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Posts from the ‘African music’ Category

Nov 17

Mulatu Astatke says goodbye

A month shy of his 82nd birthday, Mulatu Astatke brought his farewell tour to a close with two sold-out dates at the start of the EFG London Jazz Festival this week. I went to the first of them, at the Royal Festival Hall, to celebrate the work of the man generally credited with the creation of “Ethio-jazz”.

It takes more than one person to create a genre, but Astatke, who left Ethiopia as a teenager in the late 1950s to study vibraphone, his main instrument, and composition at Trinity College in London and Berklee College in Boston, was certainly a catalyst. He began making records in the US in the 1960s before returning to Ethiopia, where conditions changed after the takeover by a military junta in 1975, restricted Addis Ababa’s lively creative scene. He already had a large hipster following when the use of his music in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers in 2005 expanded his audience considerably.

On Sunday night he began the concert with Steps Ahead, his seven-piece European band, including such familiar figures as the trumpeter Byron Wallen, the pianist Alexander Hawkins and the double bassist John Edwards. The first half of the 90-minute set featured some of the compositions revived for a recently released album, Mulatu Plays Mulatu, including “Yekermo Sew”, with strong echoes of Horace Silver, and “The Way to Nice”, which plays a game with the James Bond riff. This music sounds like early-’60s hard bop filtered through Ethiopian modes and intonation, infusing it with as distinctive a flavour as the Skatellites and the Blue Notes imparted to similar material in Jamaica and South Africa respectively.

I was struck by the use of Danny Keane’s cello, sometimes strummed like a rhythm instrument, at other times interjecting short percussive phrases with a dry tone, and often combining to powerful effect with Edwards’ bass. It was intriguing to hear Edwards, Hawkins and the saxophonist James Arben delivering solos using the language of free jazz in the context of this mostly riff-based music, and receiving ovations for their efforts. While Astatke was spinning out his mellifluous extended vibes solos over the deep groove provided by the kit drummer, Jon Scott, and the percussionist, Richard Olatunde Baker, on something like “Netsanet”, I felt perfectly contented.

For the second half of the set, the band was joined by two dancers, a man and a woman, and two more musicians, playing the masengo, a single-stringed bowed lute, and the krar, a six-stringed lute. This was more of a folkloric experience, inviting the sort of mass participation that can seem awkward in a modern western concert hall. But it would be wrong to suggest that it was not greatly enjoyed, or that Astatke was not given the warmest and most rousing of valedictory salutes.

* Mulatu Plays Mulatu is out now on the Strut label.

Sep 9

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Autumn books 1: Joe Boyd

“Tango comes from the mud,” Brian Eno told an audience at Foyle’s bookshop the other night. He was conducting a public conversation with the author of And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, an 850-page examination of the forms of popular music with which Joe Boyd has engaged in Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil, Argentina, Bulgaria, Senegal, Albania and elsewhere during his six decades as a successful record producer and enlightened facilitator of musical projects.

For many years now it’s been rumoured that Boyd was writing a history of “world music”, a tale perhaps beginning with his presence at the famous meeting at a London pub in 1987 during which that rubric was invented, with the best of intentions and outcomes, as a way of persuading open-minded listeners to pay as much attention to music from other cultures as they did to their own western idioms. The result is much more interesting than a simple history; its eventual subtitle, “A Journey through Global Music”, conveys a much more accurate impression of what Boyd has taken on.

The quote about tango coming from the mud is to be found on page 483, where it’s identified as an Argentine saying. It was clever of Eno to spot it, because it says something larger about pretty much all the music Boyd considers here. How and when it happened, who made it happen, and to whom it happened are all part of his investigations, whether the music under consideration is Tropicália or townships jazz, Django Reinhardt or Béla Bartók.

I’m still working my way through the book, which will take a while even though Boyd writes in the easy, fluent, open-minded, anecdotal style familiar from White Bicycles, the relatively slender book about his adventures in the ’60s underground, published in 2005 to justified acclaim. Vast as his new one might seem, it’s worth reading with full attention, lest you miss some vital socio-cultural connection or valuable information on the roles played by, for example, the Ghanaian drummer Tony Allen, the Sudanese oud-player Abdel Aziz El Mubarak, Rodney Neyra of Havana’s Tropicana nightclub or the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. (I didn’t know, for instance, that, according to Boyd, the names samba, rumba, mambo, tango and cha-cha all have their roots in Ki-Kongo, one of the languages of the Kongo people living in what are now the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Gabon.) Boyd’s enviable skill is to bring the reader an astonishing level of historical detail while wearing his research lightly and enlivening the narrative with exactly the right seasoning of his own views.

