Random A-List for Set: Africa

Artists from Africa.

Here are 12 A-list albums, selected at random from Set: Africa. Use your Reload button to get more.

Guitar Paradise of East Africa [1991, Earthworks]
Though at least three of the artists came up in Zaire, this classic compilation comprises six four- or five-minute Kenyan dance hits and five eight- or nine-minute Kenyan dance hits. So I guess it's benga, a beat/genre/label even more all-embracing than the soukous it cheerfully lifts. Though at times the guitaristics billow like Kinshasa, they're gentler, quirkier, more rural--and they're not definitive, because this is a song album. Nasally conversational or breathily musical, the voices get catchy to impossibly fetching melodies, and though only one band can afford horns, that band comes up with a great chart--a great cheesy chart. Intensely pleasurable up till cut seven, Orchestre Super Mazembe's atypically dark, typically gorgeous "Shauri Yako." After that, five consecutive tunes make you sit up and exclaim, "Oh boy, that one." Destructible, I suppose--persuasion, not power, is the idea. But if this is one world, undeniable. A+

The Heartbeat of Soweto [1988, Shanachie]
Earthworks having cast in with Virgin, Shanachie goes to the well and tests Zulu hegemony with its own mbaqanga compilation. There are big advantages to the wider range of tribal melodies and beats--in Western pop terms, sharper hooks and a less monolithic groove. Seven artists divide up the 12 tracks, and while the hottest stuff is still Zulu--Usuthu's eternally recurrent tunelet, Amaswazi Emvelo's supertipico forward grind--this album has its urban heart in the bush. From the simple Tsonga drumbeats of Thomas Chauke's opener to the Shangaan family chorale of M.D. Shiranda's closer, unprofessionalism in no way diminishes the music's skill or complexity. Folkies may well prefer it to Indestructible. Rock and rollers with ears won't settle for one or the other. A

Pépé Kallé: Pépé Kallé [1990, Gefraco]
The soft touch of Empire Babuka's headman takes his speedy new wave soukous a crucial lift or two higher than Loketo's more masculine Soukous Trouble. But a Diblo Dibala record is what it is--in a style where every guitarist sounds the same and pretty damn good, the producer's articulated billows of rhythm always encourage your faith that this time it'll be even better. And especially on the buoyant, surging "L'Argent Ne Fait Pas le Bonheur," it is. A−

Salif Keita: The Mansa of Mali: A Retrospective [1994, Mango]
I wonder what a mansa is. Surely nothing so crass as an albino from the desert around Bamako who was ambitious enough to hit NYC back in 1980? But that's who he is and has been, as set on world conquest as Youssou D'Dour himself even if he isn't as good at it. The baloney on this useful introduction isn't the three grand survivals from the failed Eurofusion Soro, which are more likable undercut by simpler stuff, or even the duly selected representative from the Republic of Zawinul, which starts out fairly pretty and gets fairly intense. And it sure isn't the legendary 1978 "Mandjou," 13 leisurely, inevitable minutes an Ambassadeurs fan might buy a whole best-of just to own. It's the three hunks of soundtrack, precisely one of which conjures up any image whatsoever. A−

Ladysmith Black Mambazo: Inala [1986, Shanachie]
Unless I learn Zulu (long shot) or someone starts providing trots (great idea), chances are my favorite Ladysmith album will always be the first one I listened to, 1984's Induku Zethu. But your favorite will probably be the first one you listen to, and if you were busy in 1984 you might help Paul Simon do a good deed and start here. By now you should know what you'll get: a male a cappella chorus comprising two families of brothers and cousins in which Joseph Shabalala's cunning tenor darts in and out of the harmonic brush. Though they can dance to it, you probably can't, but unless you're hopelessly culture-bound you'll soon hear how beautiful it is. As a crossover gesture there's one song in English, full of sly domestic observations that provide welcome insight into how they deploy both words and sounds. A−

