The Nile: The Song of the Rivers

Rivers can be the basis of a beautiful musical journey. Songlines #1 covered a splendid Virgin Classics three-CD set that was recorded in various locations along the Ganges. There have been good recordings following the Mississippi too. The Nile is the world’s longest river, and although it predominantly flows through desert, the territories are musically fertile. Although the White and Blue Nile flow through Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi, this album focuses on the powerhouses that are Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt (apart, that is, from one traditional harp and percussion track from Uganda). The set includes 22 tracks of urban and rural music and there are some well-known names here. It opens with the late king of Nubian music, Ali Hassan Kuban, and features Ethiopia, Mahmoud Ahmed, Mohammed Jimmy Mohammed, Alemayehu Eshete from Ethiopia; Abdel Gadir Salim and Emmanuel Jal from from Sudan; and Les Musiciens du Nil, El Tanbura, Aicha Redouane and many others from Egypt. I find the Nubian call-and-response song by Saleh Walwali outstays its welcome, but it is one of the few pieces actually about the river itself, describing floods and the building of the Aswan dam. There’s lots of variety and some lesser-known names are surely a good thing. Plucked lyres recur the territory, from the simsimiyya in Egypt, the tambura or rabab in Sudan and the krar and huge begena (also known as ‘the harp of King David’) in Ethiopia. There’s a very atmospheric track at the end of the first disc of Abiy Seyoum singing a song about the Last Judgement with the begena buzzing away beneath.

The presentation is very attractive with excellent photos. What lets it down is the actual written content – few hard facts and some pseudo-poetic guff about music and rivers. They also make the classic mistake of showing a pair of Indian tabla drums when the instrument played in the Dorsaf Hamdani song is the Egyptian tabla, a goblet drum.