T-Rob!

Buda Records, the superb French label responsible for the life-altering Ethiopiques series, seems set to blows minds all over again with a new series called Zanzibara devoted to the Swahili music of Tanzania, Zanzibar, and Kenya, among other nearby locales. It’s curated by German Werner Graebner, one of the foremost authorities on the music, who’s been documenting it for decades—including a fabulous series of work for Globestyle and releases on his own, short-lived Dizim imprint. Nearly everything I’ve heard that had his involvement has been brilliant, but most of it has been new recordings, and the first installment of Zanzibara features excellent new work by the Ikhwani Safaa Musical Club, one of Zanzibar’s most storied taarab orchestras with a hundred-year history.

But Zanzibara 2 opens the lid on the region’s musical past—its commercial recordings have been all but impossible to locate, let alone know about. Golden Years of Mombasa taarab focuses on work cut between 1965-1975 on the titular island-city off the Kenyan coast. It’s a small group taarab sound the vividly illustrates the natural polyglot nature of much of the music from the area, where Arabic classical music swirls with native rhythms and gets spiked with influences from as far as India and Japan. The tracks here combine hand percussion, strings, and prominent oud, abetted by a mixture of either organ, harmonium, or accordion as well as amplified tashkoto, a Japanese string instrument that in these hands comes off as cross between sitar and electric guitar. It’s topped off by fantastic singing—soulful, leisurely, and melodic, including the unexpected mark of Bollywood sensibilities, long a favorite form of recreation for the locals. There’s nothing else in the world like this phenomenal stuff. Bring on volumes 3-20 and beyond.

Yasseen Mohamed: Ndege Kaa Ufikiri

Buy it here.

Comments

[aduna]

Thanks a lot!

Aduna