Ricardo Lemvo and Makina Loca: Isabela [2007, Mopiato Music]
The Angola-born, L.A.-based salsero-by-default has always been a trifle polite, but on this careful tour de force, he makes politesse an active virtue. In five different non-English languages he invites cousin after cousin into the extended family--from boogaloo to rumba, bolero to son--and defines the groove they share with his own contained dynamics. Far from jarring against each other, the styles barely even seem to segue, shifting like the themes and moods on a well-sung album of quality love songs. Two exceedingly well-spoken female singers, one of them usually a bore, chip in on duets. They groove too. A−

Baaba Maal: Being [2023, Atelier Live]
This 69-year-old vocalist and guitarist is a Tukulor not a Wolof and hence, at least in his case, a more politically conscious and proactive figure than even a Wolof as socially sapient as Youssou N'Dour himself. But it pretty much goes without saying because who has that he's never approached N'Dour's musical reach or scope, and keeping up with his albums has required more diligence than they seemed likely to reward. That's one reason I missed 2016's The Traveller, only now I'm kind of sorry, because this one is simultaneously raw and delicate, powerful and modulated. One reviewer has praised how openly it integrates younger pop experimental types. What impresses me is that you can't tell they're there. A−

Only the Poorman Feel It: South Africa [1995, Hemisphere]
Relying on EMI-affiliated artists with longterm pop ambitions, this modern mbaqanga compilation seems decisively postapartheid even though not all of it is that recent. What once might have sounded like a forced identification with a contemptuous oppressor now seems more like a forced expropriation of the oppressor's cultural capital. The great moments come from 25-year expatriate Busi Mhlongo, whose only solo album begins with the same seven-minute flight of exultant woman power that kicks off this record, and urbane revolutionary Mzwakhe Mbuli, who praises a 19th-century African king to a 21st-century African arrangement. But the glitzy production extras sound as township as the kwela fiddles throughout. A−

Orchestra Marrabenta Star of Mocambique: Independence [1992, Piranha]
Said to double-time the traditional Mozambican majika, the marrabenta rhythm no doubt adds crucial subliminal novelty to Afrodance stomps like "Tsiketa Kuni Barassara," but won't signify beyond its cultural boundaries. Neither will the indigenous sources of what sounds from here like a fairly bizarre but not unexpected Afro-European-Asian-Caribbean melange. The hook is the slack horn arrangements announced on "Elisa Gomara Saia," which evoke the nutty jazz of Indonesian gambang kromong though I doubt that's where they come from. The jewel is the preacherly melody of the supposedly unfinished "Nwahulwana." A−

Oumou Sangaré: Moussolou [1991, World Circuit]
Cut in Côte d'Ivoire the week of this Wassoulou woman's 21st birthday, it'a a crucial quantum more pop than Stern's's far-from-folkloric Women of Mali collection, where Sangare's "Diaraby Nene" stands out even more proudly than it does here. But it's also a crucial quantum less pop than copyright holder Ibrahim Sylla's usual Gallic West Africanisms, not to mention those of such world travelers as Salif Keita or Youssou N'Dour. No archivist, Sangare nevertheless avoids horn charts, synthesizers, and Afrodisco overdrive for the deliberate rhythms and acoustic hooks of her own tradition. Call it a Sahel version of early Dolly Parton--with a deeper groove. A−

Rachid Taha: Live [2002, Mondo Melodia]
Brussels is already rocking when the cocky little French-Algerian embarks on a greatest hits selection from Made on Medina, my choice for hard rock album of 2001, though that Linkin Park joint gave it a run and sold more copies to boot. Sandwiched around the Berber-sounding chant "Bent Sahra," four songs climax with the onomatopoeic "Foqt Foqt" before slowing down a little into the midtempo "Ala Jalkoum," here differentiated with a Femi Kuti cameo. Seems like cheating, reprising all that Made in Medina. Only this album rocks even harder. A−