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Album Review
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WRIR, Album Review >>
Global A Go-GoWorld music reviews and charts, August 1
ARTIST: Khaira Arby
TITLE: Timbuktu Tarab
LABEL: Clermont Music
REVIEW: Female singers and bandleaders are an integral component of the music of the Sahara Desert region of Africa. Mauritania has singing star (and congresswoman!) Malouma; Mariam Hassan is arguably the most important voice in Western Sahara. To that list we can now add Mali’s Khaira Arby. She has long been popular in her native Timbuktu region, but this is her first recording to be distributed in Europe and the USA. The electric guitars, ngoni and one-string njarka fiddle in Arby’s ensemble call to mind her cousin Ali Farka Toure, the Toureg band Tinariwen, and other mainstays of the genre. But the group is subtly more global, with rock-like swells of volume and a pronounced Congolese feel to the drumming on several of the songs. Her voice is a power instrument (in all four of the languages she sings in), belting out even the slow numbers at full volume. A striking, welcome addition to the growing desert blues catalog.
REVIEWER: Bill Lupoletti
RECOMMENDED TRACKS: 1 6 7 10 08/01/10 >> go there
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