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Lo'Jo
Au Cabaret Sauvage
World Village 468007 (2002)
When a CD booklet is as informative, entertaining and valuable to a world music library as this one is, the threat of revenue loss due to music pirating is greatly diminished. The bounty here includes translations of native North African (Tamasheq), French, and Spanish songs that are by turns visionary and whimsical. Andy Morgan, whose chapter on the Kabylian (Algeria) Bards of Immigritude graces the Rough Guide to World Music reference book, contributes a vivid musical memoir (to borrow Al Young's felicitous phrase) on seeing Lo'Jo with Touareg rebel band Tinariwen performing on a moon-bathed stage in the southern Sahara last year. Plus, a glossary of native North African musical isntruments should satisfy the wonderstruck listener's curiosity about how the heck Lo'Jo makes its postmodern, yet utterly sophisticated sound, dubbing it somewhat archly here as Au Cabaret Sauvage.
A working-class Angerian, Dennis Pean again raids the fertile bohemian arts scene of France's Loire Valley and writes much of the French-language material, Pean adds a roughly textured vocal character and traveling keyboard dynamic to what is essentially a contemporary extension, in exile, of native North Africa's long literary and free musical traditions. Amazigh (Berber) Algerian composing sisters Nadia and Yamina Nid El Mourid join with West African double bass marvel Kham, violinist Richard Bourreau, bassoonist Stephane Coutable, accordionista Sami Ben Said, Mathieu Rousseau's drums, and the well-traveled guitar of Farid Roberto Saadna and Bogness. Together they look through Amazigh and Malian philosophical prisms at trans-Mediterranean as well as trans-Saharan traffic, conquest, and the eternal quest for creative liberation from all forces of social coercion.
The Mourid sisters' composition "Tangito" sashays its Spanish syllables sensually, as Gypsy violin strides alongside the native Tamazghan imzad. The imzad is a single-stringed fiddle played by women in the Amazigh tradition extending from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya to the Sahel (or southern fringe of the Sahara Desert). Bassoon, bendir, and bongos fan the western Mediterranean melody line, ripe with crakech (North African metal castanets), as traps and darbouka interact intimately with Nadia and Yamina's viscous vocal harmonies.
"Les Humains" and "Cinq Cauris Ocre" bog down under unnecessary sampling and toy organ tones, losing the poetic lift found in the translated lyrics within the booklet. "Rambling Talk" is delivered in heavily accented English, seamlessly segueing into a contemporary Touareg poem sung over the stunning sonics of native North African string instruments. What starts out as a hellish excursion to the Sahel, and may be telling of the early 1990s campaign b the military regimes of Mali and Niger to wipe out Kel Tamasheq (the Touareg "Free Peoples," as Berbers call themselves), surfaces lustrously in Saharan moonglow. The touring Touareg Tinariwen band's Mohamed Ag Illale shapeshifts 3,000 years of received Tamasheq literary wisdom in his "Japonnais' Poem," aurally backed by Yamina Nid El Mourid's supple balafon, Moussa Kanoute's kamel n'goni (larger version of the Mandingo harp known as the kora), and Wounnou Wallet Oumar's ululating chorus. The verse is movingly rendered int he longer-outlawed Tifinagh script in the booklet. This is a rare chance to see the way Amazigh bards and sages wrote across the lands of native North African Tamazgha before French and, more recently, Arabic forced the language out of public life and into the sub rosa realms of remote Libya and cyberspace classrooms (see: www.libyamazigh.org).
--Mitch Ritter (Concord, CA)
12/01/02
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