After buying the book at the Foyle’s event and getting it signed, I took it home and went straight to the chapter about tango. I like tango very much, although I once spent an evening in a bar in San Telmo, a Buenos Aires quarter then about to make the jump from funky to gentrified, proving to everyone’s satisfaction that I’ll never be able to dance it. I share Boyd’s enthusiasm for the singer Carlos Gardel to such an extent that I once visited the great man’s tomb in the cemetery of Chacarita in Buenos Aires, observing the ritual of leaving flowers at the base of his statue and placing a lit cigarette in the space left by the sculptor between the index and middle fingers of his raised right hand, because that’s how Gardel always sang until his untimely death in an air crash in 1935.

The photo above is one I took in 1994 on a sidewalk in Rosario, Argentina’s third largest city, the birthplace of Che Guevara and Lionel Messi. I was struck by the elegance and dignity of the street singer and his accordionist, who were serenading appreciative shoppers and other passers-by with a selection of songs made famous by Gardel.

Boyd traces the idiom’s origins in the bars and bordellos of Buenos Aires, examining its sources and tracking its destiny. He doesn’t share my fondness for the late composer and bandoneon virtuoso Astor Piazzolla, who became, he believes, “for tango what John Lewis and the MJQ were to jazz, ‘elevating’ it from the dancefloor and giving it concert-hall respectability.” He’s both right (in the comparison) and wrong (in the implicit criticism). Nobody who went, as I did, to see Piazzolla and his astonishing quintet for three out of their five nights in the intimate environment of the Almeida Theatre in London during the summer of 1985 could accuse them of forfeiting the sensual charms of tango in a pursuit of respectability. For a lot of worthwhile music with roots “in the mud”, the need to get people dancing is no longer a priority. But it’s a good and worthwhile argument to have, and I expect there’ll be many more as I work my way through what is shaping up to be not just an exceptionally enjoyable book but perhaps also an important one.

* Joe Boyd’s And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music is published by Faber & Faber (£30)

Aug 12

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‘The Black Chord’

David Corio is a fine British photographer whose book The Black Chord, with text by the writer Vivien Goldman, first appeared in the UK 25 years ago. A new edition, published by Hat & Beard, a Los Angeles-based imprint, presents his images of black musicians via a much more elegant design.

Corio was born in London in 1960 and had his first work published when he was 18. Where he differs from Roy DeCarava and Val Wilmer, two other great photographers of black music, is that most of his subjects are caught in performance, on or off stage. DeCarava and Wilmer both sought particular kinds of intimacy, spiritual or domestic. Corio’s images tend to look outward, making a direct address to the viewer, which means they work well in magazine features and on album covers, and the 200-odd photographs here, beautifully reproduced, combine to make an exhilarating book.

The subjects range from the drummers of Burundi and a Santeria ceremony in Cuba through John Lee Hooker, Fats Domino, Bobby Bland, Aretha Franklin, Art Blakey, Celia Cruz, Fela Kuti, Abbey Lincoln, Ray Charles, Barry White, Millie Jackson, Lee Perry, Ornette Coleman, Al Green, Toots Hibbert, Salif Keita, De La Soul, August Darnell, Sade, the Last Poets, Alton Ellis, PM Dawn, Miles Davis, Foday Musa Susa, Nile Rodgers, Don Cherry, Missy Elliott, and of course Bunny, Tosh and Bob. And many, many others. Goldman’s love of this music, from blues to jazz via R&B, soul, reggae, salsa, afrobeat and hip-hop, originally on view in her work in the 1970s for Sounds, the Melody Maker and the NME, infuses the lively essays that intersperse the groupings of photographs.

One of the pictures I like best contains no performers: over a double-page spread, half a dozen boys perch together around a sound system in London in 1978, shot from below, exuding life and possibilities despite the implicit challenge of the world around them. It has poetry in it. As, more obviously, does the portrait of Nina Simone seen above and also on the book’s cover, taken during a performance at Ronnie Scott’s in 1984, a photograph to make you think a lot about troubled genius. That, too, is Corio at his best.

* The Black Chord by David Corio with text by Vivien Goldman is published by Hat & Beard (hatandbeard.com), price $60.

