Reviews
Faya
New Yorker Joe Driscoll (now based in the UK and part of the One Taste collective) and Sekou Kouyaté, the...
Reviewed in issue Jan/Feb/2013
Funky Highlife
A 1975 release on the Essiebons label from Ghana, this is an album of occasionally funky but mostly sweet highlife,...
Reviewed in issue Jan/Feb/2013
A Nigerian Retrospective 1966-79
Soundway are on a roll at the moment, with new projects and compilations such as this that steadily mine the...
Reviewed in issue Jan/Feb/2013
From Senegal to the World: 80s Classics & Rarities
Youssou N’Dour began the 80s as the hub of a dynamic emerging music scene in Senegal and ended them being...
Reviewed in issue Jan/Feb/2013
Zozodinga
One of the founding fathers of Touareg ishumar music, or desert blues in European marketing-speak, Oumbadougou returns with his first...
Reviewed in issue Nov/Dec/2012
Nootee
The richness of sub-Saharan West African music continues to unfold before our ears as regional styles are identified and new...
Reviewed in issue Nov/Dec/2012
Sister Pili + 2
Moreno & L’Orchestra First Moja-One
While visiting my brother in Nairobi in 1983, we went to a nightclub and heard Batamba Wenda Morris (aka Moreno)....
Reviewed in issue Nov/Dec/2012
En Yay Suh
If you start listening to this album at home, take it one meaty track at a time. The whole album...
Reviewed in issue Nov/Dec/2012
The Rough Guide to the Music of Ethiopia
Few countries’ musical heritage has been pilfered so thoroughly as has Ethiopia’s in recent years. Rarely a month goes by...
Reviewed in issue Nov/Dec/2012
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...
Reviewed in issue Nov/Dec/2012
