Boubacar Diabate with Samba Lolo is performing at Johnny D's tonight. The Johnny D's blurb:

"West African guitarist, singer, songwriter, and storyteller, Boubacar Diabate, along with his group, Samba Lolo, has combined traditional rhythms with modern influences to create his own style of contemporary Malian Griot music. Singing in Bambara, the ensemble creates a performance that spans the full spectrum of Traditional to Contemporary Malian music from West Africa. These songs of a common shared experience of love, life and humanity, give all an opportunity to hear the age-old West African tradition of Griot, storytelling through song."

Johnny D's, 17 Holland Street, Somerville, MA
across from the Holland St exit of the Davis Square T stop (red line)
21+, $10, show begins at 9:45pm

Who wants to go?

Two of my favorite musicians that I rarely see, tonight at the Lily Pad:

• Ashley Maher, afropop/world/jazz singer-songwriter from Los Angeles


• Balla Tounkara, one of the world's best kora players, originally from Mali but mostly in Boston for the past decade

This is the sort of show I'd go see at Sanders Theatre or similarly sized venues, and it's kind of amazing that it's gonna happen at such a small venue. Ashley's not that well known here in Boston, and Balla plays all over (last time I saw him was randomly in Harvard Square). If you like African music and world music this show will make you very happy!

Lily Pad, 1353 Cambridge Street, Inman Square
Sunday, October 14th, Ashley @7pm & Balla @8:30pm
$10 suggested donation, all ages

Passim is having a week of great shows, most if which I'm gonna miss :(

Kris Delmhorst is performing tonight and tomorrow, though tonight's show is sold out. Both shows are 8pm, and $15 ($13 for members). Sarah Siskind is opening on both nights. I've never heard her. If you know anything about her, comment here and tell me?

On Friday evening, it's Jim's Big Ego. And on Saturday, wonderful South African singer-songwriter Tony Bird. Both of those shows are also 8pm, $15.

Next week, Rose Gerber is the feature at the Tuesday open mic, and Nightingale has two shows on Wednesday, 7pm and 10pm, both $12.

Afropop Worldwide reports that Toumani Diabate and Ali Farka Touré are in studio, and have recorded an album together.

Ali Farka Touré developed a guitar and singing style that people call "African blues", a blend of nothern Mali and Mississippi delta. Despite his name, he doesn't tour, and rumors of his retirement from commercial music keep springing up. I'm glad he's still recording.

Toumani Diabate is a pre-eminent master of one of my favorite instruments, the kora (an ancestor of the banjo). Several years ago, he recorded an album with American blues legend Taj Mahal, Kulanjan. I'm very much looking forward to this new development in combining modern Malian music and the blues.

Years ago, geoffroi played some music by Ashley Maher for me, and I immediately wrote her to ask that she send a CD to WBRS. She did that, and I played it on several shows and pointed it out to other DJs. Now's my chance to finally see her live!

Part folk singer-songwriter, part world music, she studied African drumming with Ghanaian master drummer C.K. Ladzekpo, lived in London for a while seeking out African musicians, and has appeared as a backing vocalist on albums by Youssou N'Dour and Afro Celt Sound System. Her own most recent album, The Blessed Rain, features some west African musicians. She has combined African music into a singer-songwriter core in a way that feels, to me, similar what what Liza of Zuba did with funk, or the way Kris Delmhorst is working with oldtime. In Ahsley Maher's case, the result has a rhythmic and sometimes newagey feel as well. I saw a review of her mention Peter Gabriel and the parallel clicked, though her music is very different from his. I would also have invoked Joni Mitchell as an analogy for another side of Ashley Maher's music.

Ashley is flying out from her home in Los Angeles, to do a few shows around here. Jeff tells me she's going to be accompanied by her guitar player on this little tour. This Friday evening she's playing at geoffroi's Yale House Concert series. Then on Sunday afternoon she's playing another house concert, smoemeth and wojsvenwoj's House O'Muzak in New Haven, CT. That evening, she's got a show at CB's Gallery in New York.

Friday, April 23
Yale House Concerts, Wakefield, MA
Join us at 8pm for snacks and drinks
Mail yhc@smoe.org for reservations and directions
The suggested donation is $10, which all goes to the performer.

Sunday, April 25th
Live at The House O'Muzak Concert Series, New Haven, CT
2pm, all ages, $10, which all goes to the performer
RSVP for reservations and directions: 203-776-9325 or meth@smoe.org
capacity: 25
http://muzak.smoe.org/

Sunday, April 25th
CB's Gallery, 313 Bowery, New York
8pm, $5
212-677-0455
http://www.cbgb.com/

You can hear some sound samples of Ashley Maher's music at her web site, and there are also some sound samples on the CD Baby page for The Blessed Rain.

[ Edit: Jeff adds that Ashley is also playing a 1/2 hour set at an open mic tomorrow: Thursday, April 22, 7pm, Mulligan's Taverne, 121 W. Main St.(Route 30), Westborough MA 01581, 508-366-0207 ]

Friday, March 26th, Senegalese singer Baaba Maal is performing at the Somerville Theatre at 8pm. This is part of World Music's spring 2004 concert series. They write: Baaba Maal, one of Afro-pop's biggest superstars, appears in Boston for a special acoustic concert featuring Mansour Seck on guitar and vocals, Lansine Kouyate on balafon, Barou Sall on hoddu, Mama Gaye on guitar, and others. Experience the pure, vital energy of one of the world's most powerful performers in a unique and intimate setting.

