Orchestre National de Mauritanie

For a national orchestra, this combo had previously had a remarkably small discography: one 7” single to show for an 11-year career, the 500 copies of which were mostly given away. But then the entire discography of vast, arid, thinly populated Mauritania is remarkably small and the country’s musical culture generally little known. This enterprising release documents an apparently important group who have remained under the radar of the international African music cognoscenti. Created in 1967 to promote a distinctively national dance sound, the Orchestre National were trained in Guinea, and it shows in their blend of classic guitar-led West African dance grooving and the stark, wavering cadences of Moorish classical music. The dark, bruised sound of the horns recalls vintage Ethiopian pop, while singer Hadrami Ould Meidah brings a hint of desert blues to ‘Oumletna’, getting into a dialogue with a breathy African flute backed by stabs of wah-wah guitar. In keeping with the band’s founding premise of reflecting all Mauritania’s ethnic groups, ‘Douga-Sosso’ has a more black African griot feel, like a spaced-out, heat-dazed Ambassadeurs.

These tapes were recovered from the national radio studios shortly before a raid by troops bent on destroying all recorded evidence of the previous regime. Quick thinking on someone’s part, which allows us to listen, many years later, to some highly intriguing music that recalls a lot of things you’ve heard before without sounding quite like any of them.