The Afrofunk Music Forum

The guitarist is from the north of Mali, one of the breakthrough world music artists of the 1980s and 1990s, whose "African blues" alerted a generation of guitar-loving rock fans to the treasures that lay outside the Anglo-American faultlines of rock'n'roll. And Diabaté is from the south - a Mandé griot schooled in a tradition that can be traced back to the 13th century.

...

We're used to world music hybrids between east and west; between electric and acoustic; and between the head and the heart. One of the distinctions of this album is that it is a hybrid of two Malian traditions that rarely meet. Though Diabaté and Touré have known and admired each other for many years, they have hardly ever played together. This gives their collaboration a special quality: it is simple yet richly detailed, spontaneous yet courteous.

Louis Armstrong, a k a Satchmo, a k a Pops, was to music what Picasso was to painting, what Joyce was to fiction: an innovator who changed the face of his art form, a fecund and endlessly inventive pioneer whose discovery of his own voice helped remake 20th-century culture.

...

Mr. Teachout reminds us of Armstrong’s gifts: “the combination of hurtling momentum and expansive lyricism that propelled his playing and singing alike,” his revolutionary sense of rhythm, his “dazzling virtuosity and sensational brilliance of tone,” in another trumpeter’s words, which left listeners feeling as though they’d been staring into the sun.

...

“Even before his face became known to the readers of newspapers and illustrated magazines — and, later, to filmgoers and TV viewers,” Mr. Teachout writes, “Armstrong was the first jazz musician whose voice was heard by large numbers of people. In this way he emerged from behind the anonymity of the recording process and impressed his personality on all who heard him, even those who found most instrumental jazz to be unapproachably abstract. It was the secret of his appeal, and he knew it.

...

Although Armstrong’s life story has been told many times before, Mr. Teachout does a nimble job of reconjuring the trajectory of Armstrong’s experience, which coincided with — or was in the vanguard of — so many formative events in 20th-century Afro-American history, from the Great Migration that brought many Southern blacks North to cities like Chicago to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s. He recounts the travails of touring that Armstrong experienced in a still segregated South, to his acclamation in Europe in the ’30s and ’40s and the mainstream American success he finally achieved in the ’50s.

The reader gets a dramatic snapshot in this volume of Armstrong’s life on the mean streets of New Orleans, where he grew up, the illegitimate son of a 15-year-old country girl, among gamblers, church people, prostitutes and hustlers; his adventures in gangland Chicago and Jazz Age New York; the rapid metamorphosis of this shy, “little frog-mouthed boy who played the cornet” into the most influential soloist in jazz; and the long, hard years on the road, crisscrossing the United States dozens of time, playing so many one-nighters that he often came off the stage, in his own words, “too tired to raise an eyelash.”

As Mr. Teachout astutely points out, Armstrong’s trumpet playing, like his singing and copious writings (including two published memoirs and countless letters, which he pecked out on a typewriter he brought with him on the road), was the means for Armstrong to reflect on all that he had witnessed. “I seen everythin’ from a child comin’ up,” he said once. “Nothin’ happen I ain’t never seen before.”

Boppers and avatars of the cool, in turn, rejected Armstrong’s desire to entertain the audience — to mug and clown on stage. And yet even Miles Davis, who in rejecting Satchmo’s crowd-pleasing ways went so far as to turn his back on the audience, acknowledged that the history of jazz radiated out from Louis Armstrong: “You can’t play nothing on trumpet,” Davis said, “that doesn’t come from him.”

"Known as the Originator, U-Roy wasn't the first DJ, nor even the first to cut a record, but he was the first to shake the nation and he originated a style so distinctly unique that he single-handedly changed his homeland's music scene forever...His toasts were utterly relaxed and conversational, yet always in perfect synchronicity with the rhythms."

In Africa, Fela, who died at 58 of complications from AIDS, is a figure to rival Bob Marley as both a musical innovator and a symbol of resistance. Afrobeat, the style he forged in the early ’70s, combined African rhythms and messages with the jazz and funk that Fela absorbed during his education in Britain and the United States. Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Yoruba rhythms, Afro-Cuban mambos, James Brown, John Coltrane, Nina Simone and, yes, Frank Sinatra all flowed into his music, which sounds exactly like none of them.

Afrobeat is insinuating but hard-headed, with stubbornness encoded in its sound and its lyrics. Its grooves are unhurried and hypnotic, with guitar, bass and drums locked into repetitive patterns while voices and horns leap freely. On Fela’s albums songs stretch 10 to 20 minutes, in long, tension-and-release forms. Each track is an excursion through verses, choruses, jagged horn-section lines, call-and-response vocals with Fela’s backup singers and dancers (who were his wives), individual solos and bruising full-band attacks.

It’s music of steadfastness and endurance, of uncompromising determination. It’s also, of course, dance music, made for long nights in clubs. Within the grooves Fela’s lyrics denounce corruption and injustice, call for African values and challenge authority.