HECTOR ZAZOU & SWARA
IN THE HOUSE OF MIRRORS (Cram 47)

I have mixed feelings about Hector Zazou. No, that's not true, I have always despised Hector Zazou! Back in the days when I was Papa Wemba's Numbah One American Fan, I bought an expensive imported LP that was a meeting between Wemba and Zazou. I paid big money for it and after listening once I dumped it. Then I learned that Zazou was one of those world music meddlers who finds perfectly good music and has to fiddle with it, adding synthi swashes and so on. This was also the turning point in my undying admiration for Wemba. So when Crammed sent me an advance copy of this (instead of the Kasai All Stars I had been hoping for), I hesitated to put it on. But, you know some old dogs can learn new tricks, or at least their old tricks can become more polished with time, so I gave it a listen and it was not half bad. I played it for the Duchess who being younger than me has more tolerance for programmed music, and finds it helps her concentrate at work. She liked it, saying she has an album called Sahara Blue by him. Zazou died recently so this is his last album. They say dont speak ill of the dead, but that is an absurd statement: the dead are the last to care what you say about them. Did he finally get it right? Zazou assembled a group of Indian master musicians and they float in and out of the wash and, by jove, it works. There is an overall integrity to it. After a decade of listening to Rahman who really excels at portmanteau music, it's okay to have a drum loop and drone, as long as there is someone with talent playing live atop the mix. And unlike Eno & Byrne whose return to the Bush of Ghosts sounds like they have been cryonically frozen for 20 years, this is an evolved sound, sophisticated & subtle. Nevertheless the groundbreaking work of Eno & Fripp, as one exceptional pair of collaborators, set the stage for a lot of this incidental music for loungers. While there are whispers of Paul Horn inside the Taj, and other new agey elements, the overall impression is good; it would work well as the soundtrack to a film.

DUB COLOSSUS
A TOWN CALLED ADDIS (RealWorld USCDRW155)

Dub Colossus is Nick Page, I don't know how big he is (the only other colossus I know is Rhodes which is reduced to submerged ankles), but dub he does. Page started out working with Steel Pulse before taking up bass and mixology himself. He was a founder of Trans-global Underground and a major part of their 6 albums, writing, performing and producing. Now he is indulging his passion for the Ethiopiques series of CDs on Buda Musique which document the sound of swinging Addis in the waning years of the reign of Haile Selassie before the oppressive military regime of Mengistu wiped music off the sand-encrusted map. For A Town Called Addis he found some of the old nightclub crooners and musicians still extant and added a 70s dub sensibility. Imagine playing the Mighty Diamonds in one channel and Alemayehu Eshete in the other, but ultimately that's as close at it comes. Saxophonist Feleke Hailu (a classical composer, lecturer and head of music at the Yared Music School) sounds a bit like Kenny G, maybe it's just the echo, but then the pianist Samuel Yirga also opts for space rather than sound. Teremag Weretow adds his plaintive voice; while his messenqo, a scrapey one-string fiddle, is the most interesting non-Western instrument here. The Dub takes away the exotic edge of Ethiopia but it still has a dreamlike quality as snatches of organ or flute float by. It's not earth-shaking and I don't know how much I will listen to it, but it's worth checking out.

MOUSSU T ET LEI JOVENTS
INVENTE A LA CIOTAT (Chant du Monde 2741549)

I was a bit puzzled by this disc because it only the second thing I have seen from this band yet it seems to be a career retrospective with nothing new and a lot of reworking of their one "hit"-- or catchy ditty more accurately --"Mademoiselle de Marseilles." Not wishing to dismiss it out of hand I played it for my pal Big Steve, a confirmed Francophile. His first thought was how much the rest of the world owes to American popular music. You can hear New Orleans all over this! He said. Yes, and blues and pop, I added. But then I mentioned to him that half the album was repeated from their previous album and the remainder was scraped together with two versions of one song and a DVD. Steve enlightened me: Remember Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders? he asked. They had a hit, recorded an album and then put out a Greatest hits album which was everything left over from their first session grafted onto the bit of it that people had liked. This seems to be the same story. I put on the DVD and the band comprised a singer, a banjo player and a drummer. All of the other stuff -- rhythm track, jews harp, smoking electric guitar -- was coming out of a machine. Chante du Monde is a respectable label with a great catalogue of folk music from all over the world, but not this one: save your money for something else.

BJÖRK IN CONCERT
SHORELINE AMPHITHEATRE, MOUNTAIN VIEW 19 May 2007

When I put on Björk's new album VOLTA last week, I could tell her concert was going to be a return to her tribal punk roots. She has come a long way since the Sugarcubes and reinvents herself constantly, but stays on the edge of performance art and musical exploration. We missed her tour with the symphony orchestra, Inuit chorus and harpist, as the tickets had sold out in a flash, but when the Duchess got wind of a new tour she had her connections working on the necessary digital synapses to get us tickets. The minus side included paying a 40% service charge to those Nazi pimps Clear Channel so we ended up with $100 tickets that still put us 200 yards from the stage at the impossible Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View. The plus side was a fantastic show that went off flawlessly & had us bopping about in the chilly Bay night air.

