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« Jesse Kornbluth
Happiness In a CD
Rough week? This music will pick you up and make you shake your booty with estatic joy. Dimanche à BamakoAmadou & Mariam Do you like music that makes you happy? I don't mean moderately happy, 7.5 on a scale of 10, isn't it a great day happy, kind of sort of happy. I mean ecstatic, get up and dance happy, throw caution to the winds and kiss a stranger happy, pump up the volume and wake your neighbors happy, see yourself realizing all your dreams happy. That happiness is commercially available. It's even legal. You can just trust me that this is a CD you absolutely cannot go on living without and click and have these sounds for your very own in a matter of days. Or, if you are weary of hype, you can resist until I make the case. Okay, here's the case: Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia are from Mali. They met in the 1970s, married in 1980 and started performing together. Like their fellow musicians from Mali -- I'm thinking of Ali Farka Toure and Boubacar Traore -- they started with their country's version of the blues. Along the way, they went international and borrowed from cultures as diverse as Cuba and France. And they became very popular indeed. Small fact: They're blind. Both of them. And possessed of the unusual joy that is the special province of some of the unsighted (see Jacques Lusseyran's jaw-dropping World War II memoir, And There Was Light). In 2003, Amadou and Mariam hooked up with Manu Choa. This is major, for Choa is a world music god everywhere but in America. The reason for that is somewhat predictable: Choa is unabashedly political. Many of his lyrics are about poverty and oppression, his music is based on local folk music, and underneath it is usually a bouncy punk beat. (In 1994, he bought a train in Colombia, assembled a traveling circus and traveled the country, stopping in villages to perform. "People coming to the show, they all had a gun," he has recalled. "But we went through with no problem. That was our little victory.") Choa not only produced Dimanche à Bamako, he co-authored some of the songs, and sang and played guitar as well. But it's as a producer that he shines brightest. Almost every song has a killer beat, and on top of that he layers street sounds, harmonies from anywhere (this CD starts with a cross between 1960s hootenany and 1950s doo-wop), and on top of all that are Amadou and Mariam, who would be offended if they were ever described as less than "hypnotic." Dimanche à Bamako was a huge hit in France, where it won a Les Victoires de la Musique award (the French Grammy). Just from "La Realite" -- the song I'm playing over and over -- I can understand why. The music has police whistles, xylophone, sirens, cheering crowds, a Tex-Mex organ and a beat that pounds disco right through the wall into reggae's yard. And the lyrics (in French) have a brilliantly calibrated mix of rebel politics, weary philosophy and, finally, a command to get your ass out of the chair:
Ups and downs
Ups and downs
Then it must be that while some are sleeping
Exciting? Thrilling? As the distinguished English critic Charlie Gillett has written, "There are going to be many people who will find they have three copies of this album by the end of this year: one that they bought themselves, the other two given by people who'll say 'I heard this and thought this is the kind of thing you like.' And there will be people who will themselves have bought three or four copies to give to friends, saying, 'I know you've sworn you'll never like an album not in English, but this is the one to win you over.' " I'll say it more bluntly: This is pure joy, suitable for every occasion. To turn away from Dimanche à Bamako is to choose to live a diminished life. I beg you: Don't miss this one. -- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com Jesse Kornbluth 10/27/06
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