02-04-2020 > WORLD:MUSiC:MiX # 33 selected ETHNiC FUSiON tracks 1988-1977 # WmW

02-04-2020  > WORLD:MUSiC:MiX # 33 selected ETHNiC FUSiON tracks 1988-1977 # WmW:   Los Lobos, Pata Negra, Issa Juma And Super Wanyika Stars, Dead Can Dance, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Richard Thompson, Lô Borges, Richard Horowitz, Amara Toure, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Silvio Rodríguez, Hailu Mergia and The Walias

M  U  S  I  C / WmW

if you want excitement PRESS SHUFFLE!

LISTEN THE PLAYLIST ON DEEZER.COM

1988-1977

East L.A. barrio band that draws gracefully from rock, Tex-Mex, country, folk, R&B, blues, and traditional Spanish and Mexican music.
Los Lobos
Estoy Sentado Aquí (Cesar Rosas) 2:28
La Pistola y el Corazón (David Hidalgo / Louie Pérez) 3:27
from La pistola y el corazón 1988
Los Lobos used the commercial breakthrough represented by La Bamba to turn to their first love, Mexican folk music, and recorded this excellent collection of norteño songs. If this is a band that seems to do too many things well, in a sense they are at their best when they narrow their focus, and they are certainly masters of their style here.

Pata Negra (literally, Black Leg, which is the best cut of ham in Spain) was formed in the 1980s by brothers Raimundo and Rafael Amador. Combining flamenco with amplified blues guitar, they scored their first hit with the EP Guitarras Callajeras and then again with Blues de la Frontera. The band has broken up and regrouped several times following musical differences between Raimundo and Rafael.
Pata Negra
Bodas de Sangre (Rafael Amador / Federico García Lorca) 3:04
Pasa la Vida (Romero San Juan / Garrido Lopez) 3:51
Blues de la Frontera (Rafael Amador / Raimundo Amador) 4:13
from Blues de la frontera 1987
Flamenco is both a romantic, alluring music and a dynamic, aggressive one, particularly when played and sung by masters of the idiom. Rafael and Raimundo Amador are contemporary players who understand this dualism, and illuminated it through all nine selections. Raimundo Amador provided punch on electric and flamenco guitar and bass, while Rafael sang with both lightness and spark and answered his brother's flashy chords and passages with equally hot, sensual lines and phrases.

Adamu and Abbu are the guitarists featured on most of the tracks on World Defeats the Grandfathers, a compilation of recordings made between 1982 and 1986 by Issa Juma, a Tanzania-born vocalist and bandleader who became a star in Kenya. Juma, a key figure in the creation of Kenyan Swahili rumba, scored numerous hits with the band Les Wanyika. After leaving the band in the early 80s, he led a number of successful ensembles, all with some variation of Wanyika in their names - Wanyika Stars, Super Wanyika Stars, Waanyika, Wanyika Super Les Les.
Whatever the band name, Issa Juma stretched the boundaries of Swahili rumba, adding Congolese flavor and elements of Kenyan benga to the mix. Still, the tracks collected on this delightfully, if puzzlingly titled collection, don't vary greatly in format or style, despite having been recorded in five different sessions with varying personnel. The sound is rhythmically supple, guitar-driven, and relaxed; every track runs eight to nine minutes, giving the players generous (and sometimes excessive) space to stretch out.
Issa Juma And Super Wanyika Stars
Barua [The Letter] 8:34
Mwanaidi 8:51
from World Defeats the Grandfathers / Swinging Swahili Rumba 1982 - 1986
2010 release. Wanyika is Swahili for "wild ones," and it's a fitting moniker for the various related Wanyika bands that dominated the nightclubs, recording studios and radio waves of Nairobi, Kenya, from the early 1970s into the 90s. The Wanyika bands defined Swahili rumba, the dance music popular throughout East Africa: swinging rhythms, ringing electric guitars and strong, earthy vocals. Issa Juma was one of the founders of the Wanyika dynasty and, with his powerful baritone and rhythmic phrasing, the most distinctive of its singers. (His voice has been likened to that of the Jamaican reggae singer Toots Hibbert of Toots & the Maytals.) A prominent member of Simba Wanyika and then Les Wanyika, Juma formed his own Super Wanyika Stars in the early '80s and produced hit after hit until an untimely stroke ended his career in 1988. World Defeats the Grandfathers collects the biggest and best of these hits in one rollicking CD that brings the sound of "the wild ones" to America for the first time.

Dead Can Dance combine elements of European folk music, particularly music from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with ambient pop and worldbeat flourishes.
Dead Can Dance
De Profundis (Out of the Depths of Sorrow) (Dead Can Dance) 3:58
Mesmerism (Dead Can Dance) 3:52
Circumradiant Dawn (Dead Can Dance) 3:17
from Spleen And Ideal 1985
With this amazing album, Dead Can Dance fully took the plunge into the heady mix of musical traditions that would come to define its sound and style for the remainder of its career. The straightforward goth affectations are exchanged for a sonic palette and range of imagination. Calling it "haunting" and "atmospheric" barely scratches even the initial surface of the album's power. The common identification of the duo with a consciously medieval European sound starts here -- quite understandable, when one considers the mystic titles of songs, references to Latin, choirs, and other touches that make the album sound like it was recorded in an immense cathedral.

