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"Bembeya" from Bembeya
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Bembeya
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Concert Review

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Guardian Unlimited, Concert Review >>

Royal Festival Hall, London

BY Robin Denselow

Bembeya Jazz started out in Guinea in the early 1960s, and for decades enjoyed a reputation to rival that of the great Rail Band from Mali and Senegal's Orchestra Baobab. Now, following the release of their first new album in 14 years, Bembeya Jazz are out to show that they can still compete with the best.

After all these years, much of the band's original line-up is still intact. Opening for the soulful Zimbabwean star Oliver Mtukudzi, they came on stage as they would have done back at the Jardin de Guinea club in Conakry, and started out with Bembeya, their old song of welcome from the mid-1960s. Over on the right of the stage were three elderly horn players, two of them survivors from the 1960s line-up. In front of the drums and percussion were three male singers trying out their dance steps. And over on the left was the guitar section. Most were dressed in the band uniform of black trousers and waistcoats with red shirts, but there was one exception. Sekou Bembeya Diabate, better known to African audiences as Diamond Fingers, sported a sun hat with matching shirt and trousers tucked into his boots, looking like an unlikely cross between a hunter and guitar hero.

Throughout, the band delivered remarkably tight and rhythmic playing and vocals. Many of the songs were built around guitar riffs punctuated by punchy horn lines and slick vocals, against which Diamond Fingers added his often rapid-fire guitar embellishments and solos. A natural showman, he played on his knees or on his back, never missing a note. When he did slow down, it was to switch to Hawaiian slide guitar, for a reminder that Bembeya Jazz could occasionally adds country as well as Latin influences to their up-beat treatment of traditional songs.

The band has had an extraordinary history. They started out as state-funded musicians when Guinea's first president, Sekou Toure, decided that the newly independent country needed to encourage its own culture. For decades they proved that a nationalised industry can be a rousing success, before finally drifting apart in the late 1980s. Now the reformed (and denationalised) Bembeya Jazz are part of a remarkable West African revival. And who would win out if they appeared alongside those other elderly celebrities, Orchestra Baobab? That would be a great double bill.

 11/21/03 >> go there
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