RFI Musique - - Album review - Tiken Jah Fakoly

Album review

Tiken Jah Fakoly

African Revolution

Paris

01/10/2010 -

With his tenth album, African Revolution, recorded in Kingston and Bamako, Tiken Jah Fakoly blends reggae and Mandinka blues to deliver his expansive message of Positive Revolution.

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To mark ten albums and fifteen years of career, Tiken Jah Fakoly has chosen to hit hard. Against a booming bass line, he flings dreadlocks, stones and scathing attacks at African leaders and at a civil society he considers lethargic and disunited. Yet there’s nothing aggressive about his optimistic message, which calls for positive revolution through education and increased awareness.

And the champion of Ivoirian reggae hits even harder – with his pan-African hankering to draw a large audience, along with a strong urge to break away from routine, this modern-day warmonger has broadened his reggae riddims to take in Mandinka blues and the griot legacy.

Recorded in Kingston at the legendary Tuff Gong studios, and in Bamako where the artist has lived for the last five years, the album African Revolution was admirably produced by Jonathan Quarmby and Kevin Bacon (Finley Quaye). It combines Jamaican rhythms with nostalgic accents of kora, balafon and ngoni and the rhythmic chanting of the soukou (a one-string violin). A successful mix that features folk guitar work by Thomas Naïm, known for his work with Hindi Zahra.

To resonate all the more in this vast world, Tiken Jah also invited other musicians to join him on the album, like his old sidekick Magyd Cherfi on the tracks Il faut se lever and Sors de ma télé; Jeanne Cherhal wrote the lyrics for Je ne veux pas ton pouvoir, Féfé wrote lyrics and music for Je dis non, and Political War bears the lovely voice of the Nigerian Asa. He may act as a loud speaker providing the “voice of the voiceless”, but Tiken Jah manages to put the thrust of his manifesto and his influence into perspective: “It’s only a song, it won’t change our lives, but I sing so as not to accept. I say no in song.”