Taking a break from cabbing duties back home in Washington DC, for his first LP in fifteen years. Ethiopian standards and originals; his unmistakable melodica, accordion and keys, in the same double-bass-and-drums setting as recent live shows.

Mid-nineties kwaito by Thami Mdluli (veteran of chart-toppers Taboo and CJB, and in-demand producer of the likes of Sox and Sensations).
Tasty, infectious rhythms and synth-work — if the singing is a bit Black Box — with an up-for-it, DIY energy and self-identity encouraged by the momentum of the liberation struggle in this period. “Once Mandela was released from prison and people felt more free to express themselves and move around town, kwaito was becoming the thing,” says Thami.

Lovely, hypnotic, rocking peulh music from Dilly commune, Mali, near the border with Mauritania (and the same family grouping as the celebrated singer Inna Baba Coulibaly). Duelling ngonis, calabash, flute, dashes of electric guitar; newly recorded.

‘SK Kakraba is a master of the gyil xylophone — fourteen wooden slats strung across calabash resonators. The silk walls of spiders’ egg sacs — ‘paapieye’ in the Lobi language — are stretched across holes in the gourds, giving each note a buzzy rattle. SK learned as a child from elders in his Lobi community in the far northwest reaches of Ghana.’
Beautiful, spare, mesmeric recordings — song cycles, dirges, improvisations based on traditional songs, original compositions — newly made.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Diop was celebrated in Senegal for her taasu, a form of oral poetry spoken call-and-response by griot women to the rhythmic accompaniment of sabar and tama drums. Then, in 1994, she dropped this incendiary combination of taasu and her own stripped, super-charged conception of mbalax…

No-shame housey Tsonga-disco and hands-in-the-air rave banged out on Korgs and Ataris in 1994 South Africa. It sold tons, rocking stadiums from Liberia and Sierra Leone to Namibia and Mozambique.

Precious, late-eighties dance music from Mogadishu. Big group —  three horns, four singers plus three backing, two guitars, keys, drummer, two percussionists, bassist — choca with funk swagger and highlife shimmy.