African rhythms to rock Celtic Connections crowds
release of Congotronics. Their style has its roots in traditional Bambozo music, but in order to be heard over the hubbub of Kinshasha’s streets, founder Mingiedi Mawungu decided to amplify their instruments through a DIY sound system, creating a remarkable new sound in the process.
Central to the Konono sound are likembe thumb pianos of different sizes, played by Mingiedi, his son Augustin, and various accomplices. With their lo-fi sound and ecstatic build-ups, Konono No. 1 have won a cult following among fans of experimental music and electronica; small wonder then that Björk sought them out to collaborate on her 2007 hit Earth Intruders.
An intensely joyous live experience, Konono No. 1 will make you dance in ways you thought unimaginable.
Support on the night comes from Tuareg guitar hero Bombino. Coming to prominence via Sublime Frequencies’ riveting Guitars From Agadez series, the young axeman from Niger amps up Tuareg blues with a heavy dose of funk and rock. While 2013’s Nomad was slightly disappointing, Bombino’s songs and serpentine guitar licks are sure to electrify in a live setting.
Offering a tighter, more melodic take on desert blues are Malian quartet Songhoy Blues, who play the Afro-Celtic Wire To The World event at the Royal Concert Hall on Saturday, January 24 and headline their own Oran Mor show the following night.
Songhoy Blues feature on Damon Albarn’s latest Africa Express recording and are set to release their debut album, produced by Nick Zinner of New York art-rockers Yeah Yeah Yeahs, in February.
Credited by Brian Eno with creating one of the three crucial rhythms of the 1970s (the others being James Brown’s funk beat and Neu’s motorik), Tony Allen is, along with the legendary Fela Kuti, the originator of afrobeat. Fusing jazz and highlife with the polyrhythms of traditional Yoruba music, the drummer created the jittery yet fluid grooves which drove Kuti’s revolutionary songs.
Since striking out on his own in 1979, Allen has built on the afrobeat template with elements of reggae, dub, electronica and hip-hop. His excellent 2014 album, Film Of Life, features contributions from Damon Albarn, with whom Allen has worked in The Good, the Bad & the Queen.
Support for Allen’s Saturday, January 31 gig at The Arches comes from London’s Ibibio Sound Machine, whose feverish blend of Nigerian music, pop and electronica is a guaranteed party starter. Their 2014 debut album pulses with inspired soundclashes: acid house with juju, afrobeat with Italo disco.
It’s an eclectic sound and an apt reflection of Celtic Connections’ intrepid sonic mapping. BACK in the early days of Celtic Connections there seemed every possibility that, one day, Martyn Bennett might provide the festival’s opening concert and do so triumphantly. And ten years after his tragically early death, his music delivered the way he might have intended.
Bennett’s final album, Grit, is an unlikely comingling. It takes some imagination to put a Dundee street song, Gregorian chant, Gaelic psalm singing, the soundtrack of a souk and a traveller’s storytelling into the same musical recipe. That, though, is just a fraction of the detail that Bennett stirred into Grit and if it gave sleepless nights to the man, Greg Lawson, who orchestrated these ingredients with the grooves and sweeps that Bennett produced electronically, Lawson can now rest easy.
He pulled off this spectacular undertaking in the spirit of Bennett’s questing ethos. The double bass section will likely never have to put as much elbow grease into another piece and in among the throbbing landscapes there were passages, as was Bennett’s way, of affecting beauty.
The tender string playing that gave The Wedding such a sense of Hebridean place was a masterstroke and Rab Noakes did a terrific job of another, altogether more cheeky brainwave when he followed MacPherson’s Rant in traditional singer, Jimmy MacBeath mode by turning this great, now long-departed Portsoy character into a scratch deejay. Typical Bennett. But then, the whole piece reeked of the daring, enterprise and mischief that Bennett brought to his art. We can only wonder where he might have been, musically, today. Tonight, though, he was here.