With Ease
If calm and melodic ruminations on the world’s woes can provide
a musically palliative cure, we should gag our rants and stifle our moans to
allow this record the aural space to delicately work its magic. That would be the
sweet dream anyway.
Habib Koite and Eric Bibb merge their respective West
African [Mali] and American [Finland!] roots music with a gentle glue that
adheres melody and acoustic guitar/banjo playing to beautiful effect. On the
opening two tracks, each artist shares a geographical as well as cultural
exchange with Bibb’s first On My Way To
Bamako and Koite’s second L.A. –
a musical mission statement on partnership and sharing [with Koite singing in
French so I’m not entirely sure what the cultural celebration is, apart from an
English expression of enjoying five shots of tequila that make me happy!].
They literally first join on third track Touma Ni Kelen/Needed Time which is
gorgeous, both picking guitars – folk blues and flamenco - and accompanied by
percussive African rhythms and sounds. Tracks We Don’t Care and Send Us
Brighter Days present their concern for the world’s self-indulgences and
greed and therefore the need for a better way, the latter a slow blues with the
sweetest harmonising. The whole album rests – perhaps too comfortably for some –
in this peaceful and meditative mood. Indeed, the twelfth track is a rather
soporific version of Blowin’ In The Wind
where the famous narrative does fit that reflective disposition but it is a
little too slow and misses the rhetorical pace inherent in its lyrics.
So if you are wide awake and can steel yourself against the soothing
sound, or alternatively you need to chill, this has thirteen tracks to comfort
and please with ease.
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