LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO
Live At Montreux
Eagle Records
FJ & THE LIVING SOULS
Ambient Africa
Eagle Records
· Two different approaches to capturing African music.
Christmas is coming. Bands and record companies with no new material to push will often put out a live album just to keep their name in front of the music-buying public. This is not always a bad thing. Live recordings allow people to experience the magic of a show at a reasonable cost. Cherry-picking from recorded tracks, as the producers for Ladysmith Black Mambazo do on Live at Montreaux, increases the possibility of a good product. The album contains selections from all three LBM appearances at Montreux, many of their hits and even a recording of the oldest song in their repertoire. It’s an artificial construct, but it’s well done.
FJ & The Living Souls is a Paris-based band of Cameroonian expatriates who have taken recordings by various South African groups that were recorded during the apartheid era and re-recorded them in an attempt to make the songs more appealing to western audiences. While FJ & The Living Souls have some legitimate connection to the music, such an approach raises the spectre of sonic colonialism. Of course, not allowing music to change and evolve also raises the same issue. Either way, this musical experiment fails. The additional ornamentation and ambient sounds don’t add much to the original performances and songs. If anything, it only serves to bury them under layers of unnecessary noise.
LBM 3/5
FJ&LS 2/5
BRUCE POLLOCK
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