‘The Malian Hip Hop prodigy honouring the African youth’ profiled by his international manager and one of his biggest fans Marie-Agnes Beau Continue reading Amkoullel – The Fula Child
According to World Circuit folklore, this was the album that got away. Apparently, what eventually became the iconic Buena Vista Social Club (BVSC) record was originally conceived as a Mali/Cuba collaboration.
Check it out live
“The late, great Charlie Gillett had a passion for music”, Mark Coles, BBC World Service, June 2010.
Continue reading V/A – Sound of the World Presents: Anywhere On This Road
I Speak Fula strips away some of the ponderousness that flawed the otherwise delightful debut album from this most explosive live band and reveals far more of Bassekou as a result
When you’re an international superstar, I suppose there’s got to be a little give and take here and there to keep everyone happy; but has N’Dour got it right with his new album?
Continue reading Youssou N’Dour – Rokku Mi Rokka (Give And Take)
Africa’s greatest superstar and elder statesman of global sounds wears his crossover obligations lightly in a back to basics, stripped down pop album
Apparently mud has different grades and it has gone from slurry to liquid on the site but we should be grateful — the Reading site would have been submerged. In these rather beautiful surroundings, WOMAD has begun with the best line-up in years to make up for the conditions underfoot
The ngoni, the small plucked lute said to be a forerunner of the banjo is most often found taking a support rôle to the guitar or kora. But it wasn’t always thus, and the world’s leading exponent has just released a new album that aims to bring the instrument — and the Bamana tradition from which it hails — firmly back centre stage
Continue reading Bassekou Kouyate – Blue Like a River to a Desert
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
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