What with the “Produced By Manu Chao” sticker on the cover and the Metro’s ‘Album of the Week’, what more do you want from SMOD’s third album?
Posts tagged Bamako
Begin at the end, so they say, and the end for Lobi came suddenly and out of the blue. He died in June at 49. Like Habib Koite is, Lobi was a people’s musician. Friendly and down to earth, Lobi was well known to hustlers and music fans alike in clubs like the Djembe in Bamako. A short time before his death, he grabbed half an opportunity to record an album and here it is
Late at night in Salif Keita’s studio in Bamako a cellist and a kora player recorded their jams. Vincent Segal (cellist) tells us what lay behind his collaboration with Ballaké Sissoko
Due to innumerable reasons, some great artists and bands fail to achieve the posterity of their peers, and so it was with Benin’s Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou whose name should be as recognisable to African music fans as Orchestra Baobab and the Bamako Rail Band.
Continue reading Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou – Echos Hypnotiques
Network records have kept up the profoundly high level of quality control exhibited on the first two instalments of this exquisite series
Go anywhere in Mali and people will fall over themselves to tell you how great Habib Koite is. Whether on guitar, flute, vocals or one of the seemingly hundreds of other instruments he plays, he is a musician to the core. He has the charisma to match so why is it so few people outside Mali know his name?
Continue reading Habib Koite – The Greatest Malian Musician You Don’t Know
Bassekou Kouyaté is better known as the ngoni player on seminal recordings by Toumani Diabaté and Ali Farka Touré. Segu Blue is his assured, elegant and long overdue debut
With all the hype surrounding Tinariwen’s third international release, long-time fans could be forgiven for expecting to hear the lost desert album of Radiohead. Thank God it’s still the boys in blue’s trademark sound instead
A few years ago a group of hoteliers got together in the pleasant but unremarkable stopover of Segou along the banks of the Niger river to work out how to get people to stay for a while in their town. Thus the Festival sur le Niger was born and this year it burst its banks
Continue reading Festival sur le Niger – Dancing through the Tears
Malick has had three books of his photos published, exhibitions across Europe and the States and is regularly cited as one of Africa’s most important photographers. I dropped in on his Bamako studio to find a gentle man fighting the good fight against the airborne red earth of Africa and dodgy chemicals
