Africa Express Presents...

We Say...

Review by Michaelangelo Matos

The best various-artist compilations generally have an organizing principle — the better to pull together a disparate bunch into a cohesive whole. Having a bunch of people pick their favorite track in Category X isn't always the greatest method for this, though; it's too often redolent of those British music-magazine packages long on dimwitted rock stars spouting deadening clichés about songs everyone's been sick of for years — a hodgepodge with a will to power.

There's no question that Africa Express Presents . . . is a hodgepodge: with artists as different as Afrobeat pioneer Tony Allen and inheritor Femi Kuti, Ethiopian star Alèmayèhu Eshèté, Malian husband-and-wife team Amadou & Mariam, rai-rock rebel Rachid Taha, and Senegalese singer-songwriter Baaba Maal, it has to be. That artists from Elvis Costello and Damon Albarn to Flea and Fatboy Slim are credited with the selections isn't of any great matter, though there's always room for any (cough) Hard-Fi completist who discovers Rachid Taha via the band's imprimatur.

Kidding aside, Africa Express Presents . . . is simply an excellent sampler of mostly recent African pop with crossover appeal, either via Kuti and Allen's simmering funk, Tinariwen's desert blues, or the eager jump of Big Boy Jack's vintage South African township jive. It's basically a variation on the Rough Guide series' pick-and-mix style; it doesn't seem like a coincidence that the Big Boy Jack cut (chosen by Super Furry Animals' Gruff Rhys) appeared on a South African Rough Guide in 2006. But when the selections are as hypnotically beautiful as twin Malian modernists Rokia Traore's "Koronoko" (VV Brown's pick) and Oumou Sangare's "Wele Wele Wintou" (Sam Duckworth's), not to mention the Albarn-selected closer, a fantastic percussion workout for squeeze-bulb honk horns, bells, drums, and chanting by the LA Drivers Union Por Por Group, from Ghana, who selected it is less important than who's listening — ideally, you.