Category: Featured Slideshow

For items to show in the featured bit

PLAZA FRANCIA: Tango’s long distance love affair

Detail from the painting 'Pobre mi Alma' by Antonio Seguí

With The Gotan Project, Christoph Müller and Eduardo Makaroff turned tango on its head. Now they’re doing it again, with the Plaza Francia Orchestra

Blick Bassy 1958 Book Cover Slider Image

In this, the opening passage from my book Blick Bassy – 1958, I imagine the nocturnal reveries of Ruben Um Nyobè, the revolutionary leader of pre-independence Cameroun who was gunned down by the French army in September 1958

Group of Ahidous sword dancers and singers, Taragalte Festival 2017

Three generations of poets guitarists sing of their hopes for the Sahara at the Taragalte Festival 2016 in Morocco

“I think we’re lacking a lot of tolerance,” says Souad Massi, “and I think that we must give the power to the learned people in Islam… They’re the ones who will show us the way.”

Songhoy Blues in Laffiabougou, Bamako, Mali, 2014 (L-R Garba, Nat, Ali, Oumar). Photo: Andy Morgan

My 2014 photoshoot of Songhoy Blues in the Laffiabougou district of the Malian capital, Bamako, which yielding the cover shot of their hit debut ‘Music in Exile’.

Bombino at home in Niamey, 2013. Slider Image. Photo: Andy Morgan

What’s more extraordinary however is Bombino’s fame at home. He’s become a bona fide head-turning airtime-hogging star in his own country, not just amongst the Touareg, who mainly live in Niger’s northern deserts, but amongst the youth of the entire nation. That’s something that no other Touareg artists has ever managed to do, not even Tinariwen.

Songhoy Blues in Bamako, 2014 Photo: Andy Morgan

Garba Touré and his guitar were a familiar sight on the streets of Diré, a dusty town on the banks on the Niger River, upstream from Timbuktu. But when armed jihadists took control of northern Mali in the spring of 2012, he knew it was time to leave.

Ibrahim ag Alhabib on stage at the Highline Ballroom, New York, July 2011. (c) Andy Morgan

Ibrahim battles through the show, smiling only once. His grave immobile presence is like a challenge to the hip bubbling New York crowd. To do what? To imagine a simplicity and a silence that their city will never know.

Last year, the Festival on the Niger had been cancelled at the last minute. French transport planes full of soldiers and hardware had landed in Bamako only two weeks before the festival was due to start. Now peace was back. So was music. The jihadists tried to ban all music except Quranic chanting in the north of Mali. But it just came back like Whack-a-mole. How could it not?