[FA Worldmusic] Jon Pareles' NY Times Review 'Club Zanzibar': Some East African Flavor at Makor

[Evangeline Kim]

Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar - Music - Review - New York TimesYou'll enjoy
reading Jon's fine review about Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar in New York.

Best,
Evangeline

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/arts/music/30zanz.html



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September 30, 2006
Music Review | 'Club Zanzibar'
Some East African Flavor at Makor
By JON PARELES



Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar sounded like two different bands in its two
sets at Makor on Wednesday night, a rare chance for New Yorkers to hear the
East African music called taarab. The first set was elegant pop, rooted mostly
in Arabic music but with hints of India and the Caribbean. And the second was
unmistakably African: frisky, nonstop, propulsive dance music.

Culture Musical Club isn't a revivalist project like the Buena Vista Social
Club. The band is named after the club in Stone Town in Zanzibar, where it
rehearses. Zanzibar, a spice island in the Indian Ocean off the coast of
Tanzania, has long been on international trade routes, and its music looks
west to mainland Africa, north to the Middle East and east to the Indian
subcontinent.

For the first set, Culture Musical Club used a lineup something like an
Egyptian pop orchestra: oud, qanun (zither), accordion, three violins, dumbek
(hand drum), rika (tambourine) and bass accompanying three lead singers: two
women (Rukia Ramadhani and Amina) and a man, Makame Faki, all singing love
songs.

The women sang in long, gentle lines, with the gliding ornaments of Indian
music, answered by the fluttery phrases of oud and qanun. Mr. Faki was more
forceful, with his voice sometimes taking on the sharp, soaring tone of
African traditional singers; he got the audience clapping along. And as the
early set picked up momentum, there was also a lilt in the music, with hints
of bolero and cha-cha, or perhaps their African antecedents. The music was
finely detailed and urbane, and no harbinger of what followed.

The group returned for the second set with maracas, an African bass called a
sanduku and a pair of hand drums, called kidumbaks, that resemble both Middle
Eastern dumbeks and South Indian and Pakistani drums. The music they played,
usually heard at wedding parties, is also called kidumbak. The songs ride on
the drums and maracas and on modal, circling violin melodies, like hoedown
fiddles gone back to Africa.

Flanking the band were two female dancers gifted at rump rotation, who also
swiveled their way through the audience. The lead singers stepped forward to
sing short lines that the rest of the band sang back to them, with some
members ululating up above as the violinists dug in and the music gathered
speed. It was incantatory party music, and before the set was done, the stage
was filled with audience members dancing along.




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