6 May 2015, World Cafe

1 Akale Wube (feat Manu Dibango) – Anbessa (Clapson)

Album: Sost

Paris-based Akale Wube’s potent take on Ethio-Jazz.  Akale Wube have been going since 2009 and have just released their fourth album which confusingly is called “Sost”, Amharic for three.  Initially they only played vintage stuff on the Ethiopiques label, but they’re writing their own stuff of late.  The very great Cameroonian sax player and band leader, Manu Dibango, now in his 80s, guests.

2 Ibeyi – Eleggua (XL Recordings)

Album: Ibeyi

Ibeyi are French-Cuban twin sisters, Lisa-Kainde and Naomi Diaz, the progeny of percussionist Anga Diaz, of the Buena Vista Social Club, and French-Venezuelan singer, Maya Dagnino.  Ibeyi have just released their first album of mostly self-penned songs in English, but this is their version of the traditional Yoruba song.

3 Batida – Mama Watoto (Soundway Records)

Album: Dois

Betida is basically Lisbon-based Pedro Coquenao (or DJ Mpula) and a bunch of guests playing a hybrid of pop music, often electro, from Angola and Kenya – genres like Kuduro, Benga and Semba. 

4 Dona Onete – Homenagem aos Orixas (Mais Um Discos)

Album: Feitico Caboclo

Dona Oneta is from the Province of Para in NE Brazil near the mouth of Amazon, and during her life was mainly a history professor and secretary of culture in her hometown before she started a career as a singer in her retirement 8 years ago.  She plays a style she calls “carimbo chamegado”.  “Feitico Caboclo” came out in 2014. 

5 Beth Carvalho – Nas veias do Brasil

Album: Clube do Samba vol. 3

Sticking in Brazil, this time Rio de Janeiro, a samba star of the late 60s and 70s and going strong, Beth Carvalho is a singer, guitarist and song writer, and samba school founder. 

6 Abelardo Barroso with Orquesta Sensacion – Le Reina del Guaguanco (World Circuit)

Album: Cha cha cha

 Abelardo Barroso died in 1972 but he’s still a hero in Latin America and West Africa, and the label World Circuit has just remastered a bunch of recordings from the 50s he made with Orquestra Sensacion.  He’d been a celebrity in 20s and 30s, but had had a bad 40s, and the 50s recordings marked a return to fame. 

7 Amparo Sanchez – Plegaria (World Village)

Album: Espiritu de sol

Amaparo Sanchez released her third album in 2014.  She’s playing with Joey Burns and John Convertino of Calexico, like on her other albums.  This one was mastered at Burns’s studio in Arizona.

8 Fumaca Preta – Perdidos (Soundway)

Album: Fumaca Preta

Fumaca Preta or Black Smoke are an international outfit based in Amsterdam - a Portuguese/Venezuelan, two Brits  and an American – with a love of Latin American and Turkish psych. 

9 Boubacar Traore – Hona (LusAfrica)

Album: Mbalimaou

The great Malian singer and guitarist, Boubacar Traore, has a new album out co-produced by the great kora player Ballake Sissoko called “Mbalimaou”.  The ngoni player is Oumar Barou and the harmonica player is Vincent Bucher. 

10 Samba Toure – Farikoyo (Glitterbeat)

Album: Gandadiko

Samba Toure hails from the Timbuktu region, and learnt from and played with Ali Farka Toure in the late 90s. He began his solo career in the early 2000s and he seems to on his 6^th album, “Gandadiko” which means “Burning Land”, about drought in the N of Mail.  It’s terrific record - very hypnotic, quite subdued – about trying to put things together after the incursion without skirting the big social problems.  There’s a radical reworking of one of his tunes later on.

Two guitarists, one Swedish the other American, influenced by music from the N or NW regions of Africa:   

11 Jose Gonzalez – Stories we build, stories we tell (Mute)

Album: Vestiges & Claws

Jose Gonzalez got some of his Touareg chops, at least, from touring recently with Tinariwen.

12 Sir Richard Bishop – International Zone (Drag City)

Album: Tangier Sessions

Sir Richard Bishop, of the global pyschodelic and Merry Pranksterish band The Sun City Girls that once existed, and co-founder of the very great label Sublime Frequencies which still exists, I’m very pleased to say.  His new album recorded in Tangiers in 2014 shows off a pretty old, very expensive guitar he had bought recently in Geneva.

13 Ozlem Bulut Band – Mart Kedisi (World Music Network)

Album: Ask Bitmez

Something very infectious from Turkey.  They seem to label this kind of stuff “oriental jazz”, but I’m hearing large dollops of Kurt Weil type cabaret.  Ozlem Bulut is trained opera singer. 

14 Amira Madunjanin – Iz Banju Ide Šejtan Devojče (trad) (World Village)

Album: Silk & Stone

  

Amira Medunjanin, born in Sarajevo, plays sevdeh, a kind of folk music mainly from Bosnia although it’s found across the whole of the former Yugoslavia.  There’s some amazing qanun and oud playing in this tune. 

