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Sound Advice: Our guide to the week's best bets
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Times-Picayune, Sound Advice: Our guide to the week's best bets >>
In what has become an annual tradition, the House of Blues partners with the local French consulate to commemorate Bastille Day, the French Independence Day. This year’s featured act is Bembeya Jazz, from the French-speaking West African nation of Guinea. Formed in 1961 soon after Guinea gained its independence, Bembeya predates Senegal’s renowned Orchestra Baobab and Mail’s Super Rail Band. For more than 25 years, Bembeya combined surging horns, curlicue guitar lines by a team of four guitarists, trance-inducing percussion and griot-style tales in a music that synthesized West African pop, Afro-Cuban rhythms and even Hawaiian slide guitar by Sekou “Diamond Fingers” Diabete. The members drifted apart in the late 1980s, but reconvened in 2002 to record “Bembeya,” their first album in 14 years. Released last year on the World Village label, “Bembeya” finds Diabete and longtime singer Salifou Kaba, tenor saxophonist Doré Clement, trumpeter Mohamed Kaba and drummer Condé Mangala joining with new members in a joyous, highly danceable Afro-pop celebration. 07/09/04
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