Afropentatonism

With five notes per octave, the pentatonic scale is considered the oldest scale in the world. Originating in ancient Mesopotamia circa 3,000 BC, it spread to the four corners of the globe, and is found today at the root of blues, jazz and country music. Afropentatonism, its African variant, is what links together Nigerien musician Alhousseini Anivolla (currently residing in Berlin) and Girum Mezmur from Addis Ababa. The two guitar players have come together for this release to kick out the jams in a Sahel/Ethio-jazz style.

There is something wonderfully strange and alluring about the guitar playing here. At times invoking sonic visions of Western guitar heroes like Hendrix and Santana, more often, however, it conveys a very non-Western sense of humility in the face of the infinite, as though the two guitarists were honing their licks around a desert campfire surrounded by vast nothingness. With all due respect to Mezmur, it is Anivolla who gets the upper hand here, supplying the vocals as he does, which are delivered in a style that is part chant, part invocation and part high-spirited whooping it up. The tracks are wonderfully repetitive to the point of being hypnotic. Once a groove is found, the two musicians stick to it with an urgent force, yet lightness of spirit. The result is almost trance-inducing, a soulful, yet secular musical mode deriving from the same sacred root of Sufi zikr (ritual chanting of the names of God), common in the Sahel.