Shoreline is built on the site of a dump and to get there you drive round and round (past Google HQ!) and end up in a dusty field far from the venue. It is one of the reasons the San Francisco Bay is no longer the largest in the world, having been filled in with garbage over the past century. Famously, during a Steve Winwood concert, a fan's cigarette butt set fire to the methane that seeps from the dump and the place nearly burned down. The opening act was going on and on so everyone could find their spot. Any other crowd would have rioted and booed this crap outta there, but the warbling harpist got polite applause which only encouraged her. She had a wispy girly voice and a wispy girly band. Looking around we could see the crescent moon rising in the night sky with Venus burning brightly below it.

As I predicted Björk came out with the opening cut of the new album, "Earth Intruders," an Oompa-Loompa groove with a jagged percussion beat on two-tone African cowbell and primal thundering synth bass lines. The stage was dimly lit like an aquarium but you could make out three keyboard/computer players, a drummer, and a ten-piece brass section comprised of Icelandic ladies, dressed in flimsy pastel gowns. Each of them had an orange flag attached to her back, so as they moved and grooved the flags bobbed about like dayglo fish. It was reminiscent of the samurai cavalry in Kurosawa films: no doubt Björk is an admirer of Emi Wada, Kurosawa's costumer. Behind them were huge pastel banners with fish and toads on them. Despite the largeness of the stage it was packed with equipment, monitors and gizmos and giant television screens that showed what at first looked like computer games.

Björk ran through four songs from her new album. Mercifully she did not do the ill-conceived song about the lady suicide bomber (not what you want to think about in a crowd of 12,000), and she also did not bring "Anthony" (of Anthony & the Johnsons) who sings duets with her on the new albums, effectively ruining it as a listening experience. What was she thinking? Yes she has a strange voice, with her thick accented english, and an odd manner of phrasing, but that is her charm. Anthony is a drippy almost creepy crooner of the Pat Boone junior league that makes you tear the album off.

It's said that Konono Number 1 is on the new album. There is a bit of ragged cowbell in "Earth Intruders," but no electric likembes I could hear. In fact this is one of her strategies. She mixes four sonic elements: percussion, a tape loop or samples, a keyboard that may be another synthesizer, and a fourth element that could be a guest with a kora, harpsichord, gamelan, or Chinese pipa. On this tour a ten-piece brass section was the fourth component. But the brass band was mixed as one sound which was a shame as I wanted to hear all the individual horns. They were really fine in unison and once or twice the trumpets got to do a little improvisation. It was a tightly choreographed set so there really wasn't a lot of the spontaneity or interaction you expect in a live show, nevertheless it was a treat. The volume was massive and when she went into "Pagan Poetry," the crowd erupted. There were a lot of lost Middle Earth people wandering about in silly costumes and they stopped long enough to jump up and down for this rallying cry. But then they went back to wandering the aisles lost and consuming $10 beers. There was so much pot smoke in the air it looked like fog in the light show laser beams.

After each song Björk would say "sink yew" and curtsey, and then she tried on a "mooshas grassyass" which got quite a laugh. There was no banter which was too bad, just a black-out followed by the video games on the big screen and then the rhythm track of the next number would kick in. Gradually you realised the video game was a computer screen that was generating the sound through physical manipulation. You would see the hands & fingers of one of the musicians touching the green screen and he would manipulate the syn-waves physically. I don't know what this instrument is, some kind of clever interface, but it was fascinating to see him distort and bend the rhythms, & Björk was too far off to really see what she was doing unless she was flailing her arms and feet in her unique way, signalling that she never learned how to dance.

cel-phone snap by the Duchess

My references are probably out of date but I recalled the experiments Brian Eno was doing with Cluster in the 70s, Pere Ubu came to mind, and of course Massive Attack. My favourite song on the new album is "Wanderlust." She saved that for late in the set by when you could hear the nuances in the brass and the others were not overhyped so there was a little space in the wall of sound. Björk recycles fragments of her past tunes and some of her melodies, so you think you know a song but it has been reconstructed. "Wanderlust" has a lyrical vocal line, the brass swells poetically with contrapuntal phrasing as the insistent fragmented samples (little furry creatures pawing gravel) sets up a rhythmic contrast.

Björk is up to six albums and is off on a leisurely world tour. I didn't like her last outing, Medulla, and I am glad she has gone back to the sound of her successes from Post, Vespertine, and Homogenic. I didn't take notes but it was not a roster of hits by any means. The Duchess found the set list on a tour blog. She did "Aeroplane" from her first solo album DEBUT. From POST she did "Army of me," "Hyperballad" and the sublime "All is full of love." HOMOGENIC provided "Pluto," "Five years," and "Unravel" and VESPERTINE got short shrift with only "Pagan poetry." On "I miss you" Einar Orn got to show off some chops with a great jazz trumpet solo.