May 26

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Passion / Compassion

Back in the early 1970s, Santana were my favourite live band. I saw the original line-up — more or less as heard at Woodstock — at the Albert Hall in 1970 and twice the following year, at Hammersmith Odeon and the Olympia in Paris. They were thrilling, and surrounded by a sense of excitement; before the show in Paris, I remember Mick Jagger and Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias sweeping through the backstage bar, a week ahead of their wedding.

Then the music changed, and they became even better. Carlos Santana and Michael Shrieve had been listening to John Coltrane and Elvin Jones and to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain and Bitches Brew. Santana’s fourth album, Caravanserai, brimmed over with the effect of those influences, starting with an unaccompanied solo by the saxophonist Hadley Caliman and culminating in the ecstatic nine-minute “Every Step of the Way”, a Shrieve composition. Clive Davis, the president of their record company, called it “career suicide”. At the Wembley Empire Pool in November 1972, just after the album’s release, an expanded line-up rose to a different level, musically and spiritually.

After Wembley they went off to play some concerts in Europe before returning towards the end of the month for dates in Manchester, Newcastle and Bournemouth. On Thursday, November 23 they had a day off in London, and, being American, arranged a small Thanksgiving Day dinner in the private room of a restaurant on Davies Street in Mayfair. I’d raved about Caravanserai in the Melody Maker, so they were kind enough to invite me to join them for what turned out to be a very pleasant evening.

While they were in London I interviewed Shrieve, who talked eloquently and passionately about the changes they’d made in the music, and about the jazz influences inspiring them. He spoke of his admiration for Elvin, Roy Haynes, Philly Joe Jones and Tony Williams and of studying their playing with his friend Lennie White, who had just joined Chick Corea’s Return to Forever. And he said something that struck me when I read the piece again the other day: “What’s so beautiful about the band, apart from the popularity which we know we’re fortunate to have and which we’re grateful for, is that right now it’s the perfect situation to be open. Specially at our age, because we realise that there’s still a lot of time.” Fifty years later, it’s clear the time hasn’t been wasted.

I loved Shrieve’s playing from the start, the way he meshed perfectly with the percussionists José “Chepito” Areas, Mike Carabello, Armando Peraza, Coke Escovedo and James Mingo Lewis. Since then I’ve followed his career mostly from a distance, although we reconnected when I was at Island Records in the mid-70s and he and Steve Winwood were part of Stomu Yamash’ta’s Go project, and then when the label signed Automatic Man, a rock band he was in with the singer/keyboards player Bayeté (Todd Cochran) and the guitarist Pat Thrall, and whose 1976 single “My Pearl” sounds today like a presentiment of Prince. Of his solo albums, I’ve always loved Stiletto, released in 1989 on RCA’s Novus imprint, in which he and a band including the trumpeter Mark Isham and the guitarists David Torn and Andy Summers created a very fine version of Gil Evans’s “Las Vegas Tango”.

If you have a copy of Lotus, the live triple album recorded in Osaka during the Caravanserai tour, you’ll know the 10-minute drum solo called “Kyoto” that shows what a superlative drummer he had already become, at the age of 23. It has none of the bombast of his rock contemporaries and much of the fluency of his jazz heroes. It’s music.

His new album, recorded over a period of years, is called Drums of Compassion — a reference to the hugely popular album titled Drums of Passion recorded in 1959 by the great Nigerian drummer Michael Babatunde Olatunji, who died at his home in Northern California 2003, aged 75, but whose voice is the one you hear first and again from time to time on an album that has been long in the making. Shrieve says that the title is also an acknowledgement of the Dalai Lama’s call for a Time of Compassion.

Of course, percussion instruments play an important role in this music. But the whole thing, although its 39 minutes are sub-divided into nine pieces, some with different composers, is like a lush, constantly shifting sound painting in which other instruments — guitar, saxophone, oud, electronic keyboards — emerge with utterances that seem less like solos than simply part of the fabric.

Shrieve can put together a multi-faceted track (“The Call of Michael Olantunji”) including himself, Jack DeJohnette, Airto Moreira and Zakir Hussain on various percussion instruments without making it sound for a second like an old-fashioned drum battle or a display of egos and techniques, even when Shrieve’s orchestral tom-toms come to the fore. The percussionists’ work is blended into the overall picture, here creating an armature for Olantunji’s voice and Trey Gunn’s guitar.

