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CD Review
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The Daily Copper, CD Review >>
When it came to world music that managed to rake up the buzz stateside this past year, most looked in the direction of Eastern Europe and the Balkan area as Beirut’s Gulag Orkastar showed the potential of what a twenty year old kid from New Mexico could pull off. With Bole serving as the entry/exit point of Ethiopia and Harlem being the same for that of African music in North America, Bole 2 Harlem’s rich assortment of hip hop orientated tunes captures the essence of all the music which exists in between.
The collaboration between David Schommer on the percussion and production duties and Maki Siraj on vocals who mostly sings in the language of Amharic (if memory of my college lingual studies class serves correct), Vol. 1 adds a slew of various singers and multi-instrumentalists in the tracks and is aptly sequenced to give it that good ol’ “album feel” with smorgasbord of influences from the realm of reggae, Afrobeat, calypso, as well as a punchy Middle Eastern guile on “Hi Loga” and a bassy slab of dub funk with “Endegena” rendering Vol. 1 as a heady sonic brew more varied and spicier than a batch of fine curry powder. - Chris Pacifico (2007, The Daily Copper) When it came to world music that managed to rake up the buzz stateside this past year, most looked in the direction of Eastern Europe and the Balkan area as Beirut’s Gulag Orkastar showed the potential of what a twenty year old kid from New Mexico could pull off. With Bole serving as the entry/exit point of Ethiopia and Harlem being the same for that of African music in North America, Bole 2 Harlem’s rich assortment of hip hop orientated tunes captures the essence of all the music which exists in between. The collaboration between David Schommer on the percussion and production duties and Maki Siraj on vocals who mostly sings in the language of Amharic (if memory of my college lingual studies class serves correct), Vol. 1 adds a slew of various singers and multi-instrumentalists in the tracks and is aptly sequenced to give it that good ol’ “album feel” with smorgasbord of influences from the realm of reggae, Afrobeat, calypso, as well as a punchy Middle Eastern guile on “Hi Loga” and a bassy slab of dub funk with “Endegena” rendering Vol. 1 as a heady sonic brew more varied and spicier than a batch of fine curry powder.
-- by Chris Pacifico 12/31/06 >> go there
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