One of the band, keyboardist Jonas Sen, has a tour blog which contains insight into the music from the stage. Apparently they had not rehearsed two of the tunes, "Aeroplane" and "Mother Heroic," which they tried out just one hour before the show. From our side of the stage, it already had a finished sheen.

The encore was also carefully planned. She performed "Oceania," the song that she had written for the Athens Olympics. I remember waiting through all the crap of the opening ceremony to hear it and the minute she started singing the asshole announcers on the TV network started talking about the number of yards in her costume, and the number of extras in the piece, etc. It was a mix of tango and cha cha rhythms and a great departure. She ended with the other militaristic number from VOLTA, "Declare independence." There was a hint of Mark Smith of the Fall in her delivery of this song. It ended with a bang and a flourish and flames shooting into the sky, burning off the methane in the landfill dump below the stage.

BJORK
EARTH INTRUDERS

"Earth Intruders" was the single from Bjork's album VOLTA. It was also released as an EP with four club mixes. If you buy the album on iTunes you can skip the duets with Anthony which are insufferably wet and the song about the Lady Suicide Bomber, and add the remixes to make a better album. For that matter you can also add in "Mama na bana" from Konono Number One's LIVE AT COULEUR CAFE to get the full effect as she is jamming with them, though their sound is buried in the Björk album. This is Björk's sixth album, and though she feels she has to reinvent herself completely each time, this is a return to a more primitive kind of punk (albeit with very slick sidemen), and makes for great get-up-and-get-down music. It's accessible, brassy, and above all rhythmically propulsive.

PUTUMAYO WORLD PARTY (P263-SL)

There are three or four really good songs on here that you are not likely to find elsewhere. As usual it's a short (44-minute) Putumayo sampler, and travels from Martinique to Denmark, Ghana, Benin & Jamaica, to North America and Argentina. Roy Paci from Italy (Sicily I think) is the opener, with "Ciuri Ciuri" a catchy ditty in a ska stylee, and this is followed by Jean-Philippe Marthely, Jean-Paul Pognon & Jean-Luc Guanel from Martinique doing "Wote Monte," which has a zouk & compas feeling to it. The other Caribbean tracks, Burning Spear's "Walk" and Orchestre Tropicana d'Haiti's "Gason Total" make this worth hearing, and remind me why I love that lilting island music so much. Laurent Hounsavi from Benin turns in a credible African salsa number, like he's trying out for Africando. The other stuff is less appealing to me, though it's curious to hear Osibisa doing "Sunshine day" again. It does sound quaint. Overall the disc is chirpy and a bit too relentlessly happy but that's party music and more precisely the Putumayo sound which we now recognise. Light and bubbly. Check this out if you get a chance; samples available on Putumayo's website.

CRAMMED ALL STARS
20 WAYS TO FLOAT THROUGH WALLS (Crammed Disc CRAM129)

Crammed is one of the best world music labels extant. They love gypsy music and they champion the electric thumb-piano bands of Kinshasa, so they are tops in my book. In addition the small indie Belgian label has been putting out samba, Brasilian fusion and even rock albums for its 20 years of life. Six of my top albums of the last couple of years are sampled herein: there's Konono no 1, Mahala Rai Banda, Kocani Orkestar, Taraf de Haidouks, and tracks from Congotronix 2 and Electric Gypsyland 2. The set kicks off with Apollo Nove's "Traz um alivio," a short and sweet tropicalista ballad sung by Tita Lima with an electronic psychedelic mood. This segues into Tartit from Timbuktu with their manic droning and repetitious bass, tindé drums and plucked string instruments: about as far from the sleek Brasilian sound as you could get. But we don't wait long as it cross fades into Wise in Time, an urbane British folksinger who recalls Family from the 60s. The other acts included also hold surprises: a great cut from DJ Dolores --"De dar do"-- that reminds me of the type of pagode that used to get me worked up when I was resident in Salvador da Bahia. Then there's my guilty pleasure: Tuxedomoon. I know it sounds like a character from a Japanese anime (but I am not admitting to liking that!), however Tuxedomoon were one of my favourite post-punk bands in San Francisco in the 70s and I would religiously attend all their gigs (and those of the Mutants) when Winston Tong was their frontman. They always had interesting musical ideas, mixing pseudo-classical viola with new wave bass and drums and throwing in odd things like soprano sax in an experimental jazz-pop blend. I still have their EPs buried somewhere with my Factrix and Negativeland albums. They haven't grown up but still retain a cheeky freshness. The Duchess was surprised I played this all the way through as there are some wet bits (Cibelle's samba or the sodden take on the Beatles' white album by a Frenchman called Hugo) I would normally race to eject but the mix is intriguing and I will always give some credence to a deejay who can make the leap from a sleek club remix of Taraf de Haidouks to Kasai All Stars with their primitive buzzing and rattling onslaught. It's a great introduction to the small eclectic label that deserves worldwide exposure for their taste and dedication.

