Rokia Traore and New African Music

Originally posted on July 23, 2008

If you go to a bricks and mortar CD store and they are thorough enough to have a bin dubbed “Africa,” you are likely to find almost anything, from traditional tribal to slick “world music” releases veering on disco at their worst. It makes sense though. If you were in an African store and looked in a bin labeled “USA,” what consistency would you expect to find at that level?

Be that as it may, if you found the CD Brownboi (Nonesuch-Tama) in that African bin, you would have an offering by female singer Rokia Traore that straddles the fence between tradition and modern in a way that does not lose the continuity of possible styles in play. She sounds West African; there are West African harps and the percussion has the sound of that region. As is all-too-often the case, there are no liner notes to explain what this is. No matter.

We get western strings occasionally, well arranged, a nice acoustic guitar presence, and a very good singer singing strong material. I don’t know if she is big over there or not, but this CD encourages me as far as what a modern African music can sound like. It retains the roots and adds modern colors of western derived styles without diluting the original impetus. In other words it sounds good!

The Afropop of Fela Kuti with Ginger Baker

First posted on November 19, 2007

The African music scene began changing rapidly in the ‘50s-‘60s with the arrival of highlife and other local urban styles. Highlife combined Afro-Latin feels and sounds with African roots and American-European pop, r & b, and jazz, using electric guitar and basses, drums, hand percussion and horn sections. There were many regional variants and musics that developed wherever the local scene had creative musicians to forge their own unique combination of traditional styles and new juxtapositions.


By 1970 there was a further innovation from one of the geniuses of the times, Nigerian singer-leader-composer-instrumentalist Fela Kuti. Funk of a distinctive blend was what he developed, using rather large bands of guitars, horns, percussion, drums, etc. He passed away a number of years ago, but he left his mark on African music in a big way. An album of his from 1970 currently tops my playlist: Fela Ransome-Kuti and The Africa ’70 with Ginger Baker Live (Terrascape CD). Four fairly long tunes/jams take the music into a very hip place, and Ginger Baker fits right in. It is a riff-based music with incredibly enticing grooves set up by guitar, bass and percussion and punctuated by the horns and keyboards.