Songs of Happiness, Poison & Ululation

Over the last decade, as ageing baby boomers took stock of their past and waxed nostalgic about the pop, soul, funk and R&B of their youth, they discovered a parallel universe of African artists: acts such as Fela Kuti, who had put a Nigerian spin on funk, and Orchestre Baobab, who added Senegalese accents to dreamy Cuban ballads. But the great continent has vast riches and some, like the Tanzanian dance bands of the 1970s, developed pure sounds entirely uninfluenced by James Brown or the likes of Johnny Hallyday or Cliff & the Shadows. So perhaps only more adventurous ears will appreciate the delights of the Western Jazz Band, from western Tanzania. They have electric guitars but no 4/4 time-keeper on the drums, just a conga supporting vocal harmonies and sax lines that sound like something washed up from the Indian ocean on a dhow. Their songs are short and inventive, with a lead guitar picking a delicate filigree around a rhythm working changes on chord arpeggios and a third guitar: the mi-solo. Both lead and rhythm, it flits mercurially between the other guitars and also doubles as a percussion instrument when the player “chunks” the deadened strings, making it sounding like a rasping guiro. Western Jazz don’t have the manic drive of DO Misiani & the Benga sound, which was an earlier release in the series. Instead, theirs is a sparer, more thoughtful sound that allows us to concentrate on the melodic guitar and the vocals, which concern all the things in the album’s title and more.