LONDON IS THE PLACE FOR ME 2
CALYPSO & KWELA, HIGHLIFE & JAZZ FROM YOUNG BLACK LONDON (Honest Jon's Records)

I believe this series is already up to four releases in the UK, however number 2 has finally made it to the USA. It is different from the first volume in that, in addition to calypso, we hear other music from the era when folks from the colonies migrated to London in the mid-twentieth century. It boosted the British jazz scene immeasurably because suddenly you had real African & Afro-Caribbean musicians bringing rhythms and different musical idioms to what was essentially copycat music, at one remove, from American jazz. Among the black community you would find West African drummers jamming with Caribbean hornmen and a whole mélange of talents playing in clubs, town halls and even for anthropology students whose notion of African music was what they heard in films when you saw wild Zulus with spears attacking the plucky redcoats with their Lee Enfield rifles. The album starts surprisingly with a calypso by Young Tiger that is a critique of Bebop, which he doesn't get. His backing is pure smooth jazz: "They call a man a 'cat' and a girl a 'chick,' and they're up to all kinds of shady tricks, with their oop-badda-ba boop-badda diddly-a!" In "Gerrard Street," King Timothy visits the same club and discovers he can't dance to it, "Mister you really should stop: You only beepin, when you should bop!" The detailed liner notes give a history of Ambrose Campbell, one of the overlooked pioneers of black music in Britain, who migrated from Lagos in 1940. His laid-back number "Yolanda" is a gem. We also hear him with his West African Rhythm Brothers on four selections. Kitchener pops up with a great calypso "Come back with my wife's nightie"! The Lion does "Kalenda March," probably the only track on here you have heard before (It's on his SACRED 78s CD as "J'ouvert barrio."). I think the new context enhances your appreciation of the backing band on these old calypsos. It's certainly great to hear them interspersed with various African tracks like Ambrose Campbell's "Ashiko Rhythm," which might otherwise get overlooked. LONDON IS THE PLACE FOR ME 2 is handsomely packaged, digitally restored and essential listening.

ALBERT KUZEVIN & YAT-KHA
RECOVERS (World Village 468061)

When I was a kid I used to make "music" by playing spoons, water glasses, tapping on beer bottles & in extremis, blowing into a vacuum-cleaner hose. When I hear a didgeridoo or the Tuvan throat singers, I remember the fun of making those gravelly noises that sound like a sick bear woken from hibernation. Yat-kha are Tuvan superstars with a sense of humour who have done punk songs and have just recorded an album of heavy metal covers that is quite possibly the worst album ever recorded. I will have to listen to it all the way through, but after a few seconds of "When the levee breaks" I skipped to the next track and then killed it, not even getting to what I suspect will be the nadir: "In a gadda da vida," a song that should surely be forgotten as quickly as possible. Second try: Kuzevin's weird English emerges fully on Hank Williams' "Ramblin Man," and he makes a farce of Ian Curtis's tragic "Love will tear us apart." I can only conclude that Ben Mandelson, who produced this, is having us on. Is this actually a 3 Mustaphas album? Who knows, anyway it is truly awful. Perfect for getting those unwanted guests to leave when the party's over.

MOUSSOU T E LEI JOVENTS
MADEMOISELLE MARSEILLES (Chant du Monde CDM068)

This could pass for Cajun music, or even rural blues. It's hard to pinpoint where it's coming from. They sing about Marseilles but those are surely Africans on the cover. Also the name of the band suggests creole. But the music is varied and there's a lot of creativity. Moussou has one of those whiskey-soaked voices that will remind you of an older generation, like Paolo Conte, but the music sounds older still, as if you are in the France of the thirties and black music has just arrived in the form of jazz and beguine. A quick trip to their website reveals that they blend Antillean and Provençal music with Brasilian percussion. The banjo is a main instrument and, with an accordeon, there's a jaunty sea shanty air with a whiff of the oily backstreets of the seaport too. The title cut is really catchy and when it ends it staggers off leaving only an urchin belting out the refrain. "Bolega Banjo" gets dubby with party time percussion and discoid guitar. It reminds me of dark little waterfront bars you stagger into to get out of the rain and suddenly find yourself buying drinks for surprisingly attentive young ladies. Before you know it you are dancing like a fool, thinking where's my wallet? where's the nearest exit? all the while moving and grooving knowing you look uncool, while resisting the effect of the alcohol. "Si j'allais en prison" takes a tilt at boogie with the guitarist dusting off his Elmore James impression. OK, ladies just one more... pour la route! The last track, "Soulomi" brings things down to a nice atmospheric dream and shows that Moussou and his youngsters have much more up their sleeves.

