It's Friday night (almost Saturday morning) and it's been a while since I've shared some of the music I'm listening to. Just a band is not really a discovery, as I've been a fan for some time now, since I discovered the cool music videos of their debut album. This song, Usinibore, is the first single of their new album "82" released last October. Daft Punk anyone?
And since a few days ago it was the International Day against HIV/Aids, here's a very popular song in Côte d'Ivoire advocating for more tolerance for Aids victims. The title is "Ne l'abandonne pas", don't abandon him/her.rn
It's been a while since the last Friday Evening music session, and I've missed it. So here's a great discovery: Youssoupha. He's French but of a Senegalese mother and a Congolese father - Tabu Ley Rochereau. The song is titled "L'effet papillon" (The butterfly effect) and it makes Kinshasa look like you've never seen it before. Enjoy!
It's Friday Evening, and so it's music time. Tonight with Tiken Jah Fakoly's Ça va faire mal (It's going to hurt), which it's not my most favorite song by him, but it has a very nice music video shot in 2005 during the African Reggae Festival in Mali.
In case you don't know, Tiken Jah Fakoly is a very popular reggae singer from Côte d'Ivoire (but who's living in exile in Mali since 2003 due to death threats). His big popularity is due to the political character of most of his songs. For example, in 1993 after Houphouët-Boigny's passing away, he wrote about the electoral situation and one of his albums is titled Françafrique which includes songs such as Le pays va mal (The country is not doing well) or Y'en a marre (We're fed up).
Bongeziwe Mabandla playing live on SABC 2 (South Africa TV) on some weekend morning show. Impressive.
It's Friday Evening, so it's time for some music. And what better than a video from K'naan, one of my favourite African musicians? It's from 2005, from his first album The Dusty Foot Philosopher and it's titled "Soo Bax", which is Somali for "Get Out". In it he criticizes politicians and warlords that perpetuate the conflicts in his home country of Somalia. At one point he says:
Mogadishu used to be a place the world came to see
And if, like me, you can't get enough of K'naan I recommend this interview on Democracy Now! where he talks about the Somalia of his childhood ("my environment was incredibly beautiful and poetic"), about the breakout of war when he was 9, migrating to the US, PSD & music as his therapy ("I hoped to survive through songs"), and US policy in Somalia.
I've been really enjoying the weekly Friday Afternoon Africana series over at Mo' dernity Mo' problems, and I have a big backlog of music that I wanted to recommend around here, so I decided to shamelessly copy him: here's your first Friday Evening Africana, for all three of you to enjoy.
This week has been a long week, and it's been rough, and there are many decisions to be made... but for now, for just a few minutes, here's some party music to forget about it all. Bassekou Kouyate from Mali, who plays the ngoni like on one else did before him: standing. As the legend goes, during one of his shows in the 1980s, Bassekou suddenly stood up and walked up to the front of the stage. For the first time a ngoni player strapped his instrument over his shoulder like an electric guitar and was playing a solo standing up. The audience was stunned. Traditionalists even started a debate after the concert about whether this young man was allowed to change the style of playing ngoni. Although now this has become common practice with traditional instruments, and nobody is shocked about it anymore.
Kouyate’s latest album I Speak Fula was released just a week ago, and is the follow-up to Segu Blue that he did in 2007, both with his band Ngoni ba. And it's no wonder that's the name of the band, since continuosly innovating with that instrument, made of a calabash and a dried goat skin. He even invented a bass ngoni even lower in pitch than the ngoni ba (low ngoni), and added extra strings to make their instruments harmonically more flexible. I like the title "I Speak Fula" because it refers to the relationship between the Bamana and the Fula, two of the ethnic groups in Mali. And Maneno is translated in both of their languages!
