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CD Review
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New York Times, CD Review >>
Two of the singers whose albums are reviewed here have spent time in jail. The third was forced into exile until the overthrow of the colonial regime he opposed. Their voices can sound scarred and mournful, but their music is just as likely to head for the dance floor, where warnings, protests and messages of compassion can draw hope from the beat.
'Kaxexe' Bonga
As an exile and expatriate, Bonga Kwenda became the musical conscience of Angola, with a pained, husky voice that seems to hold all the troubles of his homeland.
When Angola was still a Portuguese colony in the 1960's, he was one of its top athletes. Traveling with a Lisbon soccer team, he carried messages between independence fighters within Angola and exiles abroad. The government caught on to his activities in the early 1970's, and he went into exile himself in Rotterdam, where he made his first album in 1972. Its lyrics earned him an arrest warrant in Angola for sedition.
After Angola achieved independence in 1975, Bonga divided his time between Angola and Europe, seeing his country devastated by three decades of civil war. Although he lives and records in Europe, his songs stay focused on Angola.
He sings in a mix of Portuguese and Angolan languages, and his music is rooted in an Angolan beat, semba, that is related to the Brazilian samba by way of Angolan slaves sent to Brazil. It is underlined with the buzz and scratch of the Angolan dizanka, a notched stick used as a scraper. Through the years Bonga has merged Angolan rhythms with styles from elsewhere, particularly Afro-Portuguese ones like samba and the Cape Verdean ballads called morna.
The songs on "Kaxexe" (Times Square), which means "in hiding," are filled with glimpses of shattered lives and yearning for an end to violence. But the music is all clarity and grace. Ballads like "Kianje" ("Before") and "Poeira" ("Dust") are as poised as they are heartsick, tinged with morna and the Portuguese fado. Yet they're outnumbered by upbeat tunes that use a handful of mostly acoustic instruments - guitars, accordion, hand drums and sometimes a Brazilian cavaquinho, the miniature samba guitar - to create airy, irrepressible grooves that find Angolan connections everywhere. All the burdens of history can't hold down Bonga's music.
He performs tonight at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, in the East Village. 04/05/04
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