Elikeh’s Between 2 Worlds – Conscious Party Music

Washington, DC Afrobeat band Elikeh are known for their ecstatic live shows. The question is if their forthcoming album Between 2 Worlds can capture that magic and the answer is yes. They like biting minor keys, they write catchy hooks and the production on the album has the same kind of edge that they deliver live: it’s sonically smooth but not slick. Togolese-American frontman/guitarist Massama Dogo’s casually forceful, socially aware vocals alternate between English and his native tongue over Frank Martins’ bubbly lead guitar, Scott Aronson’s propulsive bass and the hypnotic beat of drummer Bagin Assouramou and percussionist Josh Kay, punctuated by horn section of saxophonists Clayton Englar and Megan Nortrup and trumpeters Aaron Pratts and Amumey Komla Augustino.

The caustic, Ethiopian-tinged opening track, No Vision could be directed at any number of presidents or so-called leaders worldwide, depicting them as puppets. Over blippy organ and a catchy bass hook, Know Who You Are is a cautionary tale for the African diaspora, while the album’s most intense track, Alonye features Vieux Farka Toure playing surprisingly eclectic lead guitar, blending his ferocious desert blues style with American funk.

The briskly shuffling Olesafrica, with its wah guitar, slinky bass hooks and edgy horns penetrating the mix, delivers an aggressive political message. They follow that with another revolutionary song, Fly to the Sky, an Afrobeat dancefloor anthem stripped to its bones without the drums, Dogo pensive yet defiant over brooding, spiky guitar and bass. The revolution keeps on coming as they pick up the pace again with the swaying, minor-key Foot Soldiers – if Bill Withers had tried his hand at Afrobeat, it might have sounded like this. Eh Wee (pronounced ay-way) brings back the hypnotic dance vibe, blending Afrobeat with oldschool 70s disco.

The funky Let Them Talk makes fun of people who won’t mind their own business, and features a couple of matter-of-fact, warmly crescendoing tenor sax solos. Nye’n Mind Na Wo has a steady funk beat, Furthur guitarist John Kadlecik’s snaky lines intertwining with Martins alongside punchy horns: it’s a kiss-off anthem of sorts. The album ends with a pensive, troubled, harmony-driven acoustic number, Nyi Dji. They’re doing the album release show on August 24 at the Black Cat in Washington. Elikeh also plays New York frequently (Sullivan Hall and Joe’s Pub are frequent haunts of theirs); watch this space for upcoming dates.

Malian All-Stars Rally for Peace

Here’s JeConte & the Mali All-Stars with desert blues icons Khaira Arby and Vieux Farka Toure plus the great Bassekou Kouyate doing Le Monde pour la Paix (The World for Peace) from their forthcoming album Mali Blues for Peace. This is how it works in the third world. JeConte, about life after the latest coup: “I went by a big hotel to use the high speed internet and got trapped there for several days. I tried to escape numerous times, was threatened at gunpoint and had to escape out the back of the hotel in the middle of the night under very precarious circumstances.” They’ve set up a relief organization, SoulNow.org who deserve your support if you’re in a position to offer any.

Dusky Grooves from the Toure-Raichel Collective

Desert blues albums are best enjoyed as a whole. Sure, you can break the individual tracks up and scatter them amongst different playlists, but a good desert blues album sets a mood. The Toure-Raichel Collective’s new album The Tel Aviv Session is a different kind of desert blues album, a collaboration between pyrotechnic Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Toure and Israeli keyboardist/bandleader Idan Raichel. Raichel is an insatiably omnivorous player who seemingly never met a style he didn’t want to master; Toure admits to thinking at first that Raichel was a “crazy hippie,” but on this generally low-key, daylong collaboration in an Israeli recording studio, the two make a good team. Although he plays acoustic guitar here, Toure still has the restless, uneasy edge that makes him such a compelling electric player. Raichel shows off a potent understanding of chromatically-fueled, Arabic-tinged motifs, often playing with a rippling staccato feel that, especially when he mutes the strings inside the piano, evokes the sound of a balafon or a qanun. In one passage, he brushes the strings for shimmery, harplike glissandos. Behind them, bassist Yossi Fine - who has toured with Toure, mentored Raichel in his early years and may ultimately have been responsible for jumpstarting this session – plays endlessly hypnotic loops in tandem with percussionist Souleymane Kane. French jazz harmonica player Frederic Yonnet guests on a rustic 1920s flavored blues jam that evokes Hazmat Modine in a particularly boisterous mood; Yankale Segal, from Raichel’s touring band, adds a third layer of richly glistening textures on Iranian tar lute on another. And the final cut, where the band finally cuts loose with an all-too-brief, soaring crescendo, features haunting, intense kamancheh (Iranian spiked fiddle) by Mark Eliyahu.

