Articles that have appeared in the press.
It’s this gentle yet luminous spirituality that makes Cheikh Lo’s music so unique, injecting its boundary-busting mix of Cuban, Congolese, Senegalese mbalax and international pop flavours with a tender fire that banishes sentimentality or the empty pop formula. Lo is now 50 years old and philosophical about the time it’s taken him to deliver ‘Lamp Fall’, the ‘difficult’ third album, whose title is synonymous with the Baye Fall’s revered founder.
Rimitti sang, as she has always done, in the plain spicy slang of Oranie, the huge province that spreads south, east and west from the port city of Oran in Western Algeria. She didn’t mince her language or play too many high-minded metaphorical games.
I’ve been busy translating the lyrics for the forthcoming album by Tamikrest, the band from north eastern Mali lead by the talented Ousmane Ag Moussa. If you don’t know them already check out their existing album ‘Adagh’. One thing I always suspected but now know for sure is that Ousmane is a really excellent poet.…
Son of the great Sidiki Diabate, the father of the modern kora, Toumani is 71st in a direct line of griots that stretches back to the reign of the great medieval Emperor Sudjata Keita.
OK, here goes. This is the last post I upload before ‘going live’! Andymorganwrites will be born sometime tomorrow…breach, Cesarean, gas and every unholy drug under the sun!
My sis, true to form, scored 180 with her Christmas present. It was Joe Sacco’s latest tome about Palestine: ‘Footnotes In Gaza’. Now, very few people out there spur me to become a completist of their oeuvre. Lee Perry. Don Paterson. Joe Sacco. That’s about it. And let me tell you that Joe Sacco is…
I went for a walk in Ebbor Gorge yesterday. It’s a deep dank wooded gash in the Mendip Hills, about 45 minutes drive south of Bristol. Hunter gatherers used to live here. I kind of envy them. Walking up the slippery slimy rocks on the ever enclosing path up through the limestone cliffs, I could…
“Silence is death and yet if you speak you die. If you keep quiet you die. So then speak and die.” Tahar Djaout “I want to speak and I don’t want to die” Matoub Lounès A grave between an olive and a cherry tree Death finally caught up with him on the lonely bend of…
Look at Omar in his sheer white body-length jellabiya and gingham keffiya, with his Arab hitman shades and AoE tache, looking like a flesh and blood version of Sheik Yerbouti’s Yahoo Avatar; Omar the hillbilly from Hicksville, Syria, who sings with a voice like a chainsaw and has taken old music and mashed it into…
A national treasure, who has always taken the trouble to stay out of big ‘P’ politics, Khaled has no problem flirting with power. He’s a good friend of the current Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and defends his friend’s decision to play loose with the constitution and seek a third term.