JULIA VORONTSOVA
FROM ST PETERSBURG WITH LOVE (Abaton Book Company #011)

This may be hard to find but is worth tracking down. A very mellow album of Russian folk music with a surprising rockabilly edge to some of the songs, it was a pick to click on Charlie Gillett's recent SOUND OF THE WORLD compilation. Although Vorontsova sings above her range and doesn't project a lot, there's an engaging quality to her voice and she plays a mean fingerpicked ax. Her upper-register straining lends an endearing quality of fragility to her songs. Charlie says she was applauded for her witty lyrics and even without understanding them you can appreciate her delivery. The mood of the CD is very intimate and there's a synopsis of each of the songs in the booklet, which has original drawings by the singer in it. Here's a sample: FABERGE. "This song is about the house in St Petersburg where Fabergé would produce his famous eggs. My friend's balcony was facing that house. This is a short song. Most of my songs are short.
And once again on a sleepless endless night
do you know what will come to my mind?
You, my most cherished sacred dream,
and a duet for voice and sorrow."

SOUND OF THE WORLD (Wrasse Records 169)

I am so sick of compilations. To me most compilations seem like the province of newbies. The compiler cherry-picks the obvious greatest hits from a genre and then spits them out as a definitive look at African blues, Malian blues, Latin dance favourites, Best of Slick Salsa, Best of Sloppy Salsa, or whatever. I listen to those that come my way, and even review them in print, but I usually know all the good songs and am not particularly intrigued by the obscure cuts. Therefore it was a great pleasure to get SOUND OF THE WORLD, a double-disc set put together by BBC radio DJ Charlie Gillett. Charlie is in a good position as he not only gets EVERYTHING but even gets to hear stuff not available to us mortals. For example he recently got invited to Russia to judge a music festival and some of his discoveries from that trip provide the most interesting moments on this new set. Of course being a DJ is not that easy. I mean you don't need any actual musical ability, though it helps. Mainly you need an ear to pick out what's new and original and then to find the cut that is going to click. I have DJ friends who only try the "side one track one" approach. If that doesn't set their foot tapping, they forget it. "Wow, what's that great song?" they ask me. "It's the second cut on the B side," I tell them. So it's work, and often you dismiss an album because there's only one good song then are glad when it shows up on a compilation and wonder if you should have tried harder. But life's too short to be listening to mediocre albums over and over trying to find the good bits in them.

The first disc kicks off with Daby Balde from Senegal. Not a familiar name but this cut will have you looking for the album INTRODUCING DABY BALDE (on Riverboat records) to see what else is on there. Next up is Bulgaria and the first of the "gee I didn't know those white people had so much soul" moments. Actually it's Boris Iliev's clarinet that sets this apart, and the vocal by Sissy Atanassova is great, reminding you of those other gypsies, the ones that appear in Bollywood production numbers! OK cue the video on this one! But track three, "Geo" by Ivan Kupala from Russia, is the first that makes you grab a pen and say I have to write this down-- RADIO NAGRA-- must try to find this album (try http://www.soyuz.ru).

I know many of you will disagree but I thought Amadou and Mariam were crap in concert with their French rock band and though Amadou plays a good R&B guitar, Mariam's vocals were shrill and the din was awful. Every time the djembe player stepped forward the trap drummer decided to outdo him. I liked their previous two albums, but I didn't keep their Manu Chao-produced album DIMANCHE A BAMAKO. However the best cut from it, "Coulibaly," is on here. It is followed by the first one you are going to either love or hate, Camille, a French singer who wants to be Bjork but settles for Jacqueline Brel. I hit the forward button. The next one starts like Miles Davis' "Elevator to the gallows" and I am thinking we are in for some more weird French time-warp crap, but then an arhythmic drum comes in with some dubby bass and I know Mr Gillett has been clubbing in France & it is, well, kinda interesting. There's a hip hop feeling to it but the best part is the stretch between the jazz trumpet of Ludovic Venu and the Wolof vocals of Jean Gomis (a relative of Rudy?). The group is called, inexplicably, Meï Teï Shô. Streets of Laredo ranchería is up next with a Canadian woman of Mexican extraction named Llasa. I imagine if you caught her act, you might dig this. On the other hand if she appeared on Sabado Gigante she might get the hook. Now I am getting an itchy trigger-finger and zip forward to Darko Rundek & Cargo Orkestar with a good cut from RUKE (on Piranha) which I enjoyed. (I went looking to see if I had reviewed it and found I had rubbished last year's Charlie Gillett compilation, so things are definitely looking up!) After some bad rap from Nairobi Yetu (at least it's in Kiswahili), the first disc mellows out with State of Benghal vs Paban das Baul, followed by the first encounter between Ali Farka Toure and kora player Toumani Diabate and then the jazzy reggae of Anzacs DJ Fitchie and Joe Dukie, who give us "Midnight Marauders," with a solid horn chorus. (The Duchess found it boring and asked me to take it off.)

