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Album Review
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Perceptive Travel, Album Review >>
Putumayo Presents African Blues
Various Artists
We say: From Memphis to Mali and back again
The very obvious connection between American blues and West African music has long been recognized. Call and response vocals, work-songs and flattened 'blue' notes are all mutual ingredients, and the original music of artists like Ali Farka Touré has always sounded uncannily close to Mississippi Delta blues despite Touré's, perhaps disingenuous, claim that he had never heard it. An earlier release on this same label was Mali to Memphis, which explored some of commonality of these two musical traditions.
What this collection does is not so much explore these links further but, rather, throw distinctive voices from both sides of the Atlantic together to create some intriguing musical hybrids. African Blues features some inspired pairings. On "Dhow Countries", the oriental-sounding strings of the Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar beautifully augment Taj Mahal's rich warm voice as he croons about East Africa's timeless sailing tradition. Elsewhere, African and American musicians blend effortlessly on tracks like Mali Latino's "Ni Koh Bedy" that features Alex Wilson's down-home bluesy organ. Tuareg desert rockers Tinariwen join forces with Keb' Mo' under the auspices of the Playing for Change band on the plain-titled "Groove in G", British guitarist Ramon Goose plays slide alongside Senegalese kora maestro Diabel Cissokho on "Totoumo", and Belgians and Malians join forces as fellow members of Kalaban Coura on the gentle and lyrical "Mali".
African musicians have been playing with Americans and Europeans for quite some time now — even the world-famous Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon was simply the serendipitous outcome of a proposed Mali-Cuba musical project that never got off the ground. Nevertheless, African Blues is a welcome addition to this ever-fertile, two-way musical dialogue.
04/24/12 >> go there
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