2 May 2012, World Cafe

1 Galactic – Attack (Epitaph)

Urgent, brooding, almost martial afrobeat infused jazz-funk from New Orleans. Galactic have been around for 18 years, and “Attack” is from their 2012 album, “Carnivale Electricos”.

2 Dr John and the Lower 911 – Big Gap (Proper)

Dr John, long a mainstay of New Orleans music, is having a serious revival at the moment. That was something from his second last album “Tribal” which he wrote with Allen Touissaint, very much with the aftermath of Katrina and the current recession on his mind. His backing band, the Lower 911, is probably called after the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the oldest and most heavily flooded areas of New Orleans, and the birthplace of Fats Domino.

3 The Heavyweights Brass Band – Bad Romance (own label, used with permission)

From Toronto, not New Orleans, that was the Heavyweights Brass Band with their fabulous Preservation Hall type version of the Lady Gaga tune. These guys have only been around since 2009, and have supported Galactic.

4 Gilles Peterson’s Havana Cultura Band featuring Dreiser and Sexto – Orisa (Brownswood)

Last month we heard the Heavyweights Brass Band’s melting together of Cuban and New Orleans sounds curated by Gilles Peterson on his 2 CD collection “Havana Cultura: The Search Continues”. From that same collection, that was something more distinctly Cuban (or perhaps Afro-Cuban) by the house band on CD 1, the Havana Cultura Band. Orisa is a Yoruban deity.

5 Ablaye Thiossane – Bouki Ndiour (Discograph/Sterns)

Sticking with the Afro-Cuban, this time sung in Wolof , that was the great veteran Senegalese singer Ablaye Ndiaye Thiossane (who sang for Orchestra du Baobab in the 70s) with “Bouki Ndiour” off his debut solo album which is just out. A bunch of former and present Baobabians play with him on the album, including the sax player Thierno Kouyate.

6 Sory Kandia Kouyate – N’na (Sterns)

Cuban sounds ended up being the musical substrate for most of West Africa in the late 60s and 70s, including Guinea. Sterns has just released the fifth set of its double CD reissues of the Syliphone catalogue. Syliphone was the label linked to the government- funded cultural renaissance in Guinea in the 70s. The new CDs collect the music of Sory Kandia Kouyate, an incredibly powerful singer with a massive repertoire of traditional songs, and is called “La Voix de la Revolution”. “N’na” is from volume 1, on which he’s backed by “modern” dance bands and sounding more poppy than traditional.

7 Teta – Ze mahery managnaze (Buda Musique)

Teta plays in the Madagascan Tsapiky style and has been doing so since he was age 8, in the mid 70s. The tune is off his 2012 album called “Fototse Racines Roots”.

8 Damily – Rombo (Helico)

Hailing from the Tulear region in southern Madagascar, that was the great Tsapiky band, Damily, with a short, frenetic percussive piece, pretty typical of the style.

9 Prince Fatty Meets the Mutant HiFi – Across the border (Mr Bongo)

Where the barren, tumbleweed Mariachi plains meet tropical Jamaica. Prince Fatty and the Mutant HiFi are essentially a pair of producers – Mike Pelanconi and Nick Coplowe. Coplowe has done a bunch of work for the British dub label On-U Sound.

10 Augustus Pablo – Black Ants Lane (Goldenlane Records)

A classic track from the late 70s. Black Ants Lane is a rough area off Red Hills Road in uptown Kingston.

11 New Age Steppers – The Worst of Me (On-U Sound)

After about 30 years’ absence here is the great On-U Sound punky-dubby collective The New Age Steppers, with something new. The late Ari Up (from another punky dub band, the Slits) is at the helm, as she used to be back when the New Age Steppers were a regular thing. She was fighting cancer when she was making the last New Age Steppers album “Love Forever”, and it’s probably the last thing she did.

12 Jagmohan - Aji Kahan Gum Ho (Finders Keepers Records)

The 80s and 90s saw a craze in Bollywood for cheap and nasty horror movies, usually scored by some top-drawer Bollywood composers. Finders Keepers has just released a collection of some of the finer musical moments of the genre – “Bollywood Bloodbath: The B-music of the Indian horror film industry”. The song we heard there was composed by Jagmohan – the performers are lost.

13 Anoushka Shankar – Traveller (Deutsche Grammophon)

From a B grade label, to a decidedly A grade one. Deutsche Grammophon have been making forays into the popular of late. The sitar-playing daughter and pupil of Ravi Shankar, Anoushka Shankar, has just put out a release with Spanish flamenco producer Javier Limon – most of it is way too polite and fusionesque for my liking. The title track “Traveller” lets rip though.

14 Anda Union – Galloping Horses (Hohhot)

From the Inner Mongolian city of Hohhot, a wonderful, relatively new band off their fine 2011 album “The Wind Horse”.

