Perceptive Travel World Music Reviews

November/December 2007

In this issue: An African musician travels East and into Asia; belly dance pop to get you dancing; a classic from a Mauritanian singer, and a compilation to take you back to Africa, again.

Here at Perceptive Travel, "world music" is just that––music from places around this big planet of ours. If it's a little offbeat and it doesn't completely suck, we'll throw it into the global music soup. Give these a stir.



Orientissime
Thione Seck
We say: Go East, young man

There are world music purists who believe "authentic" music of a region is tainted by outside (read "Western") influences––which seems to imply that local folk or pop musicians should somehow remain locked in a time capsule for the enjoyment and analysis of ethnomusicologists. Such paternalistic purists deplore the fact that musicians from the old Belgian Congo now use synthesizers, or that sitar players in India tailor their ragas for short attention–span radio play.

Fortunately such complaints rarely trouble the musicians themselves who simply get on playing their music, exploring boundaries and using whatever new tools or collaborations come their way. Just as African musicians gave America the blues, so too did they learn from James Brown, Bob Marley and hip–hop. Cuban music is big right across Central Africa––and has been for more than five decades.

Singer Thione Seck from Senegal––a former member of the famous Star Band of Dakar and world–beating Orchestre Baobab––knows all about the songline between Cuba and West Africa, but on this new album he explores its equal and geographical opposite: he teams up with musicians from Egypt and India.

It makes for heady and exotic concoction which is grounded in his own traditions but comes coloured with oud, veena, chiming zither, coiling flutes, stabbing violins and a chorus of backing vocalists. This is music impelled by a Big Vision, and therefore probably not for those purists. But this project––more than a decade in the making; recorded in Paris, Madras and Touba––is an innovative landmark in world music, and deserves your serious attention. Your reward will be the thrilling music Seck and his cast deliver.



Cairo Nights: Bellydance Bar
Hossam Ramzy/Samy El Bably
We say: Do the hip shake, baby

On a fool judges a world music album––especially a belly dance album––by its cover. Beneath the bikini–top breasts on this unpromising looking album are the two key features: the names of Ramzy and El Bably.

Ramzy is a prolific writer, percussion player and global citizen who plays traditional music from various regions of the Middle East as well as Western jazz. He's been a guest on albums by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Cheb Khaled, Rachid Taha and Peter Gabriel.

El Bably, who was recently killed in car crash in Egypt, was a legendary trumpeter whose sound is best described as woozy, sinuous and sometimes beguilingly sleepy.

Together these two masters essay a mesmerizing crossover between jazz, Egyptian bellydance, cool Parisian nightclub and hot Mediterranean cafe. They fall for kitschy softness in the funk–lite of Kol El Aalam, but elsewhere with a large ensemble (oud, accordion, zither and so on as well as sequencers and electric bass) they make music which will transport you somewhere––if not make you want to get up and shake your belly and booty.

Graham Reid is an award–winning New Zealand travel writer, music writer and journalist. His book Postcards From Elsewhere won the 2006 Whitcoulls Travel Book of the Year award, and his website www.elsewhere.co.nz features travel stories, photos, rock'n'roll reminiscences, and a weekly music review in which he posts tracks from albums which have gone past radio programmers and other reviewers.