Episode 14: African Underground 1

Some music from Africa is highly approachable for gringo ears. Funk, disco, and boogie sounds from the motherland track nicely with the Western music styles that inspired them, and they are frequently compiled and reissued for world music labels today. Afro-latin, although less well anthologized, still stays close to the source material from Cuba, sounds that are not terribly unfamiliar to US listeners.

But there are other musical styles from Africa that are more underground in the popular Western consciousness. In some cases this is because the music draws from ancient local traditions without as much influence from modern Western sources. In some cases it may be due to use of indigenous instruments that are not known in the Americas, such as the kora or ngoni... or it may be due to the Arab-influenced melismatic singing style that sounds foreign to our ears. 

Today we will hear from three such underground musical traditions from Africa. We begin the set with desert blues from the Niger River valley winding along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert... this is rootsy country style music from the region and is born from nomadic peoples outside the large cities. We will hear tracks in this set from two legends of Malian music... Tinariwen is one of my favorite current acts; we will hear from their latest LP Amadjar; we will also hear one of the great albums from Ali Farka Toure, the 2006 release Savane, which has been recently issued on vinyl for the first time. 

We will next visit the larger cities of the Niger River valley: Mali's river portsTombouctou, Mopti, Segou, and Bamako. In this middle passage we will sample vintage sounds from the mighty regional orchestras of these cities in the 1970s, along with similar sounds from acts based in neighboring countries of Guinea and Ivory Coast.

For the end of the set we jump east to Ethiopia, a region with a unique history and music style. Located on the East Coast of Africa, Ethiopian music draws influence from the East, including Bollywood songs as well as the pentatonic scale, in which five notes create an octave.