Horns of Africa
Summer and autumn releases are out and there are some fascinating new albums that are well worth checking out. The European Broadcast Union’s Top Ten World Music Chart for November features hits from the Horn of Africa, Turkey, Zimbabwe and Colombia.
Riding high in top spot is the legendary Dur-Dur Band of Somalia, who were big in the Mogadishu disco/funk scene of the 1980s and 1990s. The band, formed in the mid-1980s, rose to fame on a soundtrack of funk, disco and soul (inspired by Michael Jackson, James Brown, Bob Marley and Santana) to become one of the top acts in the country and hugely popular in neighbouring countries like Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya.
Dur-Dur were big sellers in the cassette market which flourished before the civil war. That conflict, which started in 1991, destroyed the effervescent music scene. (It was the same sad story for Eritrean popular music.) It was a March 2013 reissue of their 1987 cassette, Volume 5, in multiple formats that drew attention to this fabulous band and their super funky sound. (Fans of Ethiopian popular music will certainly take to Somalian popular music.)
Dur-Dur disbanded in the 1990s but a version of the group was resurrected in London and now plays many of the old hits. Original founders, married couple Abdinur Daljir and Sahra Dawo, live in Ohio, USA.
Now the good folks at Analogue Africa have compiled a monster two-volume release that brings alive this band’s wonderful sound. Available on double-CD, 3-vinyl disc or a limited edition cassette, the line-up of brilliant tracks is truly mouthwatering — check out the funky Yabaal on the Analogue Africa website (analogueafrica. bandcamp.com). Essential.
Another artist of note from the same region is Netherlands-based Ethiopian singer Minyeshu, who creates a compelling contemporary sound on Daa Dee. Also worth checking out is the powerful, mesmerising singing of Sudanese master Amir Khier on Mystic Dance and the stirring sound of mbira (sanza or thumb-piano) maestro Stella Chiweshe — one of the few female players of this iconic African instrument — on Kasahwa: Early Singles. This release is a must-have for fans of early popular Zimbabwean music. Mali’s Fatoumata Diawara, whose album Fenfo topped the charts for several weeks, rounds out the African contingent in the charts.
The latest batch of new releases also includes a couple of great fusion albums.
London is not often thought of as a base for African musicians — most folks think of Paris and Brussels. But the new iteration of the Dur-Dur Band, Moses Se Fan Fan of the Congo and a whole range of contemporary Afro-related bands are based there. You can also find Latin and Brazilian musicians plying their trade in London. So it was only a matter of time before they started to collaborate.
Cuban collective Lokkhi Terra is known for the way it seamlessly blends Cuban sounds with whatever comes to hand, from Bengali beats to jazz. Recently, the band got together with one of Britain’s top Afrobeat musicians, Dele Sosimi, to record Lokkhi Sosimi (Cubafrobeat), an Afro-Cuban fusion album full of serious dance grooves, Yoruba vocals, rumba choruses and Afrobeat horns — a winning combination. Finally, famous Scottish “acid croft” collective Shooglenifty have released the fusion album Written In Water in collaboration with Rajasthani musicians Dhun Dhora (Shoogle Records). Shooglenifty are well known for their pioneering work in blending traditional Scottish music with dub and dance grooves. The album was recorded just before the annual Jodhpur RIFF festival in 2017. Both bands had lost members and were introducing new members to their line-ups.
Shooglenifty’s frontman, fiddler Angus R Grant, died in 2016 at the age of 49. I don’t know how I missed this but I would like to make a belated tribute to a wonderful musician who said very little and was unconventional but who, when he did speak, was always worth paying attention to.
I meet Shooglenifty at a hotel pool with my son at the Rainforest World Music Festival in Borneo many years ago. They joked around with my son and, learning that he spoke English, gave him a hilarious crash course in the accents of Scotland. When I interviewed them later, I asked why they didn’t use singers. Angus cracked everyone up with his pithy retort: “We don’t have anything to say.”
The son of a left-handed fiddle teacher, Angus R Grant was the focal point for Shooglenifty’s live performances, a key composer of their tunes and a much-sought after teacher. It’s a tough act to follow for replacement fiddler Laura Jane Wilkie, but her playing holds up on the tracks I’ve heard from this fascinating album — Scotland meets Rajasthan. It’s a fitting tribute to a great musician, whose legacy lives on.