The Rough Guide to African Blues

What goes around comes around. African music was transported across the Atlantic in slave ships and came to soundtrack the black American experience in the form of the blues; today it has been repatriated once more. The blues in the US is now little more than a heritage industry and the music's potent, creative heart is to be found once again in Africa, most notably in Mali and Senegal, but increasingly across the entire continent. This 14-track collection kicks off fittingly with an early recording by Ali Farka Touré, who holds the same pre-eminence in African blues as Robert Johnson does in the musical heritage of the Mississippi Delta. Tamikrest and Bombino are here to represent the dynamic guitar blues of the nomadic Saharan tribes. Tracks from Nuru Kane, Amadou Diagne and Modou Touré, recorded with Western rock musicians, illustrate a rich collaborative a process that has now been under way for 20 years – ever since Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré won a Grammy for Talking Timbuktu.

It would have been easy to fill the rest of the disc with more West African examples but World Music Network's compiler Dominic Raymond-Barker opts for a bolder course with bluesy tracks from Ethiopia, Zambia, Mozambique, Sudan and even the islands of Madagascar and Réunion. There's even a second CD, a solo album by Etran Finatawa's Alhousseini Anivolla. The whole thing is a top-drawer compilation that is wonderfully diverse and yet impressively cohesive.