“Rough Guide to North African Cafe” (Various Artists)
This album sounds awesome, but then I'm partial to the music of the desert, especially gnawa.
Carol Cooper writes:
village voice > In-Flight African Reveries :
The happiest five hours I ever spent in mid-air was aboard an Air France jet plugged into their on-board global jukebox. A menu of multiple simulcasts featured three channels entirely dedicated to regional styles of African dance music, including a dizzying array of North African electronica. The new Rough Guide to North African Café reprises that joy with 14 tracks by a multinational selection of artists demonstrating the hybrid vigor and sophistication of Islamic psalmody. Whether performing Moroccan gnawa, Algerian rai, Arab-inflected dancehall, or Latino-inflected shaabi, these guys are creating eclectic beats you can hear booming in hookah bars from Dubai to Loisida. Indeed, the jazzy improvisations riding the digitized rhythms of Smadj's “Hat” suit such cosmopolitan dives just as well as Tarik's Franco-Moroccan cover of Edith Piaf's “La Foule.”
Tad Hendrickson adds:
Any Frenchman worth his pedigree should be quick to point out that it was the French who invented cafe music, a style of late-19th- and early-20th-century pop that originally blended light opera, local folk, chanson, and even silent film scores. Its main purpose was to help fill out silences in conversations or meals with charming little songs. The music quickly migrated (along with other facets of French culture) to the other side of the Mediterranean where French colonies in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia picked up the habit. Now decades later, the cafe concept is updated and localized, often by young musicians who blend the modern and traditional, African and European, to create the same effect as the original cafe style. The tracks range from the playful Cheb Balowski to the hypnotic El Tanbura to oud master Jean Pierre Smadj to the rocking Les Boukakes. It's music from a place where the aroma of strong sweet coffee mingles with tobacco.
