Weekly Music Roundup: Jidenna, Tinariwen, and elbow
Week of August 26: This week, African sounds from Jidenna and Tinariwen, plus elbow’s crumbling empire, and new remake of an early electronic music classic from Maya Beiser.
On Jidenna’s Map, The I-85 Goes To Africa
The Nigerian-American rapper and singer Jidenna lives in Brooklyn, but he has spent time in Atlanta, and he understands the concept of “oceans,” so he must know that the I-85 highway cannot possibly go to Africa. Except that on his new album, it does. Improbably but powerfully, Jidenna’s 85 To Africa takes us on a journey into a kind of global hip hop that celebrates the African diaspora, draws on West African music styles like highlife and Afrobeat, and even name checks the medieval Sufi poet Rumi. The album’s opening track, “Worth The Weight,” is a statement of intent, although the video (shot in South Africa?) doesn’t use the album’s actual opening statement – “People, confusion going on/Why don't we just learn how to live with one another?” set to a cinematic soul orchestration. The song features Seun Kuti, one of the sons of the legendary Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, and ends with a recorded statement about Africa’s importance, but along the way, Jidenna is in full voice, taking a swipe at homophobia, positing a black alternative to the dream of making money on Wall Street, and even suggesting that a lot of past heartache could’ve been avoided if weed had been legal all along. The song takes a brief psychedelic turn towards the end, with swirling electronics and what almost sounds like glossolalia but could possibly be Jidenna chanting in Igbo.
Jidenna plays Brooklyn Steel on October 30.
Tinariwen Issues An Almost Acoustic New Track
The Grammy-winning band Tinariwen is based in northern Mali, and over the past twenty years have become the most famous and most successful of the many guitar-toting Tuareg bands from the western Sahara region. The sound of these bands is reliant on the loping rhythm of the so-called desert blues and the hypnotic swirl of electric guitars. In Tinariwen’s case, they’ve worked with so many Western rock musicians (Robert Plant, the guys from TV On The Radio, and lots more) that their sound has approached the amps-to-eleven world of arena rock. So it’s nice to hear this new single, called “Kel Tinawen,” which is probably as close as we’ll get to hearing Tinariwen “unplugged.” Folk-rocker Cass McCombs adds acoustic guitar to a track that was originally recorded under a tent – the forthcoming album, called Amadjar, was made on location in southern Morocco and Mauritania, and apart from the later Western contributors, most of it was done in just a few takes with minimal editing. The video gives a sense of what that was like. This song is a warning to the enemies of the Tuareg (who are traditionally nomadic and have occasionally fought against the governments of Mali and Niger to maintain their cultural identity and freedom) that their lies and betrayal will only strengthen the Tuareg people.
Amadjar comes out on September 6.
elbow’s New Song Ponders Mortality – And Brexit?
The British band elbow has released a single called “Empires,” from their forthcoming album Giants Of All Sizes. The song acknowledges that all things must pass: it may literally be talking about, or around, the topic of death, as Guy Garvey sings “how can a bland, unremarkable, typical Tuesday be Day of the Dead?” But it’s impossible to miss the not-so-veiled reference to what’s happening to a United Kingdom that’s being divided by the subject of Brexit. “Empires crumble all the time,” Garvey sings in the chorus. “You just happened to witness mine.” All of this happens atop a steady trudge of drums, uneasy keyboards reminiscent of side two of David Bowie’s Low, and around the edges, stray tendrils of what sounds like thumb piano. Fortunately, the darkness is relieved a bit by the glowing harmonies of the chorus.
elbow’s new album comes out on October 11.
Lazarus, The Malawi Street Musician, Releases His Debut LP
We’ve met Lazarus in these weekly roundups before: he is a street musician from Malawi who has albinism. In Malawi and some other parts of central and eastern Africa, albino body parts are thought to have magical properties, so people with albinism are sometimes mutilated or killed. Lazarus has just released his full-length album, called Stomp On The Devil, recorded with the Anglo-Malawi band The Very Best. The recording sessions were the subject of a documentary film that premiered this April at the Tribeca Film Festival, and Lazarus has since recorded songs with Bon Iver and The National, and played an impromptu set for Leonardo Di Caprio when the actor came to dinner. The album continues Lazarus’s quest to raise awareness of the plight and the dangers faced by people with albinism. But of course, it’s also a set of songs, and some of them are quite catchy. This track, "Waynera,” features his home-made guitar and drum, and a small chorus of background singers.
Cellist Maya Beiser Remakes An Early Electronic Music Classic
When we say “electronic music,” most people naturally think of some form of pop music, whether it’s krautrock, industrial, trance, EDM, or any of a hundred other subspecies. But the first electronic music experiments were in the world of classical music, and one of my favorites has long been a work by the 20th century French composer Olivier Messiaen called La Fete Des Belles Eaux, which he wrote in 1937. It was composed for six ondes martenot, an electric instrument with a sound eerily like, yet unlike, a high human voice. Messiaen was a mystic, and his music often has an otherworldly quality; this piece certainly fits that description. Now, the cellist Maya Beiser has done her own version of this piece with multiple tracks of her own instrument. Beiser is a former member of the Bang On A Can All-Stars and someone who has claimed both contemporary classical music and rock classics as her own in a series of thematic albums. This piece, a meditation on water, is from her album delugEON, which comes out on Friday. The record is a response to climate change, to rising seas and water shortages, and to music that suggests something resilient and hopeful in the human spirit.