Disc two starts with Issa Bagayogo, top of the pile where he belongs. Brazilian flava-of-da-month Seu Jorge pops up for a moment with his squeaky cuica accompaniment. On the recommendation of two different people I watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zizou to see Seu Jorge. He was awful (David Bowie covers? Forget it!) and the movie really stank, or sank. The first thing that catches me by surprise is Shukar Collective. I didn't know you could actually imitate Lee Perry! But this second disc gets very slack and I venture could have been left out entirely. True, there's Youssou Ndour, but we all have that album EGYPT as it's the best thing he's done in decades. Ana Salazar from Spain does the "Ay-yi-yi-yi" chorus which you can hear at any soccer match. (Though recently at a forgettable Premiership game in England I noted that "Guantanamera" has become the most popular melody for fans to co-opt.) By the time we get to Japanese horns doing "Jingle bells" (Tokyo-chutie-iki's "Otome sankabi") I feel like I am wasting my time. I hate the shotgun approach: pack the CD with lots of stuff and someone's bound to like some of it. The consumer isn't fooled by the offer of "buy one get one free." Quality not quantity is what we want. The last cut by Think of One is a Belgian-Morrocan collaboration with another big nod to Jamaica. It's a good ending, but the most interesting stuff on here is by the Russian artists Gillett has discovered. Someone might consider a Best of Russian New Wave or whatever and ask him to compile it and open up another frontier to us music fans.

ENZO AVITABILE & BOTTARI
SAVE THE WORLD/SALVAMM'O MUNNO (Wrasse Records WRASS124)

There's a peculiarly Italian way of singing that sounds like an endless litany of complaints. You probably know it from Paolo Conte, and, if that's your thing, there's plenty of gruffness and griping here. Enzo has a commanding presence, however, and this is a very engaging album: its success due equally to the stellar roster of guest artists who appear and bring their varied talents to the project. Khaled and Amina sing, Manu Dibango and Hugh Masakela toot their horns. Best of all is the pervasive presence of Simon Shaheen on oud and violin on four tracks, Baba Sissoko on kamelengoni on a few tracks, Adel Shaaher on tar on three tracks, and the occasional sound of the ney, zurla and sax. It makes for a lot of variety that sustains your interest. The driving rhythm is also intriguing. This album of Neapolitan music has a raft of guys beating on barrels and tubs (instead of drums), and clashing scythes together. I bet it gets the spiders out of the tubs before the new wine goes in. This tradition started in the 14th century to drive out evil spirits form the farm and also augur a good harvest. It's a weird mechanical clacking sound and sets up a metronomic beat that is quite hypnotic. This is unlike anything you've ever heard, I'm sure, but you will get hooked by the second listen.

SERGE GAINSBOURG
MAUVAISES NOUVELLES DES ÉTOILES (Sunnyside SSC3692)

DeeJay IJ arrives with a bag of goodies, or so he represented it to me: stuff he thought was great and worth checking out, though when pressed he admits he is passing on other people's assurances and hasn't actually listened to it himself. I waded through the bag and there were some pleasant moments but also a lot of dross. I tried hard with three albums, one was Keb Mo's BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND, which should be good: a bunch of familiar old sixties protest songs done with sincerity and passion, but ultimately not very engaging. I wanted to like the Handsome Boys Modelling School album because they are witty but it was just a retread of their earlier efforts and didn't seem very fresh. Next up some bad news. I really don't know why there is any interest in the singing career of Serge Gainsbourg. Sure he was a bad boy, etc, etc, boffing starlets without removing his Gauloises or getting out of bed to shave, but his "new" release sucks. Titled "Mauvaises nouvelles des étoiles" it is inded "bad news from the stars". It is a reggae album. Now I know Robert Mitchum made a calypso album and there are folks who thought it was good, but anyone, & I do mean anyone, could get up in front of Sly & Robbie and share a medicinal spliff with the Lone Ranger & cut something as good if not a lot better. Throw in the I-Threes on backing vocals, Sticky on percussion, Ansel Collins on organ, and "Mao" Chung on guitar and you can't fail. In theory. I can see me now doing "Johnny Too Bad" and "Police and Thieves" with my old bass-man Grandmaster Dan adding his Joycean rap! But Gainsbourg bombs: this is wretched. With pretentious lyrics like "Ecce Homo" you gotta ask, who paid for this and why? (Hey, didn't James Joyce have a rap song called "Ecce Homo"!? you insist.) Are the fans that stupid that they will listen to anything? Who are these Gainsbourg-listening fans? Even the bonus disc of reworked dubs (with less Serge) is garbage. The liner notes say the posthumous irony is not lost on anyone. No, but it should have been lost.

