that everyone involved (including some other London-based Ethiopian players and singers) had time and energy to spare, because the resulting CD melds Ethiopian tradition and freewheeling fusion as perfectly as Dub Colossus linked Jamaica and Ethiopia on last year’s In a Town Called Addis. If you’ve heard any of the discs from the Ethiopiques series on Buda Musique, several of which feature Astatke’s work, some of these pentatonic scale arrangements and jagged rhythms will be familiar. But that’s only part of the story. There’s strains of Fela Kuti's Afrobeat, Latin grooves, vintage analog effects, mysterious melodies, intros that go from kitschy to way cool and Far Eastern riffs, all wound around ear-grabbing piano, percussion, vibraphone, horns, strings, guitar, standup bass and rustic Ethiopian harp and flute. Most of the tracks are instrumentals carried along on currents of pure inspiration and musical ideas seemingly coming together on the spot but too perfectly realized to be arbitrary. It’s as though everyone involved knew something special would happen and just let it flow. This disc is not really a combination of old and new; it’s more an instance of the old being brilliantly expanded. -Tom Orr

Listen

Buy the CD at Amazon.com

Read more about world music at RootsWorld and cdRoots

Culture Music Club of Zanzibar - Video: Live 2007

Read a review of the new CD in RootsWorld

Italian Jazz and Ancient Sardinian 'Tenores' Collide

Enzo Favata Tentetto, featuring Tenores di Bitti
The New Village
Manifesto (www.ilmanifesto.it)

Composer Enzo Favata plays multiple woodwinds (saxes, bass clarinet, and an array of wind instruments from his native Sardinia and beyond), combining a foundation in free jazz and European classical music with elements from around the Mediterranean and the African diaspora. He joins forces with the Tenores di Bitti, a riveting Sardinian a cappella quartet, and an ensemble of trumpet, piano, Fender Rhodes, electric guitar, live electronics, upright and electric basses, and drum kit (avant garde journeyman U.T. Gandhi). Together they conjure up a decidedly global (village) revelation, antiphonal, and thoroughly (uprooted) cosmopolitan. Featuring enduring Sardinian texts, The New Village offers an interplay of voices and instrumentation (as on "Comare Mia," "T'amo," "Pullighita Blues," or the funkified "In su Monte Seris now," something late Miles would have been proud to call his own) that opens up transcendent beyond-the-conservatory musical territory, uneasy revelatory listening for those more at ease than not in a restless sonic world. - Michael Stone

Artist's web site: www.enzofavatta.com

Listen to "Te Amo"

CD available from cdRoots

Visit RootsWorld for more world music

Zanzibar's Culture Musical Club

Culture Musical Club
Shime!
World Village (www.worldvillagemusic.com)

The opening drumbeats sound like the heart of Africa, but soon an accordion, oud and qanun are adding an Arabic grace. Strings, a chorus of female voices and subtle shifts in rhythm emerge, hovering somewhere between Nubia and the Indian Ocean. Such is the beauty of taarab music, which originated on the spice island of Zanzibar, located just off the coast of Tanzania, and draws from every direction that such a cross-culturally opportune spot would suggest. Culture Musical Club isn't the oldest taarab outfit (they've been around a mere fifty years; the similarly venerated Ikhwani Safaa Musical Club was established a century ago), but they're the best known outside their homeland and, as their new release Shime! ("Keep it Up") shows, they cover the most ground stylistically. There's a clear link to Egyptian orchestral music in the combination of slow-building intensity and melancholy beauty, especially evident when the accordion takes on a mournful tone during the instrumental stretches. It's not sad stuff, though. Percussion and bass often kick the songs into a mid-point tempo increase that clears the way for male and female vocals to take a similar jump from blues-tinged to almost jazzy. And despite an ability to sound highly polished and sophisticated when they see fit, the group retains a certain rawness at the core, touching upon the sparser, drum-driven kidumbak style and ending the CD with a two-song suite that puts aside the full ensemble in favor of violins, percussion and the weathered voice of principal male singer Makame Faki. So whether taarab is new to you or you're already hooked, you will want to hear this music by one of its finest collectives. - Tom Orr

Listen: Kidumbaki:

CD available from cdRoots