1 May 2013, World Cafe

Programme airs on Wed 1 May 2013, 10 - 12pm South African time on Fine Music Radio, 101.3 Fm in the Cape Town area or via live stream http://infant.antfarm.co.za/fmr/fmr-player.asp

FMR's website: http://www.fmr.co.za/

Check out this clip of Orchestra Polyrhythmo de Cotonou:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SfFT3ie-ok

1 Bongo Botrako – Respirar pa trabajar (Kasba Music)

Album: Revoltosa

Bongo Botrako’s amalgam of rumba, reggae and punk and bunch of the other stuff is the brain child of singer Uri Giné who apparently got inspired while hanging out on his local plaza in his hometown of Tarragona watching the world go by.  Definite sonic connections to Manu Negra there – they’ve shared a producer in the past.  “Respirar pa trabajar” is off their latest, “Revoltosa”, which is produced by Amparo Sanchez, who helped invent this sort of thing in Spain as part of Amparanoia. 

2 Los Gemelos – La Galopera (Carillon)

Los Gemelos, The Twins, were a sort of Spanish pop peasant folk group in the late 50s and early 60s.  On they second EP which came out in 1960, they turn to Spanish speaking Central and South America for inspiration.  Here is something got from Paraguay.

3 Amparo Sanchez – Pulpa de tamarindo (Kasba Music/Wrasse Records) -

Album: Alma de cantaora

Amparo Sanchez’s lovely mixture of Cuban, Mexican and Cali-Texan styles.  The tune is and it’s from her new album, “Alma de cantaora”, which translates as “Soul Singer”. 

4 Ana Alcaide – Como La Luna (Lubican)

Album: Como la luna y el sol

Ana Alcaide uses Spanish medieval and traditional music and Sephardic music from Spain, Turkey and other places as one of the bases for her inventions and arrangements. Her other bases are the nyckelharpa and Hardanger fiddle, traditional Scandinavian instruments, which she learnt in southern Sweden while studying biology. The nyckelharpa is a keyed fiddle – like a hurdy-gurdy but with bow to sound the strings, instead of a wheel. “Como la luna” translates as “As the moon”.

5 Seckou Keita – Hino (Astar Artes Recordings)

Album: Miro

Seckou Keita’s remarkable take on flamenco played on the kora, with singer Inma “La Carbonera”.  It’s from his latest LP. Keita now lives in Nottingham, UK, but was born into a griot family in Casamance, in the south of Senegal.


















6 Ablaye Cissoko & Volker Goetze – Silo (Motema Music)
Album: Amanke Dionti

A wonderful kora fusion from Ablaye Cissoko, also from Senegal, and German trumpeter Volker Goetze.  They’re been playing together for about 12 years.  Joe Quitzke is on percussion on their latest album.

7 Mokoomba – Manunge (Zig Zag World) NC Moyo, M Muzaza, T Samende, NG Pauline

Album: Rising Tide

Mokoomba hails from around Victorian Falls, northern Zimbabwe, but are totally pan-African in their approach.  “Manunge” is a hunting song sung in the Angolan language, Mgundu, and written by various band members.

8 Jimi Tenor and Kabu Kabu – Floating Orange (Puu) (Famson, Savage, Tenor)
Album: 4^th Dimension

From 2009, Finnish multi-instrumentalist and composer, Jimi Tenor, with his band of Berlin-based fellow Fins and a bunch of West Africans, Kabu Kabu, and their mix of dark, mid-70s Miles Davis sounds and rich Western African drumming. 

9 Francis Bebey – Ngoma Likembe (Original Music)

Album: Akwaaba: Music for Sanza

A tune from Cameroonian Polymath Francis Bebey’s 1985 album “Akwaaba: Music for Sanza”. A sanza is type of mbira, and in the tune title “Ngoma Likembe” - the “ngoma” means “dance” and “likembe” is a type of sanza.  Before dedicating himself to being a novelist, poet, and composer-musician, Bebey worked as a radio journalist in Africa and France, working for information service of UNESCO.  Bebey often employs all kinds of outré production techniques, like the double-tracked voice on that track and layers of reverb.

10 Bobonga Stars – Koteja (Strut)

Album: Change The Beat: The Celluloid Record Story 1979-1987

On the theme of fancy 1980s production techniques applied to African music – one the few label few labels to get things right was Celluloid Records based in NYC – set up by Parisian Jean Karakos and New Yorker Bill Laswell, fresh and wealthy from his production success of Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” with its infusion of hip-hop which was just emerging the time. Strut Records has just brought a collection of all kinds of Celluloid Records’s fusions of punk, hip-hop, French and African music. “Koteja” is something slightly more straightforward from the Congo. 

