Random A-List for Set: Africa

Artists from Africa.

Here are 12 A-list albums, selected at random from Set: Africa. Use your Reload button to get more.

Before Benga 2: The Nairobi Sound [1993, Original]
We all know African music is meant to be apprehended rhythm foremost--except for the oddballs who think maybe it actually comes tunes first. Early electric pop from a high-set city too temperate for open-air dance halls, these lovingly collected Kenyan singles lilt and sway beguilingly, and the lyrics mix timeless courtship and dated topicality with an earnest smile I'm sure will charm Swahili speakers. But the collective genius is in the tunes. Play it a dozen times, then attend as each melody makes its modest entrance, and you'll swear you've been hearing every one for years. And I guess it's possible you have. But not in the same place. A

Alpha Blondy: Revolution [1989, Shanachie]
Finally the great weird one he had in him. Its seven cuts include a chanson in Dioula, a crude, endearingly right-on crossover bid called "Rock and Roll Remedy," and the Solar System vamping for 10 minutes behind a speech by Côte d'Ivoire's 84-year-old president Félix Houphouêt-Boigny, a Francophile bourgeois as unrevolutionary as any head of state in Africa. Wish my French was up to what the Old Man is saying; wish my Dioula was up to what the songs about bleeding and elections are saying. I do know that the lead love song ends up in a mental hospital, because it's in English. A−

Etoile de Dakar: Volume 1: Absa Gueye [1993, Sterns]
Supposedly, Youssou N'Dour has gone onto better things than these first recordings, cut in 1979 with the seminal band he formed two years earlier at age 18. And without doubt his music has grown more ambitious and more accomplished. But there's nothing youthfully naive or folkishly charming about mbalax at this stage of evolution. Counterbalancing clavé-inflected sway with hectic tama-drum interjections, making ample room for guitar and horns, it never shrinks from its own complexities or sinks under their weight. With five band members writing, many of the 10 tracks grab you at every turn. And unlike N'Dour's always admirable and usually enjoyable internationalist fusions, they never overreach. A

The Heartbeat of Soweto [1988, Shanachie]
Earthworks having cast in with Virgin, Shanachie goes to the well and tests Zulu hegemony with its own mbaqanga compilation. There are big advantages to the wider range of tribal melodies and beats--in Western pop terms, sharper hooks and a less monolithic groove. Seven artists divide up the 12 tracks, and while the hottest stuff is still Zulu--Usuthu's eternally recurrent tunelet, Amaswazi Emvelo's supertipico forward grind--this album has its urban heart in the bush. From the simple Tsonga drumbeats of Thomas Chauke's opener to the Shangaan family chorale of M.D. Shiranda's closer, unprofessionalism in no way diminishes the music's skill or complexity. Folkies may well prefer it to Indestructible. Rock and rollers with ears won't settle for one or the other. A

Miriam Makeba: Sangoma [1988, Warner Bros.]
It's disorienting at first to hear women singing what sounds like mbube, and though the weave would be richer (and more competitive) if most of them weren't this fifty-five-year-old matriarch, whose still-powerful voice has definitely thickened, the disorientation is salutary--South African pop is very male. Half the tunes are gorgeous and all of them are traditional, drawn from a cross-section of tribal cultures dominated by Makeba's clicking Xhosa. But they're not recreated, which usually means embalmed at best--they're interpreted for the studio, which permits Makeba her overdubs and enables Russ Titelman to lock in the spare accompaniment. There's even a synthesizer, and damned if I can tell exactly where. A−

Dorothy Masuka: Pata Pata [1991, Mango]
Masuka's an old-timer, a Zimbabwean with South African tribal ties who came up in the upwardly mobile artistic ferment of the Jo'burg '50s. Because there's not much country in her, her "marabi" derives from Sophiatown musical theatre rather than, say, Zulu wedding music. Sprucing up tried-and-true melodies with mbira-based chimurenga effects, she constructs a swingingly syncretic popular style that partakes of more than its allotted portion of pop--and that sounds southern African, not South African, with none of mbaqanga's guttural thrust or mbube's intricate spirituality. Nobody this side of Abdullah Ibrahim has made the musical aspirations of genteel black South Africans so credible. A−

