Reviews

Afrobeats Hot Hits: The New Sound of Urban Africa

VARIOUS ARTISTS

The sounds of Afrobeats are not to be mistaken with the music of Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The crucial ‘s’ denotes...

Reviewed in issue November/2017

Mezana Dounia

Massa Dembele

Massa Dembele is a jeli (griot) from Burkina Faso who plays the kamalengoni. It's a bridged harp-lute not dissimilar to...

Reviewed in issue October/2017

Live in America

Oumar Konaté

Over the last few years, Oumar Konaté has been making his mark on the Mali guitar scene, his guitar-bass-drums trio...

Reviewed in issue October/2017

Sweet as Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Sweet as Broken Dates is a collection of Somali-language pop recorded in Somalia, Somaliland and Djibouti from the 1960s right...

Reviewed in issue October/2017

Mali Blues: The Film Soundtrack

VARIOUS ARTISTS

This is the soundtrack to a documentary by the German filmmaker Lutz Gregor, which chronicles the return to Mali of...

Reviewed in issue October/2017

Daba

Makan Badjé Tounkara

The simple, unaffected, sound of the traditional ngoni (lute) is one of West Africa's most distinctive and evocative musical delights....

Reviewed in issue October/2017

Boka Kafé

Tcheka

Manuel Lopes Andrade, better known simply as Tcheka, is a guitarist and singer from Cape Verde, the former Portuguese colony...

Reviewed in issue October/2017

Gass Giss

Takeifa

Takeifa like to keep it in the family: the five members are all siblings. The four brothers and a sister...

Reviewed in issue October/2017

Creology

Carmen Souza

When you hear Carmen Souza, it's like being thrown into some sort of fantasy land where Billie Holiday was in...

Reviewed in issue August/2017

monmon

Danyèl Waro

Ever since 1994, when he burst onto the world music scene with one of his landmark songs ‘Adékalom’, Danyèl Waro...

Reviewed in issue August/2017