22 first tracks from the best albums of the year 2015 (44-63) PnM.MiX

Florence and the Machine

Titus Andronicus – No Future, Pt. 4: No Future Triumphant 4:53
If you've been to Brooklyn venue Shea Stadium in the last few years, you might have encountered Patrick Stickles sitting at the door, selling tickets to shows with crowds far more diminished than those drawn by his band, Titus Andronicus...

Viet Cong - Newspaper Spoons 3:02
Starting a band is easy; an actual career in indie rock is a much tougher proposition these days. Financial success seems harder and harder to come by and saying something new within the context of guitar based music might be even more difficult...

Florence and the Machine – Ship to Wreck 3:55
Florence Welch has built her career on the premise that she feels things more painfully and powerfully than anybody else...

Miguel - A Beautiful Exit 3:04
As perhaps the last vestige of grown-folks carnality in mainstream music, modern R&B trades in the archetypes of masculinity; sweaty abs and dirty talk pushed by loverboys (Usher) and bad boys (Jodeci)...

Slaves - The Hunter 3:02
Kentish punks lose their edge on record
Slaves are extraordinary fun live: a duo with a singing stand-up drummer and a guitarist prone to playing while being passed across the heads of the audience, and blessed with the underrated gift of being amusing between songs...

Young Fathers - Still Running 3:08
Edinburgh hip-hop trio Young Fathers continue to evolve on their sophomore release, so much so that White Men Are Black Men Too could threaten a jump out of the "rap" section of any given record store if it weren't for all the electronic musical mashing and the album's aggressive, provocative title...

Tobias Jesso Jr. – Can't Stop Thinking About You 3:53
At some point it became clear that one of the themes for the first quarter of 2015 would be The Return of the Male Piano Balladeer. Upcoming records from Father John Misty, Matthew E. White, and new kid/not-kid Tobias Jesso Jr. (he’s 29)...

The Weeknd - Real Life 3:43
"My cousin said I made it big and it's unusual/ She tried to take a selfie at my Grandma's funeral," Abel Tesfaye sings on "Tell Your Friends", a revealing highlight from his second major label album...

Low - Gentle 5:06
Low will always be considered the quintessential slowcore band, but their real mastery, and the secret to their decades-long vitality, lies in something more intangible than tempo...

FFS – Johnny Delusional  3:11
Franz Ferdinand and Sparks initially floated the idea of working together in 2004, following the release of the former band's first album, which went platinum, and the latter band's 19th, which didn't chart...

Jazmine Sullivan - Dumb 3.33
The Philadelphia singer Jazmine Sullivan is such a singular artist there's an easy temptation to contrast her latest album, Reality Show, with everything else—to define her work by its negatives, by the paths it avoids rather than those it follows...

US Girls - Sororal Feelings 2:57
Three tracks into the new U.S. Girls album, Meghan Remy is awoken by a phone call from a girlfriend. She tells her about the bad dream she just had, in which her father emailed her a digital folder containing nude images of Remy taken when she was a child...

Jlin – Black Ballet 3:39
Menace is a sensation endemic to footwork, the Chicago-borne genre of heart-racing house music that is predicated on going harder and better than anyone else on the floor...

Richard Thompson - She Never Could Resist a Winding Road 4:28
Decades into his career, Richard Thompson remains a perennial critical favorite, favorite of other musicians, and cult hero; his guitar work (hybrid picking, bizarre tuning, and soloing that never feels too self-indulgent) is unparalleled and his songwriting taut, brainy, dry and dark...

Songhoy Blues - Soubour 3:32
Songhoy Blues are a young and exuberant Malian band who already have a remarkable history behind them. They fled from their homes in the north when radical Islamists overran the region, and on reaching the safety of Bamako, decided to form a band – at which point their fortunes dramatically changed...

FKA Twigs - M3LL155X EP 3:03
In "Papi Pacify", the video that introduced FKA twigs to the wider world, the British pop star stares into the camera as a man (a lover, it should be said) pries his fingers into her gaping mouth...

Ryley Walker - Primrose Green 4:06
If you thought that the last word in folky period detail was offered by the Coen brothers in their movie Inside Llewyn Davis, then you’ll be fascinated by Chicago’s Ryley Walker...

John Grant - Grey Tickles, Black Pressure 5:30
...Possessed of a smooth but aching baritone, this Colorado-raised, Iceland-based expat evokes the lushest masters of Seventies rock while delivering sociological commentary and self-deprecating wit offset by dreamlike symphonic-synthetic splendor...

Drenge – Running Wild 3:45
When their self-titled debut clattered out of the Derbyshire village of Castleton in August 2013, it was clear that Drenge were troublemakers of the very best kind. Stroppy, pale-faced brothers Eoin and Rory Loveless looked committed to near-vampirical levels of sun avoidance...

Bill Ryder-Jones - Tell Me You Don't Love Me Watching 2:26
...As with 2013's 'A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart', much of 'West Kirby County Primary' was written and recorded in the 32-year-old's childhood home, and the album sounds appropriately haunted by his memories of people and places...

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba - Siran Fen 5:48
Two years ago, the world’s greatest n’goni player released the magnificent Jama Ko, an album that matched furious songs about the chaos then threatening Mali with exhilarating solos on the ancient African lute, transformed with electric pick-ups and effects pedal...

Wolf Alice - Turn To Dust 3:07
What a relief it is that the next big British indie sensation isn't a bunch of anointed lads with stadium-sized savior complexes. Wolf Alice's debut album is one of 2015's most anticipated homegrown debuts, thanks not to them running their mouths or having the right management, but three years of hard touring punctuated by just four EPs...