Youssou N'Dour: Best of 80's [1998, Celluloid]
Not a reissue, or anyway not an '80s reissue, this comprises 1995's Senegal-only Dikkaat and 1997's Senegal-only St. Louis, which in turn comprise a dozen songs supposedly composed (and recorded?) in the '80s, although none of my sources has unearthed them all. I own two: the strictly indigenous title song of Etoile de Dakar's Thiapotholy, and a David Sancious stinker buried at the tail end of The Lion. The former reemerges cleaner, faster, and more professional, none of which are necessarily positives; I'll take the rock sonics of renegade guitarist Badou N'Diaye over Jimmy Mbaye's lithe new jack lines any day. But the latter is improved so much it's almost unrecognizable, rougher and shapelier simultaneously. Everywhere guitars, horns, and tama drums interact with sharper punch and tighter pizzazz than in his wild dance music or his crossover set pieces. And sometimes--I'd single out "Xarit," "Diambar," and the unabashedly beautiful "Njaajaan Njaay"--the songwriting is even more inspired than the playing. A−

Papa Noel & Papi Oviedo: Bana Congo [2002, Tumi]
Noel's record--Papi, the well-respected tres-playing offspring of tres legend Isaac Oviedo, is on only half the 10 tracks. But collaboration agrees with Noel, the longtime Franco guitarist and recent Kékélé mainstay whose exercises in the son style that fueled Congolese rumba in olden times gain contour from their brushes against Cuba's compatible melodic resources. The tunes are brighter than on his solo album, and Oviedo's angular tres adds bite to the rumba flow. Several lyrics taken by second-rank soneros boil down to "Our classic style beats your newfangled noise," which I'm glad I only know from the booklet. The music makes the case better without them. A−

Sound d'Afrique [1981, Mango]
This unannotated compilation of six hit (I assume) dance (though "Jalo" gets pretty meditative) tracks out of Francophone Africa is a sampler rather than a true album, jumping and skipping style-to-style. From Senegal, Muslim soul; from Côte d'Ivoire, sound-effects guitar; from Upper Volta, underdeveloped structure and rich feeling. From Cameroun, Zaire, and Congo, the continent's dominant beat: Afrorumba over sweetly chattering rhythm guitar, hooked on the opening cut by a refrain so unforgettable Pete Seeger would shit cobalt in the Hudson for it. A−

Rachid Taha: Bonjour [2010, Knitting Factory]
In 2009 the Algerian-born internationalist set down in New York and recorded 10 terrific tracks sans Cantabridgian avant-eclectic Steve Hillage and avec Parisian chanson-rocker Gaëtan Roussel. On the whole they're prettier than his casbah-rocking norm, especially the love songs that open and close, and when he claims that the uncommonly cushy Middle Eastern beat on "Ha Baby" is actually part-country (as in Nashville country, really), you can half hear what he means. Quality dips ever so slightly tracks six-through-eight, including a celebration of ancient Arab-Jewish amity and a whispered one he IDs as "how to talk about death while staying alive." But my only real complaint is that there are no trots--just enticing descriptive phrases alongside mostly Arabic script, though not on the title track, which begins "Hello Kitty bonjour Violent Femmes." In a world where too many are set on paradise, I believe this guy is committed to the party of this world, which is also my party, and I want ever detail I can get. A

Tinariwen: Tassili [2011, Anti-]
The first Saharans to break internationally are forbidding even by the sere standards of the region. But they calm rather than mesmerize, which together with some subtly shameless showmanship helps sell them to peace-out types. Having found 2009's widely praised and supposedly "traditional" Imidiwan too lulling by half, which may be because I joined the caravan before Pitchfork and Entertainment Weekly and is definitely because they should rock out a little, I was disappointed to learn that this one is where they abandon electric guitars. But since there's never been any Agadez ax-god abandon about headman Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, the difference is marginal, especially given the help they've gathered on their first album for Epitaph's alt-trad label: Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone on guitar and/or vocals on five of the 12 tracks, Dirty Dozen Brass Band on a sixth. The collaborations are subtle but telling, as are Alhabib's deep melodies. Not "desert blues." Sadder than blues--too sad to be merely calming. A−