Saturday, March 27th, Eddie From Ohio will be at the Somerville Theatre, with Fruit Trio (acoustic) opening. Doors at 7pm, show at 8pm, tickets $22.50. On Sunday night, EFO will be at the Iron Horse in Northampton, MA.

The Somerville Theatre is at 55 Holland Ave in Davis Square, right next to the Davis stop on the red line, and shows there are all ages. Their phone number is 617-628-3390.

Sunday, March 28th, Mike Seeger is coming to Cholmondeley's Coffeehouse at Brandeis. He plays fiddle and banjo, and is known for playing and promoting roots folk music of the past. He's also a musicologist at the Smithsonian, and Pete Seeger's half-brother. The show will be at 8pm, free with a student ID (any college, I think), and $10 otherwise - though chumleys is a small space and it may be packed. It's located in the castle at Brandeis University, and is also all ages. This show is co-sponsored by WBRS, and I may be running sound. Sam Petsonk, who took over from me as DJ of Southern Rail at WBRS two years ago, put this concert together.

The AFRican in association with Skoto Gallery cordially invites you to "An Evening with the Nigerian photographer Femi Bankole Osunla" on Friday, September 5th, 5:00 - 8:00pm at the Skoto Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, 5FL, New York, NY 10011 212-352-8058

For over 20 years Femi was the personal photographer of the late Nigerian Afrobeat icon and social activist Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. He is one of the participating artists in the exhibition "This is Lagos: Yabis Night, Music and Fela" currently on view at Skoto Gallery through September 20th, 2003.

Femi's works are also included in the exhibition "The Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti" presently at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York through September 28th, 2003

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Three times that I can remember, I cried over the death of people I did not know and had never met. One of them was Nigerian afropop pioneer Fela Kuti, who died in August of 1997. I found out about it while driving to Northampton to see a concert at the Iron Horse. Fela had died earlier that day, and our NPR station was devoting two hours to a retrospective and discussion about him.

I had first heard of Fela in 1989, a year after his last visit to the US - perversely, to play a concert in Boston. Despairing of his ever making another tour outside Nigeria, I was on the verge of deciding to go to Nigeria myself to see him. Nigeria, with 115 million people, is the world's tenth most populous country, and Africa's first by a wide margin. There, from all I've heard, Fela was bigger than Elvis or the Beatles ever were in the US. Every Nigerian I've ever talked to knew and loved Fela, and seemed to remember him with reverence. He was a national hero.

He started out playing "highlife" music in the 1950s, added jazz, and after a tour of the US in the late 1960s, combined elements of highlife, Nigerian traditional music, American jazz, and 60s protest music, to form what he named "Afrobeat". Over the next three decades he influenced countless other musicians, directly and indirectly, in combining African and western music, and made over a hundred recordings in so many countries on so many different labels, no definitive and complete discography exists as far as I know. Fela's bands were huge, with call-response singing, dancers, big fat brass sections, guitars, and percussion. Many of his songs were 10-20 minutes long, and he usually stopped playing each song once it was recorded.

Fela played the saxophone, trumpet, piano, and drum. He composed, led the band, and sang lead. Many of his songs were half-story half-song, improvised and re-told in different ways. With his voice he could comfort, excite, soothe, exhort... he could sound old or young, gravelly or smooth. He would move from sustained high power to the delicate variations of an old storyteller, and back. He led his funky horns section and took off on sax and trumpet solos that called to mind an African parallel of a cross between John Coltrane and Maceo Parker, the full power of funk nuanced by jazz and improvisation. His style varied from songs like Lady, a tight funky piece about African women, to long anthems like ITT and Beasts of No Nation with a powerful social and political punch presented in Fela's versatile and dynamically expressive voice, seamed with call and response - all of them with horn solos interspersed.

To Nigeria, Fela was much more than a musical phenomenon and pioneer. An activist and agitator as well as a spiritual leader, he was in constant conflict with successive military regimes. He declared his nightclub, The Shrine, a sovereign nation, and twice it was burned by the military. On one attack, they killed his mother. In 1983 he ran for president, but another military coup landed him in prison 1983-1986. His concerts at The Shrine were, from what I've heard, indescribable experiences for the people who saw them in person. To me he was, and is, a musical force of nature. A funk band sound bigger than James Brown, a social force on the order of Bob Marley, and a life more colorful than most rock stars.

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If you're in New York, you can see two exhibits featuring Fela Kuti this month. I hope to make it to at least one of them. Tonight, Friday September 5th, is your chance to see Fela's photographer speak, and hear a band led by one of Fela's drummers (or at least, that's how I interpret this press release).

( the full text of the press release about these shows )

Quick note: Zap Mama is playing at the Somerville Theater tonight. The show starts at 8pm and Les Nubians are opening. Somerville Theatre is right at the Davis Square stop on the red line. It's all ages, tickets are $33 downstairs, $27 upstairs, and there are still tickets available. They said they think there will still be tickets at the door, but call ahead if you're not sure: 617-625-4088.

I think Zap Mama is one of the best musical groups to ever have existed, and I've seen them on every US tour they've done so far, but I'm going to miss this one. So I'll rave about them some other time. A brief description: Women of mixed Swiss/Congo origin, vocal based music, a combination of English, French, Swahili, and nonsense syllables, percussion, dance, and color, powerful stage presence, and interesting sound tricks. They started out almost entirely a cappella and over the years have included more and more instrumentation, but their music is still focused on vocal sounds. They've added, in particular, percussion, rhythm instruments, and hip-hop influence. (the fact that Marie Dualne, Zap Mama's founder and leader, is or at least was dating Michael Franti (aka Spearhead) may have had something to do with it... :)

BTW, Education First is on right now! I'm heading over there to catch the Dresden Dolls.