Shrieve can make the space for one performer alone on the eponymous “The Euphoric Pandeiro of Airto Moreira” (chanting and Brazilian percussion) and “Zakir Hussain” (tablas). He shares another track, the sultry, drifting “Oracle”, in a duet with another Brazilian, the electronic musician Amon Tobin. The ambience swirls and drifts without relaxing its subtle grip.

A steamy tone poem titled “On the Path to the Healing Waters” features the tenor saxophone of Skerik (Eric Walton), a Seattle-based musician who has played with Wayne Horvitz and Charlie Hunter, and who here plays a Wayne Shorter-ish less-is-more role. And I’m particularly happy to lose myself inside “The Breath of Human Kindness”, five minutes of one-chord jam in which the oud of Tarik Banzi makes its single eloquent appearance, a voice from ancient Al-Andalus amid the glistening keyboards of Pete Lockett and Michael Stegner, paced by Farko Dosumov’s stealthy bass guitar riff.

There’s a rare combination of majesty and humility at work in this music, something that speaks of the deep and lasting impact of Coltrane’s influence on Shrieve’s instincts and decisions. More than half a century after Caravanserai, this is an album for listeners who followed Shrieve and Santana on that journey into a wider world, one where frontiers and prejudices dissolve.

* Michael Shrieve’s Drums of Compassion is out now on the 7D Media label and available via Bandcamp: https://michaelshrieve7d.bandcamp.com/album/drums-of-compassion

Apr 15

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Sounds for summer

Tall enough to be unmissable in any environment, and with a truly remarkable fashion sense, Shabaka Hutchings had presence from day one of his career. To me, as an observer, that was the concert at the Royal Festival Hall in June 2009 at which he was one of several UK guests with Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra (others included Robert Wyatt, Jason Yarde, John Parricelli and Andy Grappy). He had just one solo but when he stepped forward, the sounds coming from his tenor saxophone commanded everyone’s attention.

Since then, we’ve heard him with Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, the Ancestors and Louis Moholo-Moholo’s Five Blokes, and in a reinterpretation of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme at the Church of Sound a few weeks ago which I was very sorry to miss. And now he has enough presence to allow him to drop his surname and become just Shabaka.

He’s also dropped the saxophone, which is more of a surprise, in order to study the flute — specifically the Japanese shakuhachi and other iterations, including the Andean quena and the Slavic svirel. His new album — titled Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace — is evidence of this turn of interest.

It’s a radical departure from anything he’s given us before. A series of sketches deploys varying personnel, including the pianists Nduduzo Makhathini and Jason Moran, the guitarist Dave Okumu, the singer Lianne La Havas, Moses Sumney, Laraaji and ESKA, the harpists Brandee Younger and Charles Overton, the drummers Marcus Gilmore and Nasheet Waits, the speakers Saul Williams, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Anum Iyupo, the rapper Elucid, the percussionist Carlos Niño and the bassists Esperanza Spalding and Tom Herbert.

That’s an impressive line-up, but as you listen to the album you’re never really thinking of individuals or their virtuosity. In that sense it’s a quite different experience from that of listening to a “jazz album”. But neither is it a kind of New Age tapestry of sound, slipping by without disturbance, merely a bit of aural decoration.

It has an overall charm and moments of great and singular beauty, too, such as the shakuhachi improvisation against Overton’s harp and the celestial layered voices of Sumney on “Insecurities”, La Havas’s vocal reverie on “Kiss Me Before I Forget”, or Spalding’s springy bass behind Elucid’s rap on “Body to Inhabit”, but it also has depth, and not just in the occasional verbal passages, which are carefully integrated into the quilt of sound. The overall impression is what counts, and somehow that goes beyond words.

The album contains one snatch of tenor saxophone, on a track called “Breathing”, in which Rajni Swaminathan’s mridangam — a Carnatic double-ended hand drum — backs first Shabaka’s treated and looped flutes, then his clarinet, and finally his saxophone, which briefly erupts in a gentle squall with an intonation recalling the great Ethiopian tenorist Getatchew Mekuria.

That little hint of Ethiopian music sent me to a new release in the name of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, who died this time last year at the age of 99. Born in Addis Ababa, she studied violin in Switzerland as a child, worked as a civil servant and sang for Haile Selassie, was imprisoned by the Italian occupiers during the Second World War, and spent a post-war decade as a nun in a hilltop monastery. The arrival of a new regime forced her to flee to Jerusalem, where she spent the rest of her life in an Ethiopian Orthodox convent and composed music for piano, organ, and various ensembles while running a foundation to encourage music education among children in her native land and elsewhere.

