Browse by Artist: KOUYATE/NEERMAN

Artist:	KOUYATE/NEERMAN
Title:	Kangaba
Label:	NO FORMAT (FRANCE)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	NOF 012CD

Originally released in 2008, the No Format label now makes this incredible collaboration available once again. France's David Neerman is a free spirit in an orbit of his own across Europe's fledgling creative scene. A lunar poet of the vibraphone, he's as much at home in the precious, evanescent universe of Korean chanteuse Youn Sun Nah as he is in the spontaneous, urban slam of Anthony Joseph & The Spasm Band, contemporary post-jazz, or the thousand-year-old poetry of Mandinka music. In short, a musician of today living very much in the present; a man both curious and erudite with a hunger for all kinds of music from Morton Feldman to Sonic Youth. Lansiné Kouyaté is a maestro of Mali's music and an undisputed master of the balafon, "the classical piano of Africa." As a child prodigy (with a griot mother, and a father who played the balafon), he was enrolled by the National Orchestra of Mali when barely ten and then hired away by Salif Keita before he started turning up unexpectedly almost everywhere. He has partnered with the greatest names in West African music from Baaba Maal to Mory Kanté, but he's also a bold experimenter who's adapted the ancestral sounds of his instrument to the most diverse languages to be found in either "serious" or popular contemporary music, from Béjart's ballets to Joe Zawinul, via the rappers of Positive Black Soul, the Cuban music of Omar Sosa or the Red Earth: A Malian Journey project helmed by Dee Dee Bridgewater. On this release the balafon and the vibraphone ring together collectively -- so close and yet so far apart in tessitura, sound, matter, playing technique, history and imagination. Over long hours of improvisation, the two musicians would exchange their wisdom and other possessions, progressively laying down the bases for a mutant universe of sound whose process was totally organic and laid on the foundations of Mandinka music, yet which made a radical break with all the clichés of the music called "fusion" or "world." Accompanying them on this recording are contrabassist Ira Coleman (Dee Dee Bridgewater, Laurent de Wilde), drummer Laurent Robin, and Malian singer Mamani Keita on the magnificent song "Touma." With this album, Kouyaté & Neerman explore new territory that is both authentic and innovative, a work of poetic power that is absolutely stunning.

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