Nowadays we’re doing multiple #musicbreaks on Twitter and Facebook when the spirits move us. We figured we’d put the ten favorite ones up every Friday as our #BonusMusicBreak. First up, old school jazz man Pharoah Sanders is still doing it. Here’s a video (uploaded this week on Youtube; recorded last year) of him and his band playing (and him getting down):
From the Otelo Burning soundtrack (we still owe the soundtrack a review), here’s ‘Walk on Water’ by Reason. The film about a group of young South African surfers, set in 1989, comes with an official mixtape.
In the introduction to The World According to Bylex Filip De Boeck and Koen Van Synghel describe the Congolese artist Pume Bylex as “not interested in the day-to-day reality of Kinshasa. [He] turns his attention to what lies beyond the horizon of the visible and the tangible (…) a world with perfection and harmony at its centre.” [Read more...]
Mali’s on our mind. Mostly because of the confusion. Reports from Bamako abound, while there’s still very little information available from the north. Malian artists in the diaspora, it seems, are as confused. (Check Mokobe’s site for example.) Earlier this week, Tuareg band Tamikrest gave a shoutout to “our friend” Ben Zabo. (Is it true what his European label says? Is this “the first album ever to be released by a Malian of Bo descent”?) His hommage to Dounaké Koïta:
Post by Olufemi Terry (text) and Marco Lachi (photographs)
In 2008, while living and studying in Cape Town, I heard, over and over, two observations about the city: it was a place of singular beauty, perhaps even the world’s most captivating city. Visitor and local alike seemed incapable of seeing other landscapes than the physical one, and some claimed that the city’s insularity was a result of the mystical, domineering influence of Table Mountain. The second perception, loosely related to the first, was that Cape Town was not an African city or, at least, not a “real African city.”
I never understood why E-Type’s 2002 smash hit ‘Africa’ didn’t really catch on outside Sweden. The video is slightly embarrassing. It’s like watching a Scandinavian version of the b-grade movie ‘Soul Plane.’ But it has its tongue firmly in its cheek. Or so one hopes. [Read more...]
Tuareg musicians Tinariwen, on tour in Europe these days, spent some time in Belgium this weekend. Belgian public broadcaster VRT [they’ll do a feature on Mali blues once a year, usually at the end of June, covering the one high-profile ‘world music’ festival Brussels has in summer, squeezing them into a one-minute slot alongside performers from the Balkans, a visiting Soukous star, a French rapper and a Jamaican reggae artist] asked Tinariwen members Eyadou Ag Leche and Mina Walet Oumar what they made of the coup in Mali. It’s a short but useful video interview since most of what we get to read in international media over the past weeks are translations of and interviews with the military commanders of the coup, and then some other wires by foreign journalists based in Bamako. I haven’t read much reports coming from the north, i.e. from the Tuareg front. Below’s a brief translation of the VRT’s interview with Tinariwen’s guitarist and singer: [Read more...]
For over two decades, West African Muslims from the Murid Sufi Brotherhood come together at the annual Cheikh Amadou Bamba Day march in Harlem, New York. Scholar Zain Abdullah calls it “a major site where they redefine the boundaries of their African identities, cope with the stigma of blackness, and counteract an anti-Muslim backlash”. Mamadou Diouf (in his preface to ‘A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal’) considers Bamba’s message an “unfinished prophecy”. Above and below are photographs Marguerite Seger took during the parade in July 2010.* [Read more...]
At the occasion of the recent publication of Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s book ‘African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude’ (originally published in French in 2007) and listening to this interview where he speaks about his new book, ‘Bergson Postcolonial’, I intended to write a short post wondering why it often takes years before important work by African authors (both fiction and non-fiction) that is originally published in French becomes available in English — if at all. Browsing through English news and culture blogs focussing on ‘all things African’, one does find a lot of visual work (by francophone artists, fashionistas or musicians) because that work is easy to blog and reblog (Tumblr & co), but when it comes to engaging with French opinions and writings… it’s a desert out there. [Read more...]
Kenyan artist Rabbit is working hard to get the word out about his new album Orutu Ya Masudi. The music video for ‘Yesterdays’ (and The Main Ingredient’s inspiration) will help.
