AfroCubism at Barbican, London
Robin Denselow,
Denselow, Tuesday 23 November 2010 23.20 GMT
Fourteen years in the making ... Bassekou Kouyate performs with AfroCubism
at the Barbican, London. Photograph: Andy Sheppard/Redferns
When this project was conceived 14 years ago, the idea was bold yet simple: the Malian guitarist
Djelimady Tounkara and n'goni virtuoso Bassekou Kouyate would travel to Cuba to work with local
musicians. The Africans failed to arrive, and the resulting (mostly Cuban) session became the hugely
successful Buena Vista Social Club. Now, the original plan has been revived. Several of the musicians
involved are now celebrities, making AfroCubism a world music supergroup.
Their debut UK concert was a joyous, classy, historic affair that almost did justice to the extraordinary
lineup, of which at least four of the artists alone could have packed out the hall. The Malian contingent
wore long coloured robes, with Tounkara and Kouyate joined by the remarkable kora exponent Toumani
Diabaté, the fine singer Kassé Mady Diabaté, and Lassana Diabaté, an exponent of the west African
xylophone, the balafon. Playing alongside them was the Cuban singer, guitarist and Buena Vista star
Eliades Ochoa, dressed in black and wearing a cowboy hat, with his red-shirted band Grupo Patria adding
percussion and brass.
The mood was set by the opening Mali Cuba, an instrumental written by Toumani, which provided a
reminder that Malians adore Cuban music – many went to study there after independence – and allowed
solos from all the celebrities. Next, the band switched to Mali's griot tradition, with sturdy singing from
Kassé Mady, who then swapped vocals with Ochoa on a song in the eastern Cuban guajira style before
Tounkara showed off his impressive electric guitar work on Djelimady Rumba.
It was a magnificent set, but could have included even more from Tounkara and Toumani, who provided
one of the highpoints of the evening by matching his kora against Kouyate’s n’goni and Ochoa’s guitar for
a gloriously delicate acoustic reworking of Guantanamera.
Guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011
A LongLong-Delayed Alliance, Cohesive and Potent
Potent
By JON PARELES
Published: November 10, 2010
Better late than never — far better. AfroCubism, the
group of Malian and Cuban musicians who have made an
album together and who performed at Town Hall on
Tuesday night, is a long-delayed collaboration. It’s a
musical chemistry experiment that Nick Gold, the founder
of World Circuit Records, tried to assemble in 1996 by
bringing Malian musicians to Havana to work with eldergeneration Cuban musicians, for trans-Atlantic Afro-Cuban fusions.
The Malians had visa problems, the Cubans recorded some romantic old songs by themselves,
and the result was the multimillion-selling “Buena Vista Social Club.” AfroCubism merges one of
Buena Vista’s surviving stars — the guitarist Eliades Ochoa, who sang “Chan Chan” — and his
band Grupo Patria with what amounts to an African supergroup: the guitarist Djelimady
Tounkara, the kora (harp) player Toumani Diabaté, the griot singer Kassé Mady Diabaté and the
balafon (xylophone) player Lassana Diabaté, who was born in Guinea but now lives in Mali.
(Diabaté is a common name for West African griot families; the three are not related.) Echoing
1996, another Malian who played on the album, the ngoni (ancestral banjo) player Bassekou
Kouyate, was stranded in Canada with visa problems.
But the group sounded even stronger and more cohesive than it does on the “AfroCubism”
album. Although Cuban music has West African roots, and many Malian musicians participated
in cultural exchanges in Cuba in the 1960s, their music evolved along different paths, and
mingling them involves more than making sure players get along and communicate.
Mathematical decisions are required about rhythms and spaces, about phrasing and scales and
tunings. (Luckily Lassana Diabaté plays a modernized, chromatic balafon, which is not tied to
one mode.)
AfroCubism made those choices with ingenuity and verve. To slightly oversimplify, the Cubans
brought concision and lilt, with forthright, folky tunes sung by Mr. Ochoa and pithy lines from his
guitar and the band’s two trumpets. And the Malians brought speed, rhythmic subdivisions and
sparkle, with triple-time balafon patterns and Toumani Diabaté’s sprinting, dizzying kora solos.