The rest of the album alternates between slinky two-chord desert blues vamps, and Middle Eastern piano music, sometimes in the same jam. Toure reveals a fondness for open chords and a biting facility for raga-like passages; Raichel often mimics Toure’s quicksilver hammer-on attack. Most of the songs here are long, slowly and casually coalescing out of themes typically introduced by the guitar. When Raichel supplies the central riff, Toure responds with fluttering, muted chromatics of his own, or simply steers the jam south toward Mali. The album liner notes mention “frequent breaks for coffee;” one suspects that there were other aromas wafting through the studio that day. The most hypnotic track, a lush, warmly major-key cut that brings to mind the Stones’ Moonlight Mile is followed by a brief, rather impatient, upbeat cut driven by Toure. Then they follow that with the single most hypnotic cut, featuring Raichel on Fender Rhodes, adding a vibraphone-like rhythmic bounce against Kane’s boomy calabash. It’s out now on Cumbancha; fans of desert blues, Middle Eastern music and intelligent jam bands ought to check it out. And it goes without saying: this collaboration between a Muslim African and an Israeli Jew underscores the argument that if we took the rabbis and mullahs (and American agitators) out of the picture and left everything to the musicians, there would be no war in the Middle East.

Cross-Pollination from the Toure-Raichel Collective

If you follow cross-cultural musical supergroups, you may have heard of the Toure-Raichel Collective: pyrotechnic Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Toure (son of Ali) in surprisingly laid-back acoustic mode alongside Israeli pianist Idan Raichel plus bassist Yossi Fine and percussionist Souleymane Kane. Grab a free download of their lush, watery, John Fahey-esque new instrumental, Bamba; they’re touring in support of their forthcoming album this spring, with two nights in New York at City Winery on April 13 and 14.

A Posthumous Desert Blues Classic

Malian desert blues guitar powerhouse Lobi Traore died suddenly, under a cloud of mystery in the spring of 2010, a year short of fifty. Tragically, he’s destined for greater popularity now than when he was alive. Recorded in his native Bamako, his posthumous live concert album Bwati Kono was probably never intended for release, but it’s a good thing that the specialty label Kanaga System Krush put it out. A methodical, uncannily terse player, Traore’s signature style falls somewhere between the precisely meandering, subtly dynamic crescendos of Ali Farka Toure and the feral hammer-on assault of Vieux Farka Toure, with a more rhythmic, casually insistent, sometimes staccato attack and a tone that often oscillates woozily through an open wah pedal. Traore didn’t sing much: the vocal numbers here have a quick verse at the beginning and sometimes the end, nothing more. The band here is particularly excellent, including drums, percussion, balafon (west African vibraphone), rhythm guitar and a melodic bass player who gets some solo space and makes the most of it. Almost all the songs here all have surprise, cold endings, a device that works even better than Traore may have conceived: it allows the tracks to end without any crowd noise!

With its roaring, ringing central hook, Bi Donga Fi Ko is the best track here – a Malian take on Voodoo Chile, perhaps. Traore’s solo veers from jaggedly incisive to a menacing, noisy swirl, then steals a page out of the Edge’s EFX book, adding slapback reverb to the wah so that he sounds like two guitars. This is jamband music par excellence; here, Traore manages to be reckless and elegant all at once as he finally backs out of the song and the band follows slowly behind him. Another real scorcher, the ominous 6/8 anthem Ya Time sounds like a desert blues version of a slowly burning Little Milton tune from the late 60s, with the album’s most surrealistically volcanic Hendrix-influenced playing. The steady, shuffling opening track, Makono is also a gem, Traore sailing bluesily downward before resuming his staccato pulse, spaciously placing his accents or hammering on a pedal note over simmering, bubbling bass. Banan Ni, the second cut, is a riff-driven three-chord number set to a thinly disguised reggae riddim – when they break it down to a bass-and-percussion interlude, it’s impossible not to think of Band of Gypsys, especially when the bassist starts playing a call-and-response tune. Likewise, the ten-minute Maya Gasi Ka Bon sets long guitar and balafon solos over a slow, syncopated reggae pulse.