11 Orchestra Super Mazembe – Kassongo (Earthworks) (Katele Aley)

Album: Giants of East Africa (2001)

Orchestra Super Mazembe was based in Nairobi, and active from the mid 70s to the mid 80s. They were part of a very vibrant Congolese rhumba/soukous scene in Kenya at the time.  Like some other key soukous bands in Kenya they have their physical roots in the Congo.  Super Mazembe arose from the band Super Vox which started in the Congo in 1967. 

12 Emma Sweeney – The Singing Kettle (Sweeney)

Album: Pangea

Emma Sweeney is a young, ridiculously good fiddle player based in Manchester.  Here’s an Irish tune from her debut album “Pangea” which she put out on her own label.  The wonderful John Doyle supplies unassuming but dexterous support on guitar.

13 Karine Polwart – The Wife of Usher’s Well (Hegri)

Album: Fairest Floo’er

Karine Polwart’s version of a Child ballad, generally considered Scottish off her 2007 album.  The Childs Ballads is a collection of 305 songs, most from the 17^th & 18^th century, put together by American academic Francis J Child and published at the end of the 19^th century.  Although Polwart is now very much a singer-songwriter with a serious disposition, she has a solid pedigree in singing traditional songs for Scottish folk groups Malinky and the Battlefied Band, and this is pretty evident in this incredible version.

14 Alasdair Roberts & Friends – The end of breeding (Drag City)
Album: A Wonder Working Stone

Another Scottish great is Alasdair Roberts. Although he writes his own songs, they’re always steeped in tradition but they often have a rocky edge – in the best style of Fairport Convention. “A Wonder Working Stone” is off his brand new album. 

15 Anais Mitchell & Jefferson Hamer – Sir Patrick Spens (Winterland Records)

Album: Child Ballads

A version of one of the most well known Child Ballads by another serious singer-songwriter, this time from Vermont, and the guitarist from her backing band, Jefferson Hamer. 

16 Adrian Sherwood – Starship Bahia (On-U Sound)

Album: Survival & Resistance

Leading us out of British Isles, one of the greatest dub producers ever, Adrian Sherwood, who very much hails from London, with something off his newest album, from 2012.

17 Kiddus 1 – Thin line between love and hate (Rubin Records)

Album: Topsy Turvy World

Kiddus I was around in the 70s – I remember something he did with Lee Perry – but he only starting releasing albums in mid 2000s.  His version of the famous soul song first put out and made famous by the Persuaders.  He’s amassed some heavyweight session musos from the 70s reggae scene for this outing recorded in Germany and released a few month’s ago.




18 The Paragons – Danger in your eyes (Soul Jazz)
Album: Studio One Ironsides

Heading even further back in time to the precursors of reggae, ska and rocksteady.  The Paragons are most well know for the “Tide is high”, and that’s probably because Blondie covered it.  “Danger in your eyes” is 1968 culled from a pretty fabulous collection called “Studio One Ironsides” – Ironsides being a small singles imprint at the time produced by the legendary Coxsone Dodd, the owner of Studio One.

19 The Sharks – You made me warm (Dub Store Records/Kentone Records) (Dwight Pinkney)

Album: 7” re-issue, Japan

Something even more obscure from the same period – the spaghetti western ska of The Sharks from Japanese 7” re-issue.

20 Tommy McCook & the Supersonics– Real Cool (Treasure Isle JA)

One of the total greats of ska was the saxophonist Tommy McCook.  A single from 1967, which he put with The Supersonics in 1967 on legendary ska label, Treasure Isle.  You don’t hear cooler brass than this – cool, but warm and comforting at the same time.

21 Los Piranas – Lgbtrago y mas trago (Festina Lente Discos)

Album: Toma Tu Jabon Kapax

Los Piranas are from Colombia and the side project of the Meridian Brothers, who we listened to last month, and the Frente Cumbiero, whom I’ve never heard of before.  Injecting more psychedelia into already fully saturated sounds of vintage Afro-Carribean Colombian music. 

22 Telela Kebede – Alemiye (Axum Records)

A veteran of the Ethiopian scene but this time from the Derg period – Telala Kebede – apparently one of the first to raise her voice against the Derg. 

23 Samuel Yirga – The Blues of Wollo (Dessye Mix) (Real World Records)

Album: Guzo

Samual Yirga’s bluesy tribute to his hometown, Wollo. Yirga says “I wanted to show the deep blues of this town … while American blues uses the guitar, Ethiopians use mesengo”. A mesengo is a one-string fiddle. The singing is by British Iraqi singer, Mel Gara.

24 Stein Urheim & Mari Kvien Brunvoll – If the river (Jazzland Records)

Album: Daydream Twin

From Norway, guitarist and player of a bunch of other string instruments, Stein Urheim, and singer, Mari Kvien Brunvoll, who likes to add a bunch of other things into the mix - in this case handclaps.  A version of traditional American song “If the river” from their new album.