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A compilation of ‘Burger Highlife’, the crossing of West African melodies with synthesizers and drum machines, disco and boogie, which took over Ghanaian airwaves during the 1980s. Dominant figures like Thomas Frempong and George Darko, alongside more elusive, nowadays hard-sought recordings by Aban and Uncle Joe’s Afri-Beat.
‘Egypt’s ‘official’ popular music throughout much of the twentieth century was a complex form of art song steeped in tradition, well-loved by the middle and upper classes. The music business was highly structured and professional; centred in Cairo. However, far from the metropolis, to the north and northwest, in towns like Tanta and Alexandria and extending across the Saharan Desert to the Libyan border, a raw, hybrid shaabi/al-musiqa al-shabiya style of music was springing up, supported by small, upstart labels.
‘This compilation covers the full range of styles presented by the short-lived but fecund Bourini Records, launched in the late 1960s in Benghazi, Libya. Gobsmacking moments include Basis Rahouma’s transformation into a growling, barking man-lion, and Reem Kamal’s onwards-and-upwards hand-clapping party banger, with a grooving nihilistic dissonance reminiscent of the Velvet Underground. The thorough-going contrast with mainstream Egyptian popular music is stark in Ana Mish Hafwatak, its vocal woven deftly through a constant accordion drone, and the sparse, slow-burning lament Al Bint al Libya. Whereas the mainstream was aspirational, projecting Egyptian culture at its most refined, the performances captured by Bourini were authentic expressions of ordinary, everyday life. More than half a century old, this music has lost none of its urgency, presence, or relevance.’
A tape collage from the south of Mali, and the capital Bamako, in Sublime Frequencies fashion.
John Surman, bass clarinet and soprano saxophone; Dave Holland, double-bass.
Crafted, swinging, soulful Middle Eastern jazz, led by oud and bass clarinet. Dedicated to the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. (Why he didn’t win the Nobel Prize isn’t a mystery.)
With Barbaros Erkose, clarinet; Lassad Hosni, bendir, darbouka.
From 1990 — a trio with oud, violin and percussion.
Ravishing, chilled interplay between oud, piano and accordion.
The master oudist with Jack DeJohnette, Django Bates and Dave Holland.
‘Not only one of the year’s best ECM releases; it’s a classic-in-the-making that should ultimately be considered one of the label’s very best recordings in its nearly fifty-year history’ (All About Jazz).
The key fifties recordings of the great anarchist songwriter. For Alex Kapranos — ‘his lyrics were more subversive than Dylan or the Sex Pistols and he wrote better tunes than either.’ Tremendous.
The Psych Funk 101 selectors smashing it over again with this lovingly annotated selection of 45s.
Brilliant, game-changing re-deployments of the lap-slide Hawaiian steel guitar — in this case a Gibson Super 400, modified with a drone string and a high nut to raise the strings off the fretboard like a lap steel — away from Indian popular music, into the service of ragas.
Cicadas, dragonflies and other insects boogie down live and direct from Laos, Thailand and Burma.