Echoes of the Land

Friday, February 16, 2007

After more than 14,000 recordings and a career spanning six decades, legendary Bollywood singer Asha Bhosle still considers herself a student of music.

Born in 1933 in Goa, she has sung thousands of hits in several Indian languages, which have garnered her innumerable awards.

Bhosle gained global renown through world tours, concerts and performances with international artists such as Boy George, the Grammy-award winning Kronos Quartet and British band Cornershop, who paid tribute to her with their 1999 song "Brimful of Asha".

Recently she zoomed to the top of the Indian music charts with her album "Asha and Friends" featuring blonde Australian cricketer Brett Lee and macho Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt.

After losing her father at the age of 9, Bhosle started acting and singing in films with her more illustrious sister Lata Mangeshkar to support her family.

A failed first marriage did not deter her -- she brought up her three children as well as pursuing her singing career. She remarried famous Bollywood composer Rahul Dev Burman in 1980.

Bhosle's big break in Bollywood came in 1957 when she sung tracks for the film "Naya Daur" (New Age). Now 73, Bhosle has no plans of quitting the industry.

Soweto Gospel Choir - African Spirit

The third album from Soweto Gospel Choir is called "African Spirit," a title that's more than justified by such rollicking, soulful numbers as "Seteng Sediba." But the disc also includes a lot of Western crossover, which lessens the effect of the most exuberant material. Though it makes a certain sense to ransack the songbooks of Bob Marley ("One Love") and Jimmy Cliff ("Sitting in Limbo"), such Dylan songs as "Forever Young" are ill-suited to the group, and "World in Union" is closer to Broadway than Johannesburg. Most egregious is a version of U2's "One" in which the choir, comprising more than 30 voices, serves merely as a backup group for the ever-preening Bono.

Interview with Femi Kuti

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti. But, in the run-up to the annual "Fela-bration" in Lagos, his eldest son and chief musical heir is in no mood to reminisce. "There's so much in my father's life," says Femi Kuti. "Just his musical works you could listen to all year long. But I don't want to be derailed. I have it at the back of my mind, and I just use it as a strength to keep me grounded."

In the 1970s, Fela Kuti pioneered the exhilarating meld of horn-driven jazz, funk and west African highlife that took James Brown's soul beat "back to Africa". For more than 20 years he played to thousands in his famous Lagos club, the Shrine. But his politically inflected lyrics brought clashes with successive military regimes in Nigeria, including frequent beatings and jail. In one raid in 1977 on Fela's walled compound - his self-declared "republic of Kalakuta" - his mother died of her injuries after being thrown from a window by soldiers.

Femi Kuti rebuilt the New Afrika Shrine in 2000, after it was closed down the previous year following harassment from the landlord, and he plays three free concerts there a week. He also founded, in 1998, the student-based Movement Against Second Slavery (Mass) to push for social change. Although he has been less confrontational with the government than his father, his appearance to many as Fela's reincarnation has drawn attacks in the Nigerian press for "standing by my father's legacy".

African Soul Rebels

This is the third year of the African Soul Rebels tour - previous line-ups have included the Sahara Guitars of Tinariwen, Mali's Amadou & Mariam, Rachid & Taha & Souademassi from Algeria.

This time around you couldn't beat the line up with a stick. The "son of a lion" Fema Kuti is the headliner. Kuti's 16-strong band summon up a killer brew of Nigerian Afro-Beat, matching the energy and innovation of his father Fela Kuti. Guinean kora player Ba Cissoko, is a relative newcomer. His Electric Griot Land was a nod to Hendrix's 1968 double album, Electric Ladyland, to do for the kora and its West African repertoire what Jimi did for the Delta Blues. His cousin Sekou plays a Kora saturated with effects and veers from a skunk futurism to sounding like it has been amplified from a 1920s radio.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Ali Farka Toure & Vieux Farka Toure

Reviews of Ali Farka Toure's Savane and Vieux Farka Toure's first album Vieux Farka Toure.

One immediate response, when presented with these two albums—the first posthumous release by the extraordinary Malian guitarist and singer Ali Farka Toure, and the first ever release by his son, Vieux Farka Toure—might be to see in the albums the passing of the “desert blues” flame from one generation to the next. In a sense, of course, that is indeed what Savane and Vieux Farka Toure represent, for the transmission of tradition from father to son is established practice amongst West African musicians—and Ali duly anoints his son's debut with two cameo appearances, one of which is amongst the album's highlights.