More Big Musik from Over There!

Even though the title is pretty terrible, there’s an elegant charm about this Sheffield-based collective’s debut that’s missing from many of the global fusion acts around at the moment. Rafiki Jazz have members from Zanzibar, Mauritius, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Brazil and Colombia as well as the UK, so theirs could have been an over-spiced recipe for disaster. But there’s a surprisingly cohesive, natural flow to their music, making it easy to imagine hearing a track on the radio and wondering which indigenous culture the song had sprung from.

This illusion of rootsy authenticity is partly down to the fact that they’ve wisely avoided the musical albatross of programmed beats. Instead Rafiki Jazz generate an almost wholly acoustic sound out of marimba (xylophone), steel pans and tabla, overlaid with harmonium, koloko (a banjo-like lute) and kora. Although ‘HiLife Mama’ is very South Africa and ‘Mingi Mingi’ is far more Polynesian, there’s an overall unifying cast to the whole album that makes it all feel like the single, fluid vision of a focused group of musicians. There are also digressions into Malian blues and even a track that seems to borrow its melody from Talking Heads’ ‘Once in a Lifetime. Not to mention one of Justin Adams’ current collaborators, Juldeh Camara, adding ritti (one-stringed fiddle) and vocals to the hypnotic Toumani Diabaté-ish ‘Jallo Jerry’. So please, all you world fusion musicians out there, try dropping the programmed beats. You know it makes sense.