Like Mekuria, she had a volume of the producer Francis Falceto’s Ethiopiques series devoted to her music in 2006, and in the last couple of years there have been more albums on the Mississippi label. The latest is called Souvenirs, a collection of her songs apparently recorded between 1977 and 1985. It’s a primitive recording: the piano sounds like a poorly maintained upright and her voice was probably recorded on the same microphone, in a room that was almost certainly not a recording studio. But that does nothing to diminish the appeal of these songs, with titles such as “Where Is the Highway of Thought?” and “Like the Sun Shines on Meadows”, whose vocal melodies are doubled by the pianist’s right hand against left-hand figurations assembled from scraps of blues and rhumba and gospel tunes.

What’s so appealing, almost mesmerising, about this music? I think it’s the combination of transparent simplicity (and sincerity) with the unexpected guile of the rhythmic undertow, which is always playing appealing tricks on the western ear. There’s something about the distinctive melodic shapes and phrase lengths that is special to this kind of Ethiopian music, springing from some deeper root.

Something else to add pleasure to this summer is After a Pause, the new album of acoustic duo music by two brilliant Welsh musicians, the guitarist Toby Hay and the bassist and cellist Aidan Thorne. I got interested in Hay when he was filming himself outdoors playing ragas during the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 and putting the results on YouTube, and wrote a bit more about him when he released some duets recorded in an old chapel with his fellow guitarist David Ian Roberts later that same spring.

I try to avoid talking about what musicians are doing in terms of the work of other musicians, but I suppose a simple — and, I hope, enticing — way of describing the scope of these duets is to imagine what Davy Graham and Danny Thompson might have got up to if they were both in their prime in the 2020s and were able to spend three days together in a studio with no distractions, enhancing their compositions and improvisations with a sparing but highly effective use of overdubbing and electronics.

After living with this album for a few weeks, I’ve come to appreciate not just its surface beauty but the way it reveals more of itself and its spiritual essence the closer you listen. The 12-string arpeggios and bowed bass of the opener are a call to the attention that is never wasted as the music blooms and glows through 10 shortish but unhurried pieces, trajectories shifting and densities varying considerably from bare-bones to near-orchestral (on “Burden” or “Eclipse”) but mood sustained. The brief solo piano coda is a lovely way to finish.

A light shines through these three albums. I’ve a feeling they’re going to be among the summer’s best companions.

* Shabaka’s Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace is on the Impulse! label. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s Souvenirs is on Mississippi Records. Toby Hay and Aidan Thorne’s After a Pause is on Cambrian Records. Links here:

https://spibaig.bandcamp.com/album/perceive-its-beauty-acknowledge-its-grace

https://emahoytsegemariamgebru.bandcamp.com/album/souvenirs

https://cambrianrecords.bandcamp.com/

May 20

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Abel Selaocoe & BBC Singers

At one point during last night’s concert with the BBC Singers at Milton Court, the cellist Abel Selaocoe appeared to attach something to his instrument’s bridge that enabled him to make it sound alternately like a kora and a kalimba, and sometimes like a combination of the two. At another juncture he turned it sideways, tapping its back with one hand and its shoulder with the other, creating a groove that swung the whole 25-voice choir. He slapped it, sawed at it, and waved it at the audience, but he also did things that Rostropovich, Casals or du Pré would have recognised and applauded.

He sang a great deal, too, delivering songs in, I think, Sesotho, Zulu and Xhosa in a variety of voices that ranged from a form of guttural sub-bass throat-singing to a silvery whisper via a gentle tenor croon suited to lullabies. And he danced a little, while getting the choir and then the audience to clap and sing along.

Born 31 years ago in a Johannesburg township, Selaocoe — whose name is pronounced Sa-LAU-chay — has made his way via Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music to the concert platforms of the world, collaborating en route with the likes of Famoudou Don Moye, the great percussionist with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the saxophonist Tim Garland and the kora player Seckou Keita. As a gifted improviser, it may be that, with the American cellist Tomeka Reid, he is capable of building on the legacy bequeathed to the instrument by the late Abdul Wadud. Last night showed that Selaocoe intends to bring not only his instrumental gift but his own music to the audiences he will meet as his fame grows.

