Pick of the Week - Guitar (Various)
A rather broad topic this time around, looking back (and forward) at some of guitar music featured at Music of Africa.
Once upon a time I played guitar. But I had a problem. I wasn't sure if I wanted to be the next Andres Segovia, Eddie Van Halen, or Johnny Ramone. My genius solution was to give up the guitar altogether - for a very long time. I only took it up again in the last decade.
I keep coming back to guitar music here at MoA. I wasn't consciously aware of it, at first. But I guess it makes sense, given my early life aspirations.
This all finally sank in after this past week, when I did a deep dive into the music of the late Ali Farka Toure, of Mali. The video that opens this post focuses on the music of Toure and John Lee Hooker. Some have remarked on the similarities between the two. I mostly just listened to the music, without following any narrative that might be there. Any excuse to hear music by Ali Farka Toure and John Lee Hooker...
Just yesterday, I happened to run across an album called Zulu Guitar Blues. It came out...just yesterday. It looks great, but I'll come back to it when I've had a chance to actually listen to it.
In the meantime, here's a snip from the blurb and there's a song posted below. I should add that it's available on Bandcamp. For as much as I plug them, you might guess I'm on their payroll. But I'm not. I just like the fact that there's so much great music from Africa at the site. And much of it happens to be guitar music.:
But for this compilation of rescued songs masterfully restored from rare 78 rpm shellacs, few could imagine the diversely beautiful roots of Zulu Guitar Music emerging during the period 1950 – 1965. Story-tellers and master musicians appropriate outlaw personae, re-purpose country and western, Hawaiian and other styles, to stretch and challenge our notion of “the Zulu guitar”.
Twenty-five songs (18 on vinyl) plunge us into the depths of the migrant experience. Translations in the liner notes offer us glimpses of pugnacity, melancholy and heartache, all coloured by the paternalism that circumscribed the singers’ apartheid-dominated lives.
If it weren't for the unorthodox playing styles of Botswana's folk guitarists, this site might not even exist. Our first post focused on those guitarists and since then, I've feature some great guitar music every now and then. Click here to see that first post and some of our more guitar-centric features.