Various Artists - Sahara: Blues Of The Desert / Various (CD)

All Music Guide

The stated concept of this twoCD collection of African music is to highlight the connections between Africa and the blues, the liner notes cautioning that "it's not a scholarly exercise and makes no claims as such." And it's probable that these particular 21 tracks, most or all (dates are missing for a few selections) recorded in the 15 years or so subsequent to 1990, would not pass a scientifically folkloric test of the most bluesrelated African recordings available. It's better to simply treat it as a quality, lengthy (running a little over two hours) collection of rootsy contemporary African music. Some of these names are well known to Western listeners (Ali Farka Toure, Oumou Sangare, Hamza El Din, Baaba Maal, Aster Aweke, Youssou N'Dour); others aren't; most are from countries bordering the Sahara desert, but some aren't; and a couple artists (Markus James and the duo of Robert Plant Justin Adams) aren't even African. Regardless of the flexible musical boundaries, this is general...ly good, varied African music with a fairly traditional base, often prominently employing string instruments, even if only isolated cuts are apt to make listeners think of the blues. Ali Farka Toure's "Tolumba" is certainly about the most obvious of those, which comes as little surprise, since he's so often been classified as an African John Lee Hooker. At the other end of the scale, you have Gigi's dreamily ambient "Abay (Illuminated Audio Remix)," given a dub treatment by American producer Bill Laswell, which might be a decent track, but where the specific connection with the bluesfromAfrica concept gets pretty tenuous. And you also have material which is based on voice and percussion, like Yande Godou Sene's "Salmon Faye (Reprise)." Whatever the case, the quality of the music is pretty consistent, perhaps more lowkey than the average contemporary African collection, but effectively so. - Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide Read more Less