Mr. Tounkara, Mali’s definitive electric guitarist, played ultra-smooth lines that embraced
Arabesques, Malian modes, the blues and suave Cuban pop.
The songs, new and old, came from both cultures, and often merged them; “Bensema,” by
Kassé Mady Diabaté, placed his billowing griot-style vocals over a Cuban changüi rhythm. The
Cuban standard “Guantanamera” emerged from a trio improvisation by Mr. Ochoa, Toumani
Diabaté and Lassana Diabaté, with Mr. Ochoa assertively plucking the tune while the Malians
surrounded him with staccato streaks and curlicues.
“Una grande familia,” Mr. Ochoa declared after the last song “one big family.” As the musicians
left the stage, Yacouba Sissoko from Mali started a six-beat rhythm on his talking drum, and Mr.
Ochoa grinned and sang a Cuban tune over it. This wasn’t the Buena Vista Social Club’s fond
nostalgia; it was a new and potent alliance.
AfroCubism, CD review
By Mark Hudson 11:25AM BST 13 Oct 2010
The real Buena Vista Social Club finally get their moment in the sun.
Rating: * * * *
Behind this elegantly crafted meeting of African and Cuban
master musicians lurks the presence of another massiveselling album. Fourteen years ago, a group of Mali’s finest
musicians were due to fly to Havana for an exploration of
common roots with some of Cuba’s best singers and
instrumentalists. When the Malians didn’t show, a very
different album was recorded, the multimillion-selling Buena Vista Social Club.
Yet Nick Gold, the British producer behind the Buena Vista phenomenon, remained haunted by
the idea of the great Afro-Cuban project that never was. So when Malian kora virtuoso Toumani
Diabate expressed interest in recording with the tough-voiced Cuban balladeer Eliades Ochoa,
Gold seized the chance to bring together as many as possible of the musicians who would have
appeared on the 1996 album.
On one level this is an album that has missed its moment. Yet AfroCubism creates a bittersweet
musical micro-world all its own, full of rippling textures and sinuous picking, with musicians at the
top of their game finding a fluent, yet delightfully rough-hewn musical chemistry that transcends
cultural differences.
Ochoa’s throaty guajira singing coheres easily with the gutty bluesiness of Bassekou Kouyate’s
ngoni lute thrumming, while Djelimady Tounkara’s sparkling guitar runs put one in mind of some
wayward, tropical Hank Marvin. Toumani Diabate adds delicate ornamentations to the tumbling
rhythmic flow over which Ochoa and the elegantly nasal Malian griot singer Kasse Mady Diabate
exchange verses with blissful disregard for differences of language and meaning.
If you could wish at times for something a bit left-field to cut across the prevailing tasteful
folksiness, that is in a sense provided by the stridently percussive Dakan, a kind of avant garde
jam derived entirely from traditional Africa ideas.
The closer, a spacily languid, Africanised take on the old Cuban chestnut Guantanamera,
confirms the sense that with players this good and a vibe this inspired, music can’t help but be
relevant to its moment.
AfroCubism - AfroCubism (World Circuit)
UK release date: 11 October 2010
by Daniel Paton
Whilst the hugely popular Buena Vista Social Club was initially sold as the
fruits of Ry Cooder's
Cooder Cuban explorations, both in publicity material and in
the subsequent Wim Wenders documentary film, it transpires the original
aim for the project had been rather different. Nick Gold, the astute
businessman and genuine music lover behind the World Circuit label, had
tried to instigate a collaboration between musicians from Cuba and Mali
but the Malians had failed to obtain the correct visas and the project had to be called off. With
the release of Afrocubism, that laudable aspiration has finally been realised, with predictably
wonderful results.
This kind of world fusion, instigated by a label boss and uniting artists separated by substantial
language barriers (translators were employed during the sessions), could easily have been
contrived or forced. Yet it's hard to imagine how a project involving musicians of the calibre of
Toumani Diabaté, Bassekou Kouyaté and Eliades Ochoa could be anything other than stunning.
These are simply the masters of their individual fields - virtuoso instrumentalists and supremely
expressive musicians and writers.