WORLD 2004
Compiled by Charlie Gillett (WRASSE 123)

I am not privy to the cult of Charlie Gillett, the BBC radio deejay. Throughout my teens in Britain I was a devotee of John Peel & used to listen to his "Perfumed Garden" show on pirate Radio Caroline until I fell asleep (after years of Radio Luxembourg on the shortwave under the covers). Peel was a world music pioneer but I think he was jockeyed into a more mundane gig by the BBC while they have turned the fringes over to Gillett and other later arrivals. Gillett gets a lot of reverence from blurbists but his own compilation seems diffused and a bit too middle-of-the-road, but you know that's what makes a success sometimes. Besides, this year's music seems average so far and therefore stuff that is only marginally good tends to get noticed. Though it's only mid-2004 Gillett has plumped for a year's worth of music in this round up which spans two CDs. But because it's so long it gets flaccid. The first cut is very intriguing: a Brasilian hip-hop reggae sample with weird found lyrics, including a bit of Bollywood. It's called "Xin" by Fat Marley and then two hours later we get to another ambient dubby thing called "Hope" by Fat Freddy's Drop which nicely ties things up with a big bow. It also shows the global trend towards obesity! In between there are some obvious choices: Ojos de Brujo, Kekele, Tinariwen, Souad Massi, Abyssinia Infinite, Lo'jo.

I'm tired of mediocre music and there are abundant slack tracks: the previously unreleased Khaled track "Madre" is bad disco. There's a weird return to Africa by Kanda Bongo Man (now resident in Birmingham, England) where he tackles the sound of Soweto. There's a guy called Gianmaria Testa who thinks he's Paolo Conte. There's a lousy French chanteuse Carla Bruni who does a dated, heavy-breathing thing. More French rap from Ghetto Blaster. C'est terrible! The good news, I suppose, is there's nothing sensational we hadn't heard of, so we are not as far out of the world loop as we feared out here on the Western shelf. The hottest track, "Carolina" by Bucovina Club vs Taraf de Haidouks, is sure-fire top ten material. But not much else is that stellar. There's a good piece from Brasil "A Danca da moda" by DJ Dolores y Orchestra Santa Messa I hadn't heard before, and there's a nice stretch midway through the second disc which has fado and a Venezuelan piece, followed by Taffetas (from Switzerland and Guinea-Bissau.) Other than a tendency to MOR (one flamenco cut by Tango Lorca would fit right in on Radio Three's light classical music roster), this is a decent slice of the year-to-date. Let's hope there's better to come.

BJORK
LIVE AT ROYAL OPERA HOUSE (2001)
MTV UNPLUGGED (1994) DVDs

The Duchess turned me onto her favourite pop performer, Björk. This year we got into her concerts on DVD. The Royal Opera House show and MTV Unplugged both bear watching more than once. Like my favourite artist, Thelonious Monk, Björk plays the same songs over and over, but they evolve as she does. More than just a songwriter-singer, she is a real performance artist. Her double-string quartet scores are subtle and rich and her collaborations with Matmos and other groups shows her to have a keen ear for the cutting edge of pop. So forget about the mouldy Monterey Pop box set or other reruns that are being flogged with dubious extra material, and check out something fresh and rather brilliant.

MUZSIKÁS
THE BARTOK ALBUM (Hannibal HNCD 1439)

Muzsikás have put out a recording that demonstrates a connection between classical and folk music. It's THE BARTOK ALBUM and features snippets of field recordings made by Bela Bartok along with the ensemble's performances of some of his folk-derived pieces. Classical composers have always used vernacular sources and this recording bridges the two genres. Muzsikás are perfectly suited to the task. (I won't be snide and say thank god they did this before Kronos Quartet thought of it, but it's a natural fit for them.)

This album made several critics' top ten lists for 1999 so I won't dwell on it but I think it's the best thing that Muzsikás has done. You can't really trust what you read in the music papers anyway (those lists are generally compiled by Promosexuals -- people who will say or do anything to get free product). So don't take the critics' word for it, check it out!

VARIOUS ARTISTS
OCORA BOX SET (C561061/67 Harmonia Mundi 28X7)

One of the great archives of world music is OCORA, the French national radio. I treasure my OCORA African vinyl and have tried to fill in the blanks as the albums have come out on CD. I have a poet-friend who was kept sane during his years of study at Harvard by the pygmy music of Central Africa on OCORA LPs (that he later went round the bend is not a logical manifestation of his listening to so much tribal music, but we did spend many happy evenings together exploring our collections).

Now there's a sampler box set (originally issued in separate volumes a decade ago) and, apart from the box set collectors who like to buy in bulk, there's a lot to engage you in the seven discs, boiled down from over 300 album releases. Volume one is the Arabic diaspora, starting in Algeria and moving East (most befitting) to Iran. Familiar acts on here are the Gnaoua of Essouira, Morocco and Talip Ozkan of Turkey.