15 Taraf de Haidouks – Mother, my little mama (Crammed Discs)

Album: Of lovers, gamblers and parachute skirts

One of the best and most well known Roma bands.  They’re from the Romanian village of Clejani and have been going for 25 years, but the death of a number of their founding members apparently put their continued existence in jeopardy.  Anyway, they’re back with a bunch of new members, plus some origins, and Viorica Rudareasa, who sang with the band in the 90s. 

16 Lo’Jo – Tajaban (World Village)

Album: 310 Lunes, Photographie d’un objet sonore

Lo’Jo, who are from Paris, is another band that has been going for 25 years and in 2014 they released a commemorative album called 310 Lunes, which if my calculations are right is the number of lunar months in 25 years.  The album consists of rearrangements of a number of their tunes for a five piece brass-wind ensemble. 

17 Zebrina – Freedom Groove (Tzadik)

Album: Hamidbar Medaber

Toronto-based keyboardist Jonathan Feldman and clarinetist Ben Goldberg are at the heart of Zebrina and their mission is to seamlessly combine klezmer and jazz.  John Zorn seems to have arranged the marriage, and it’s on his label, Tzadik, that their debut CD appears.  It’s called “Hamidbar Medaber” which means “The Desert Speaks”.    

18 Sam Amidon – Pat do this, Pat do that (Nonesuch)

Album: Lily-O

Sam Amidon often takes traditional songs as a point of departure and adds wonderful off-beam arrangements that seem to fit. His new album “Lily-O” contains a lot of this sort of stuff. 

19 Buddy Miller & Jim Lauderdale – I am the man, Thomas (Cracker Barrel)

Album: Ralph Stanley and Friends: Man of Constant Sorrow

87 year old bluegrass veteran Ralph Stanley has been the subject of a many tribute album.  There’s a new one out produced by Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale with a stack of guests.  It has the man himself on every track and its pretty dern wonderful.  Here’s a tune with the producers and Stanley. 

20 Rhiannon Giddens – Last Kind Words (Nonesuch)

Album: Tomorrow is my turn

Rhiannon Giddens, probably most well known as the fiddle player for the Carolina Chocolate Drops, is a trained opera singer (we had one of those earlier too) and she uses her voice to work to huge and varied effect on first solo album.  Her version of the great Geechie Wiley song recorded for the first time in 1930 for Paramount Records in Grafton, Wisconsin.

21 Leroy Sibbles – Guiding Star (VP Records)

Album: Gussie Presenting: The Right Tracks

One of the best collections that came out in 2014 was of a 2CD haul of stuff recorded by the reggae producer Gussie Clarke mainly in the 70s.  This is a tune we’ve heard before on this show in a number of guises.  This version’s by Leroy Sibbles, the lead singer for one of greatest reggae vocal bands, the Heptones.

22 The Lions meet Dub Club – Picture on the wall (Pink Dub) (Stones Throw)

Album: The Generation in Dub

The Lions are a 12-member band from Los Angeles.  From their 2014 release, a dub version of 2013’s “This Generation”. 

23 Schneider TM – Be Ki Don (Cockpit Dub) (Glitterbeat)

Glitterbeat: Dubs & Versions I

We heard Samba Toure earlier in the show – here’s a dub remix of a 2013 tune. 

24 Trio Chemirani – Attar (Harmonia Mundi)

Album: Dawar

The Chemirani Trio plays zarbs – classical Persian drums – wooden, goblet shaped, with a single head consisting of goat or camel skin.  It’s father-and-sons trio – the father, Djamchid, was born in the early 40s in Tehran and immigrated to Paris in the early 60s where his two sons in the Trio, Bijan and Keyvan, were born.

26 Mahsa Vahdat & Marjan Vahdat – Chahar Pareh

Album: Song from a Persian garden

Mahsa Vahdat and her sister Marjan live in Iran but recorded most of their stuff outside of the country because women apparently can’t sing solo, unless it’s for women-only audiences. Here’s something they recorded in the Italian embassy in Tehran in 2007 with bunch of Iranian and Norwegian musicians, including the guitarist Knut Reiersrud who is pretty great. 

27 Hallvard T Bjorgum – Skjoldmoyslaget Form Etter Olav Heggland (Sylvartum)

Album: Skjoldmoyslaget

One of the great living Norweigan fiddlers.  Hallvard continues the tradition of ace fiddling and silversmithery started by his father, Torleiv, also a legend.  In 2014 Bjorgum was appointed a Knight of the 1^st class of St Olav for his services to folk music.

28 Sinikka Langeland – The Light Streams In (ECM)

Album: The Half-Finished Heaven

Sinikka Langeland is also from Norway but she plays the Finnish kantele, which is a zither-type instrument, and has a fabulous stentorian voice.  On her new album she teams up with sax player Trygve Seim, viola player Lars Ander Tomter and percussionist Markku Ounaskari to play music inspired by the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.