Saya, which has the two guitars but no balafon, works intricately interwoven guitar lines to a casually wailing Traore solo rising high over the low, distorted growl of the bass. A couple more one-chord jams utilize a camelwalk triplet groove; another is a clever round between the two guitarists. There’s also an untitled bonus track which perhaps because it was new to the band, has the loosest feel of any cut here – and by the end, Traore’s guitar is way out of tune. All things considered, this is a classic of desert blues; if you’re into electric guitar and/or stoner music, it’s a great listen.

A Double Shot of Desert Blues

When you come to think of it, desert blues is a complete misnomer. For one, it usually isn’t recorded in the desert, and it’s definitely not blues. But whatever you want to call it – Malian rock, maybe – two of the best albums in recent months both fall under that category. Samba Toure’s Crocodile Blues is the more traditional of them, at least in the sense that much of it is long, slowly unwinding one-chord vamps. But that’s just part of the picture: this is his quantum leap. He’s always been one of the most compelling singers in the style – his gritty baritone reaches for intense highs, or stays low and wary. His guitar here also has similar bite, and a welcome unpredictability: he’s a fast, terse player who can make a seven-minute one-chord jam interesting. With quicksilver hammer-ons, judiciously constructed blues riffs and accents, and apprehensively soaring sustained notes, this is a feast of good guitar. And unlike a lot of desert blues records, this one has the bass up in the mix, maybe because Toure’s four-string buddy Baba Simaga not only played on it but also co-produced it.

Several of the cuts here have the loping, triplet-rhythm sway that Etran Finatawa made so popular; another handful are essentially long jams, and several others defy expectations. For example, the echoey, reverb-drenched opening tune takes a unexpected leap into a minor mode toward the end, Toure making his occasional eerie, sustained bend count for everything it’s worth. The second track has a turnaround straight out of 1960s soul music; a duet with Oumou Sangare has the two singers unexpectedly switching roles midway through, and there’s a Peter Tosh-inflected track later on with a contrapuntal call-and-response between the guitar and riti fiddle that’s absolutely exquisite. Although all the lyrics are in native dialects, the music often echoes the message for non-native speakers, particularly on a vividly wary “watch out for your children” cautionary tale where the guitar delivers the biting melody with a surprisingly watery, hypnotically sustained tone.

Bombino’s Agadez is the more rock-oriented of the two records, as far as both production and arrangements are concerned (who knew that a studio recording from Bamako could have this much fatness and resonance?). He gets a lot of Mark Knopfler comparisons, but a more accurate one would be Jerry Garcia (in “on” as opposed to “off” mode). Desert blues songs aren’t known for being particularly terse, nor is Bombino. One of the epics here – the amazing, serpentine, live bonus track – clocks in at thirteen minutes, another at almost twelve. Bombino varies his tone considerably, from clean to distorted, as he methodically builds his solos, sometimes with lightning-fast hammer-ons like Vieux Farka Toure, other times with spiky jangle, a little funk and even one song with an American C&W vibe. Behind him, the layers of guitars shift, rise and subside, the band sometimes picking up the pace or pulling back as the song winds down. The more laid-back songs here use an open G tuning popular in American folk music to enhance the hypnotic effect (classic rock fans will recognize it from the Rolling Stones’ Moonlight Mile). Others jam out on a single chord over a rolling, camel-walk triplet beat; from start to finish, Bombino varies his intros and outros, taking his time working his way into the song and then frequently ending when least expected: the effect is less jarring than simply reaching for the right place to take the song out after everything that needed to be said is done.  Bombino’s giving away a free download here as an enticement to get the whole album, which is also available on double gatefold vinyl!