RFI Musique - - African music - Africa 50 years of music

Album review

Africa 50 years of music

Prestige anthology

Paris

23/12/2010 -

Covering 50 years of African music in a single anthology is quite some challenge. Mission accomplished in eighteen discs comprising 180 tracks, all ranked by period and geographical area. Africa 50 years of music is better than a jukebox!

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There’s no point listing the names of all the artists in this boxed set because they’re all legends. From Kouyate Sory Kandia (Guinea) to Alémayu Eshété (Ethiopia), via Cheikha Rimitti (Algeria) and Docteur Nico (DRC), these are artists who have stood up for the people and given the youth of their countries a taste for emancipation and revolution. Everywhere, they have sung of freedom, faith in the future, or dismal despair. All have imbued their music with changing times, and over the decades the shifting ways of the world have made themselves heard.

Despite the continent’s diversity, Africa, 50 years of music skilfully illustrates that everywhere in Africa, music has played a central role during fifty years of independence. Music has accompanied all of the changes of society and even initiated some of them – highlife is said to have guided Ghana on its road to independence.

Another success of the compilation is the way it shows how open the continent has always been towards the outside world. Since 1960, Africa has followed the world tempo of the second half of the 20^th century and given birth to blends of music that have gone on to inspire the rest of the world, like Fela Kuti’s afrobeat or Mahmoud Ahmed’s Ethiopian groove.

Artists in the sixties conveyed the unbridled enthusiasm of independence; the seventies were modern times, with the thunderous arrival of electric instruments; the eighties welcomed world music; and the nineties reverberated with the urban sound.

All of this history is precisely covered in an interesting booklet with contributions from reputed journalists like Amobé Mévégué, Bouziane Daoudi, Elikia M’Bokolo (a historian from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Patrick Labesse and Daniel Lieuze. One of the most exciting products of 2010, this is a must-have!