The concert combined his pieces, collectively titled “Music of African Twilight”, with a selection of 11 (of 15) movements from Sergey Rachmaninov’s “All Night Vigil (Vespers)”, a piece for unaccompanied choir written and first performed in Moscow in 1915, during the early stages of the First World War, and here delivered under the baton of Sofi Jeannin, the BBC Singers’ chief conductor. I went along expecting Selaocoe to be contributing interludes between the choral pieces, but that was not the case. The two alternating elements were given equal time and weight throughout.

Rachmaninov’s take on the Russian Orthodox liturgy was sublime, but so was Selaocoe’s evocation of another world, his writing for the choir a full-bodied support to his own singing and playing. On the candelit Milton Court stage, one moment we were under the dome of a cathedral, the next under open African skies. The concert was in no sense an attempt at a fusion of two cultures. It wasn’t even the sort of juxtaposition of two idioms intended to provoke new thoughts, new possibilities. It just was, and when the candles were finally dimmed and the light faded, that seemed enough.

* The concert was recorded by the BBC and will be broadcast on Radio 3 on Tuesday 23 May at 7.30pm, available for 30 days thereafter on BBC Sounds. Abel Selaocoe’s debut album, Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae), is out now on Warner Classics.

Apr 23

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Homage to Celia

Celia Cruz

Celia Cruz was to Latin music as Aretha Franklin was to soul, Cesaria Evora to fado**, Mahalia Jackson to gospel and Bessie Smith to the blues. She was the queen. On the two occasions I saw her, I was left in no doubt of that. The first was in 1976, when she appeared at the Lyceum with the Fania All Stars, alongside Johnny Pacheco and Ray Barretto. The second was 10 years later, when she arrived at Hammersmith Palais on a sultry July night with Tito Puente’s eight-piece band, took the stage in a dress covered with black, silver and hot red sequins, and set the place on fire. Here’s what I wrote in The Times the next day:

“Most of her songs are constructed according to a formula that gets the verse out of the way before concentrating on the sequence in which the singer improvises over a mesmerising two-chord vamp. It is there, in the real heart of the music, as the polyrhythms of congas, bongos and timbales interlock with the fluid and deceptively simple stroll of the bass guitar, that Celia Cruz proves her greatness. The vamp section of the mid-tempo ‘Bemba Colora’ turned into a roller-coaster of successive crescendos and she shouted, chattered and crooned, the audience hardly needing her encouragement to chant the responses while attempting to dance in the sweaty crush at the foot of the stage. Her own dancing, involving brief bouts of spasms and convulsions that defined the Latin ability to retain control while discarding inhibitions, provided a further incitement to displays of ecstatic abandon.”

I can still hear that “Bemba Colora”: it went on for a very long time and would still be going on now, if those of us who were there had been given a vote on the matter. It was a night when you wished you’d been born Latin, and one of the dozen most memorable gigs I can remember.

Inevitably, “Bemba Colora” is among the 10 songs associated with Cruz chosen by Angélique Kidjo, the great Beninese singer, for her new album, titled Celia. Or, as one might put it, this is Angélique Kpasseloko Hinto Hounsinou Kandjo Manta Zogbin Kidjo paying tribute to Úrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso.

It’s no surprise that Kidjo and her producer, David Donatien, approached the project from an original perspective, choosing to take the songs on a journey back to Africa. This isn’t a salsa album: it’s an album of the African diaspora, bringing sounds and inflections from all over the continent to bear in a very organic and contemporary way. The musicians involved include Tony Allen, the great Afro-beat drummer, who partners the bassist Meshell Ndegeocello on several tracks, and the members of London’s Sons of Kemet, who provide the basis for a fine reading of “Bemba Colora”. Shabaka Hutchings, their tenor saxophonist, and Theon Cross, their tuba-player, contribute to several other tracks.

The one that really caught my ear is “Sahara”, a ballad of grand yearning recorded by Cruz in 1952. Written by Eligio Varela Mora, it’s given full value by Kidjo’s majestic delivery, languid but intense, over a beautiful arrangement featuring the unhurried ticking of Donatien’s percussion, the colourations of Xavier Tribolet’s piano and organ and Clément Petit’s overdubbed cellos, a kind of desert chamber ensemble. Every track has something interesting to offer, but this is where the project most fully realises its potential, both as a tribute and as a free-standing creation. Like that “Bemba Colora” in Hammersmith more than 30 years ago, it casts a spell you want never to end.

* Angélique Kidjo’s Celia is out now on the Verve label.

** See Vitor Fragoso’s comment.