Volume two, South Asia, presents the Indian subcontinent, and from Ravi Shankar to Nusrat it moves faultlessly in a wonderfully sequenced hour of mellow evening music. There's singing from Lakshmi Shankar and some less-well-known classical musicians who are up to the level of the masters.

Volume three is East Asia (China, Korea, Japan), an area I only know from film soundtracks. However I can't say I have ever seen any Korean films. But track 6, by South Korea's Ensemble Jong Nong Ak Ohô, reminded me of the clucking and scratching of avant-garde German guitarist Hans Reichel. The instruments are gomungo and chango (not the Cuban god!). Far out, indeed!

Volume 4, Southeast Asia, has the strangest stuff on it, as well as the familiar gamelan which, for many of us, was our first encounter with music of the rest of the world, thanks to the Nonesuch Explorer series. I once read a critique of world music that said it was marketed to jaded Westerners who were seeking the thrill of something new, but the newness and strangeness of Vietnamese and Burmese music is what makes it inaccessible to me. I don't think I'll ever get used to it, and I seek the comfort of the familiar gamelan tones of Indonesia. There is a big surprise on this album and it's the closing track "In the current of the Mekong" from Laos which sounds like a rocking Cajun two-step. The liner notes call it a bamboo mouth-organ -- the khaen, related to the sheng in China -- it sure is jamming!

For me, Volume 5 (Africa) is the greatest repository of OCORA's riches. Here they charted vast unknown areas of Africa (remember that Hugh Tracey was making his recording trips by truck from his base in South Africa, so he didn't get to Francophone West Africa). OCORA started about a decade later but they were thorough. Their albums also contained booklets with photos and detailed notes. Masques Dan, Ceremonie des Bobe, Polyphonie Mongo -- so many remarkable moments in these discs! We start with Lobi celebration music from Burkina Faso, recorded in 1961: growly, gravelly, wonderous. Musique Gbaya is great meditation music; I also discovered it's great driving music. The African selections have also been released on a single CD as C560065. While it's a great introduction to African traditional music, it has the usual limitations of time. To really get inside these pieces you need the whole length of the album, especially the ritualistic or ceremonial pieces that were already cut down from day-long recordings. This even affects more contemporary music.

One of my all-time favourites is OCORA C559007, "Musiques Urbains à Kinshasa," recorded in November 1978 and released in 1987. It never came out on LP, but the double cassette release is two hours long, while the same four selections are chopped to 73 minutes to fit on the single CD. On the sampler, the track by Tout-Puissant Likembe Konono is only 6 mins and 20 seconds; on the CD it is 26 mins and 50 seconds, while it clocks in at 29'30 on the cassette! What is so compelling about this particular release is its modernity. Here are traditional thumb-piano bands who have made contact mikes out of copper foil and wire, and built amplifiers with scavenged car batteries to generate a raw and ragged sound that is also loud! By recontextualizing their music, these musicians who have migrated from the bush to the burbs have made it vital once more.

Volume 6, Europe, seems to betray a hint of Gallic bias. The bagpipe piece comes from France and there's a Belgian polka. No Celtic music is represented unless someone wants to make a wild connection with Fado. The longest and most outstanding piece here is the "Song of the Innkeeper's Wife" by Taraf de Clejani, a Roumanian gypsy group. I have heard this same piece done by Taraf de Haiduks. There's a horsehair string on the fiddle which, when played briskly, sounds like something ripping. This segues into an uptempo ballad and the music shifts about in movements as different tempos and instruments are featured. After some laments with accordion from Russia, we hear from the master of the Greek bouzouki, followed by the startling triple-reed launedda from Sardinia that requires circular breathing to play. There's no Corsican polyphony, probably to bolster the liner notes' wild claim that polyphonic music originated in the heart of Paris at Notre Dame. (In all likelihood the liner notes are hard to read, at first, being translated perhaps by a machine which, to them, imparts a haphazard personality. Imbued with such difficulties we nevertheless blunder on.) A Spanish bulería and Portuguese fado round things off nicely showing white folks can have soul (though you might argue that 8 centuries of Arab & African blood made them mestizos)!

Last up, Volume 7, takes in Latin America. A different place from the one we know from our favourite familiar Colombian and Brasilian recordings. However there's some weird and wonderful stuff here: like the scene where a wild bull meets a market truck on a jungle track. Actually it's a rare recording made by a tribe of Asurini do Xingu whose rituals are unknown to anthropologists, but they know how to work a tape recorder! It sounds like African horn music too. The instruments are low-pitched tule clarinets and flutes made from reeds and their rhythmic propulsiveness blends in with the insect sounds. This is a must-find (on OCORA 560084). Cuba is so thoroughly documented you know right away what's going on. It's the Family Miranda doing a popular song from the 1940s by Compay Segundo. The other central American tracks have a familiarity in their rhythms and instruments, but overall this OCORA box brings to light some gems in their vast catalogue and is well worthy delving into.