The great skill and brilliance in this music lies in its effortless nature - the supreme command
these musicians have over feel and vibe - the innate, intangible understanding and interaction
between musicians that can only be acquired through years of performing experience. This is
also a music of curious paradoxes - at once quiet and hugely spirited, relaxed and propulsive,
calming and intense. It is fascinating and inspiring to hear how comfortably the desert guitar solo
of Djelimady Rumba (played by Djelimady Tounkara) fits with the rhythmic backdrop provided by
Eliades Ochoa's longstanding band Grupo Patria, or how seamlessly Toumani Diabaté's fluid,
ornate kora playing merges with the restrained groove of Mali Cuba. Guantanamera, a
potentially over-familiar old standard, is imbued with new life and empathy for featuring Diabaté's
mellifluous kora.
Ochoa, who, with the late Compay Segundo,
Segundo performed Chan Chan, one of the Social Club's
most enduring songs, provides many of the richly melodic vocals here and he has the perfect foil
in Malian griot singer Kassy Mady Diabaté. The vocals throughout are a constant source of
delight - so dynamic and expressive that the songs need little thematic explanation.
The rich quality of the vocals are matched by the frenzied magic of the instrumental
performances. Dakan offers a showcase for Lassana Diabaté's
Diabaté extraordinary mastery of the
balafon (a percussion instrument somewhere between a marimba and xylophone). Djelimady
Tounkara's guitar playing is infused with the language and feeling of the blues. Western
audiences will already be more than familiar with the astounding kora and ngoni playing of
Toumani Diabaté and Bassekou Kouyaté respectively. Many will have been introduced to these
beautiful instruments by these very musicians.
Afrocubism emerges, finally, as so much more than a rushed studio job or forced business plan.
It is steeped in two musical traditions which share common ground - and contains the kind of
sensitive and subtle but captivating and inspiring performances borne from an abundance of
talent. These are musicians who play with intuition rather than instinct - there is tremendous
natural ability on display, but it has been informed through years of intimate engagement with
their respective musical heritage and standard repertoire. Although this project is steeped in
melancholy songs and desert blues forms, what a resonant, exciting and ultimately joyous album
it is.
BBC Review - Afro Cubism
Belated collaboration between Malian and Cuban musicians results in a fine
album.
Jon Lusk 20102010-1010-08
It’s not always a disaster when plans go astray. Fourteen years after the
celebrated sessions in Havana that gave rise to the Buena Vista Social Club,
AfroCubism is a re-imagining of how that record might have sounded if the
original idea of a collaboration between Malian and Cuban musicians had
worked out. In the event, the Malians didn’t arrive, so the project became
almost purely Cuban, and spawned the eponymous mega-hit.
Of course, many of those involved are sadly no longer with us. Even so, AfroCubism brings together core
members of the originally envisaged group with several Mali-based luminaries. Although the material is
equally divided between the two cultures, the predominant ambience of AfroCubism is West African. In
fact, the sound and arrangements often recall the lovely instrumental album Ballad of Manding (2007) by
the inexplicably obscure guitarist and ngoni player Zoumana Diarra.
The best-known figure on AfroCubism – and arguably the group’s leader – is guitarist and singer Eliades
Ochoa, who featured on Buena Vista Social Club’s version of Chan Chan. He opens the vocals with a
beautifully relaxed take on Al Vaivén De Mi Carreta, a song he once recorded with its composer, Cuban
troubadour Ñico Saquito. In a deft symbolic gesture, the other main singer Kasse-Mady Diabaté takes
over in the second half, gently moderating his usually stern griot tone to suit the vibe.
Kora maestro Toumani Diabaté maintains a surprisingly discreet presence throughout, only really cutting
loose on his own fine composition Mali Cuba, and later on Benséma. Djelimady Tounkara will be familiar
to fans of the Super Rail Band, and his fluid, mildly psychedelic electric guitar is especially impressive on
Djelimady Rumba. Lassana Diabaté drops breathtaking runs on his balafon (wooden xylophone) into
many of the pieces. The other major star is ngoni specialist Bassekou Kouyate, who startles by switching
to an amplified bass version of his instrument on the spooky and atmospheric Dakan. Horns, a rhythm
section and backing vocalists fill out the arrangements.