15 Kurmanjiang Zaccharia – Babulao (Sublime Frequencies)

Also in Northern China, but on the west side in the Xinjiang region (in fact recorded close to the border with Kazakhstan), that was the Kazakh string virtuoso, Kurmanjiang Zaccharia, playing his two-stringed dongbra. It’s on the album “Ethnic Minority Music of Northwest Xinjiang”, recorded in 2009 just before the Uyghur uprising in that region.

16 Neung Phak – Kawp Koon Kawp Koon (Abduction Records)

Neung Phak is essentially a South East Asian tribute group, hailing from nowhere remotely close to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia or Vietman – they’re from Oakland, California. The tune is from their second LP called imaginatively “2”. The connection between this and the Kazakh track? Mark Gergis, a driving force in Neung Phak, collaborates with and collects music for Sublime Frequencies, especially music from SE Asia and the Middle East.

17 Burnt Friedman – Deku No Bo (Nonplace)

While we are on the subject of ethnological forgeries, here’s another one, this time committed by Burnt Friedman, sounding vaguely Javanese or Indonesian. “Deku No Bo” is off his latest album called “Bokoboko”, which is Japanese for “uneven”. He’s playing modified oil barrels, monochord, rubber band guitar and sarod (an Indian stringed instrument).

18 Renata Rosa – Marcha do Donzel (Nascente)

The rabeca violin is a kind of peasant fiddle from the Pernambeco region of northeastern Brazil, and Renata Rosa is one of the best exponents. This comes from a fabulous collection mostly of field recordings produced for the BBC that Nascente brought out last year called “World Routes – On the Road”.

19 Nidi D’Arac – Ronde noe (Tarantulae Management & Production)

For some reason I paired that Brazilian peasant music with this radically updated version of southern Italian peasant music by Nidi D’Arac, now based in Rome. It’s from their latest album “Taranta Container”.

20 Shazalakazoo featuring Wikluh Sky – Plus 49 (Eastblok Music)

From Belgrade, Shazalakazoo with some kind of Balkan ragamuffin, from their latest album called “Karton City Boom”.

21 Balkan Beat Box – Ljepa Mare (Crammed Records)

Very similar to Shazalakazoo, but from NYC, from their 2010 album, “Blue Eyed Black Boy”.

22 La Bottine Souriante – En p’tit boggie (Les Productions Mille-Pattes)

Québecois music at its best: La Bottine Souriante - "the smiling boot" – with the decidedly skanky “En p’tit boggie”. From their 2001 album, “Cordial”.

23 Iarla O’Lionaird – Ta Dha Ghabhairin Bhui Agam (The Goat Song) (Real World Music)

Quebecois includes a healthy slice of Irish music, so I thought I’d head for the Kilkenny countryside with sean-nos (“old-style”) singer, Iarla O’Lionaird, formerly of the Afro Celt Sound System. That was his version of the Gaelic ditty “The Goat Song”. Producer Leo Abrahams is on guitar, and think Leafcutter John is in there providing subtle electronics, and Caoimhin O Raghallaigh is on fiddle and hardanger fiddle. It’s off his 2011 release on Real World called “Foxlight”.

24 Seamus Ennis – The Kerry Recruit (Traditional)

The great Irish singer, folk-song collector and piper, Seamus Ennis, with his version of the traditional tune, “The Kerry Recruit”, which dates from the Crimean War in the mid 1850s. Apparently, if you were around during the playing of "The Kerry Recruit" during the Crimean War, you could be thrown in jail.

25 Nick Wyke and Becki Driscoll – Coronation Day (Own label)

Nick Wyke and Becki Driscoll are a fiddle duo based in the South West of England. “Coronation Day” is a traditional tune from their second album, which came out in 2009 called “Beneath the black tree”.

26 Liz Green – Displacement Song (Pias)

Singer songwriter Liz Green is from Liverpool and relatively new on the folk scene. “Displacement Song” is a kind of Brechtian waltz.

27 Saara Markkanen – Ralli (Solo Tuotanto)

The slightly melancholy sounding Finnish singer-songwriter Saara Markkanen. According to a blog entry I came across, her lyrics are “quite poetic and a bit dark”. From the album “Aina Jossain Sataa”.

28 Hanne Hukkelberg – Erik (Propeller)

Another singer/songwriter, also Scandinavian, but this time from Norway – Hanne Hukkelberg with something pretty marvelous off her very recent album, “Featherbrain”: a duet with her 88 year old neighbour, Erik Vister, who happens to be a classically trained singer, with detuned piano accompaniment.

29 Olafur Arnalds – Everything Must Change (Erased Tapes)

The 25 year Icelandic wunderkind, Olafur Arnald, with some soundtrack music he calls “Everything must change” which is from the 2011 Sam Levinson movie “Another Happy Day”.