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.

Faudel: Baïda [2001, Mondo Melodia]
Beautiful voices mean less than beautiful records, so no wonder this second-generation Algerian-Parisian with the tenor in his pants became a star when his 1997 debut blew up. Cut before he was 20 and just released here, it's as shameless as Shakira. The rai hooks aren't always rendered on authentic instruments, which in rai I guess means electric guitar, but the synth tootles and buzzes feed the tune-at-all-costs abandon. This is the Faudel they call "the little prince of rai," throwing all of his toys on the floor at once. The one they call "the Julio Iglesias of rai" got the next album, which came out first here. Super salsa, kid, and I know there's only one "N'Sel Fik." But why not another "version hip hop"? A-

The Indestructible Beat of Soweto [1986, Shanachie]
At once more hectically urban-upbeat and more respectfully tribal-melodic than its jazzy and folky predecessors, marabi and kwela, the mbaqanga this compilation celebrates is an awesome cultural achievement. It confronts rural-urban contradictions far more painful and politically fraught than any Memphis or Chicago migration, and thwarts apartheid's determination to deny blacks not just a reasonable living but a meaningful identity. Like all South African music it emphasizes voices, notably that of the seminal "goat-voiced" "groaner" Mahlathini, who in 1983 took his deep, penetrating sung roar, which seems to filter sound that begins in his diaphragm through a special resonator in his larynx, back to the studio with the original Mahotella Queens and the reconstituted Makgona Tsohle Band. But with Marks Mankwane's sourcebook of guitar riffs hooking each number and Joseph Makwela's unshakable bass leading the groove rather than stirring it up reggae-style, it's also about a beat forthright enough to grab Americans yet more elaborate than the r&b it evokes. The defiantly resilient and unsentimental exuberance of these musicians has to be fully absorbed before it can be believed, much less understood. They couldn't be more into it if they were inventing rock and roll. And as a final benison, there's a hymn from Ladysmith Black Mambazo. A+

Ali Hassan Kuban: From Nubia to Cairo [1991, Shanachie]
Candidly commercial if not cockeyed drunk, a veteran entertainer from the melanin-rich upriver highlands leads a thoroughly modern band that favors the same stop-and-go tricks polka strategists love so. His horn players live for their solo features, and that's not to mention his accordionists--or his bagpipers. And throbbing and clattering incessantly behind, what else? The drums, the drums, the drums, the electric bass. A-

Youssou N'Dour: Set [1990, Virgin]
After five years of struggle he creates . . . a pop record, damn it, a pop record from Senegal and noplace but: 13 shortish songs replete with catchy intros, skillful bridges, concise solos, hooks. Americans should find them emotionally accessible with the help of a trot and musically accessible with no help at all: try "Toxiques," ecology the third-world way, or "Alboury," a list of progenitors you never heard of. As for aura, say he sounds like a citizen who knows exactly what he wants and exactly how to get it. Say occasionally the tama is too hectic and the horns are too hackneyed. Say everything is beautiful anyway. That exotic enough for you? A-

Obed Ngobeni: My Wife Bought a Taxi [1988, Shanachie]
Unable to contain his pride in his wife's nursing diploma or his homeland's bus service, Ngobeni shouts roughly and excitedly at the three Kurhula Sisters, who shout boisterously and joyously right back at him, with the "social commentary" promised in the notes limited to the usual warnings against gossips and ne'er-do-wells. As so often with South African pop, I wonder how much good (and bad) such lyrics can do. But I have no doubts about Ngobeni's Shangaan beat, which lopes through the grass and pounds along with its nose in the dust simultaneously, and I love the way the synthesizer evokes now a mbira, now an accordion, now a Farfisa, now a Hammond B-3. A-

Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe: Kedu America [1996, Xenophile]
I heard this patriarch's huge 1984 "Osondi Owendi" on the Nigerian highlife compilation I found back then and never thought about him again until this delight came in the mail. Nine cuts lasting 70 minutes recorded on one day of a 1994 U.S. tour, it shambles more than Original Music's Oriental Brothers CDs; the band is so well rehearsed it makes relaxation a creative principle, interacting casually over the clattering percussion and never-ending vamps of a genre that intimates juju drums and soukous guitar within the Ghanaian dance style that defined Afropop when Osadebe was a teenager. Known for his store of traditional guitar tunes, he likes the horns to poke their noses in as well. I hope some fan constructs a compilation from his 200 albums. But though his once sonorous voice is well-weathered at 60, this one-off is an honorable testament. A-

Tabu Ley Rochereau: The Voice of Lightness Vol. 2: Congo Classics 1977-1993 [2010, Sterns Africa]
With Mobutu squeezing every fantasy of affluence out of Congolese life as he strove to consolidate his power, soukous's greatest vocalist felt the pinch as recording studios, pressing plants, and his own label broke down. And though his velvet tenor remained strong and flexible as he turned 40 and then 50, his spirit faltered. As usual, Ken Braun makes the most of a discographical briar patch, most of it originally released as dance-length two-sided 45s. There's nothing approaching a clinker on these two CDs--mourning a teacher or going disco, Tabu Ley remains an ineradicable rumba original, a lover of melody and leader of men. But only at the start of disc two does the music enter the transcendant realm where the first volume lives: with "Kabasele in Memoriam" and "Lisanga Ya Banganga," both long known to American soukous fans from Franco & Rochereau's Omona Wapi, whose other two tracks woudld flow right in as well. Conclusion: although Rochereau has lived a longer and happier life, his rival and coequal probably lived an edgier and deeper one. A

Rachid Taha: Tékitoi [2005, Wrasse]
Arabic "Rock the Casbah" or no Arabic "Rock the Casbah," this doesn't bite down as fast and hard as Made in Medina, and it'll take more than the crib sheet to hold Francophone and Anglophone attention when it gets all lyrical in the middle. Nevertheless, Taha transcends translation when he snarls--to quote the booklet, crude though it may be--"Bores, racists, the undecided, ignorants, know-alls, winners, show-offs." If you doubt his righteous rage, the beat and the rai subtext and the ululating hangers-on ratchet his cred. "Get rid of them! Ask them for an explanation!" Yeah! 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

A Taste of the Indestructible Beat of Soweto [1994, Earthworks]
Knowing it would be a waste to raid the seminal mbaqanga compilation of the title, which is why his market niche might buy this one (and also why he has a market niche to begin with), Trevor Herman aims to match it out of the half dozen or so less perfect ones that followed. This is self-actualized and public-spirited, and damned if he doesn't come reasonably close. Steve Kekana and the Soul Brothers sweeten the mix, the Tiyimeleni Young Sisters show the Mahotella Queens how Shangaan women call their lover boy, and Mzwakhe Mbuli has the last word. 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-