World Circuit’s two decade-plus exploration of the long history of musical exchange between Cuba and
West Africa didn’t necessarily guarantee the success of AfroCubism, but these players seem to have
overcome considerable cultural differences and generated good chemistry together. If the ego issues that
often beset such supergroups can be kept in check, this probably won’t be their only outing.
Although the Malian musicians were well aware of Cuban music, it’s possible that the opposite may not be
true. This would certainly explain the lack of Cuban flavour on some of the African tracks. Whereas on the
songs of Cuban origins, the Malians manage to get over their identity; this never quite happens when the
shoe is on the other foot. Cuban flavour throughout Afrocubism is represented by Ochoa on guitar and
vocals, and various other musicians playing percussion and horns, yet when the songs are not in Spanish,
their presence is largely unfelt. “Jarabi” is a perfect example. The song, written by Toumani Diabaté, is the
centrepiece of the album. Its pulsating rhythm, composed of balafons, kora, and minimal percussion,
features the stirring vocals of Kasse Mady Diabate, and brings to mind Youssou N’Dour at his best. Apart
from a shaker, it has little to no Cuban influence, which shouldn’t be an issue as I will listen to the song
over and over again, but it does somehow take a little away from the aim of the album. It would have been
great to have heard some Cuban guitar playing over African rhythms, but for whatever reason, Ochoas
never seems to have the confidence to go down that route.
It’s for this reason that this album never quite reaches the goals it set for itself. We get to hear how terrific
a number of these African musicians are and how easily they are able to blend their sound into Cuban
rhythms, yet we never get to see this in reverse, which is a massive shame. It means that a musical
journey which could have been quite groundbreaking has resulted in an album of two halves, of great
music from Mali, and of great Malian musicians playing Cuban music. It’s still worth listening to as the
music is of such high quality, but as a glimpse into something different, it keeps its eyes firmly shut.
AfroCubism: AfroCubism
By Russ Slater [29 November 2010]
Africa meets Cuba on the Malian
Malian Social Club that almost never was...
In 1996, Nick Gold, head of World Circuit Records, invited Ry Cooder to
record a collaboration between musicians from Cuba and Mali in Havana.
Cooder arrived in Cuba, but the Malians never did (something to do with
their visas), and the project morphed into the Buena Vista Social Club: a
film, tour, and, most importantly, a record. The album sold five million
copies, won a Grammy award, and became the prototype for any record
company with ambitions of selling world music. The Malians have no
doubt been kicking themselves ever since.
Now, 14 years later, the musicians from West Africa finally get their chance. While it’s never going to
equal the success of Buena Vista (the circumstances behind that record’s fruition are too impossible to
match), it offers the opportunity to hear what may seem, on paper, a very strange idea. In fact, the link
between Mali and Cuba is extremely strong. Following independence from France in 1960, Mali’s
President Modibo Keita introduced One-Party Socialism, becoming friends with Fidel Castro in the
process. During Keita’s reign, Cuban music was actively promoted throughout the country. As a result,
many Malian musicians are now as comfortable at playing son and rumba rhythms as their own.
Afrocubism should then offer a perfect union between these two groups of musicians. Unfortunately,
despite some real successes, this is not completely achieved. It’s apparent which of the songs are written
by Malians and which by Cubans, and not because of the different languages they’re singing. From a
fusion perspective, the most interesting are those with Cuban rhythms, such as the opening two tracks,
which both start off sounding like the brothers of Buena Vista before allowing for the Africans to move
within their grooves. This is where it gets really interesting as we get to hear Toumani Diabaté playing the
kora, a 21-string musical harp, Lassona Diabaté on the balafons, sounding somewhere between a
xylophone and marimba, and Djelimady Tounkaru playing the guitar in his own inimitable style.
The contrast between the rustic voice of Eliades Ochoa, leading the Cubans on this album, and the
rhythmic tones of the African instruments is delightful, and it is successful all over the album, as “A La
Luna Yo Me Voy” and “Para Los Pinares Se Va Montoro” demonstrate later on. There always seems to be
enough room in the songs for the Malians to add their inflections and licks, giving the songs extra gravitas
and ebb than they would have otherwise.