Warning: count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable in /home1/andymorg/public_html/wp-content/themes/magazine-premium/library/slider.php on line 398

PLAZA FRANCIA: Tango's long distance love affair

With The Gotan Project, Christoph Müller and Eduardo Makaroff turned tango on its head. Now they’re doing it again, with…

An extract from my book Blick Bassy '1958'

In this, the opening passage from my book Blick Bassy – 1958, I imagine the nocturnal reveries of Ruben Um…

TARAGALTE FESTIVAL - Dreaming of a better Sahara

Three generations of poets guitarists sing of their hopes for the Sahara at the Taragalte Festival 2016 in Morocco

SOUAD MASSI - What can Ibn Arabi do against Daesh?

“I think we’re lacking a lot of tolerance,” says Souad Massi, “and I think that we must give the power…

PHOTO ESSAY: Songhoy Blues in Bamako

My 2014 photoshoot of Songhoy Blues in the Laffiabougou district of the Malian capital, Bamako, which yielding the cover shot…

Siti Amina Omar play oud with the Tausi Women's Taarab Orchestra, Sauti za Busara 2019, Zanzibar. Photo: Andy Morgan

It’s embarrassing to admit how easily the exotic pull of these islands hacks into your main frame and takes control of your cognitive faculties and critical discernment. Fact is, to a pasty-faced subject just off the plane from some wintry destination in the northern hemisphere, Zanzibar is, on first appearances, irresistibly exotic. No argument. Exotic and graceful and slow and warm and easy…Falling in love at first sight with it all takes no great effort. But there’s a nagging part of you that knows that this pretty, sunny face is a deception, and that behind it must lie a very human mess of light and shade. Seeking it out feels almost perverse.

BLICK BASSY: Simonobisick’s Letter

Simonobisick is a character from Blick Bassy’s novel ‘Le Moabi Cinema.’ This letter from the novel, which Simonobisick writes to his mum, reads like a statement of Africa’s frustrated youth.

If the musicians in the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste are masters of individual survival, the orchestra itself is an epic example of debrouillardise, of thinking the impossible and then just doing it.

The best thing about drinking wine from a hollowed out ram’s horn is that you can’t put the thing down. You have to keep holding onto to it otherwise it’ll topple over, and if you’re…

Sidiki Diabate and Iba One at the Diabaté house in 'Ntomikorobougou

“Don’t be surprised if it explodes one day!” When I met Mylmo I knew nothing about him except that he was rapper who was performing on the main stage of the Festival on the…

In the early years of that epic conflict known as the cold war, an Irishman wrote a funny-sad piece of theatre, a kind of excruciating fairy tale about a pair of old tramps who sat…

“As soon as people say ‘Toure’,” Sidi tells me, “they have a vision of a man with his head in Qu’ranic books.” Strange. For me, the vision is of a man in billowing blue robes dispensing liquid gold from a Gibson, a Taylor or a Takamine.

Listen to the spirits and they’ll tell you a deeper tale: that in that vast desert which outsiders are content to call a wasteland, there exists an endless calm, tranquillity and beauty that makes the nomad cry

Like the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and Eminem, Danyel Waro has taken a style of music that wasn’t his by birthright and fashioned it into something new. The music in question is maloya.

AfroCubism: Eliades Ochoa and Bassekou Kouyate

When the record producer Nick Gold traveled to Cuba in the early 1990s he had the genius to perceive the well-spring of love for Cuban music that still flowed through Mali and West Africa and appreciate the strength of their intertwining histories.

Hamada ben Amor aka 'El Général du Bled'

It took a rapper to light a firecracker and lob it at Tunisia’s youth, whose frustration had been distilled into liquid hydrogen by years of government corruption, nepotism, ineptitude and general state imposed joylessness.

Yabous Productions, the non-profit Palestinian organisation behind the Jerusalem festival, has been organizing cultural events in Jerusalem and the West Bank since 1995. After the second intifada started in 2001, they were one of the few cultural organisations in Palestine to survive the Israeli crackdown. Their small offices in Arabic East Jerusalem buzz with activity on the day before Awj’s opening concert.

What I find extraordinary about a camera, is that you can film people that seem to be so far from you, culturally speaking, and thanks to the emotion that your work expresses, you can relive certain emotions through them and make them appear extremely close. And it’s clear that you need time to do that. If you want to understand a culture, you need to understand the language; you need to live in that culture.

Socklo - genuis guitar maker of Kinshasa

Once a guitarist himself, Socklo now makes about 2 to 3 instruments per week, with the help of a couple assistants, in a clapboard shed in the Lembas district of this enormous teeming city. Tools are rudimentary; no workbench, no electric jigsaws, drills or shape cutters, just a heap of hammers, chisels, planes, saws and anvils made from recycled ordnance, all lying at the feet of the kind-faced Socklo while he sits and patiently fashions his artisanal wonders on his lap.

Cheikh Lo - The soul man of the Senegalese Baye Fall. Photo: Youri Lenquette

It’s this gentle yet luminous spirituality that makes Cheikh Lo’s music so unique, injecting its boundary-busting mix of Cuban, Congolese, Senegalese mbalax and international pop flavours with a tender fire that banishes sentimentality or the empty pop formula. Lo is now 50 years old and philosophical about the time it’s taken him to deliver ‘Lamp Fall’, the ‘difficult’ third album, whose title is synonymous with the Baye Fall’s revered founder.

Rimitti sang, as she has always done, in the plain spicy slang of Oranie, the huge province that spreads south, east and west from the port city of Oran in Western Algeria. She didn’t mince her language or play too many high-minded metaphorical games.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s Tinariwen who created the path,” declares Ousmane Ag Mossa, frizzy-locked leader of Tamikrest, in a pre-emptive strike against a thousand inevitable questions. “But the way I see it, if younger bands don’t come through, then Touareg music will eventually die. They created the path and now it’s up to us to walk down it and create the future.”

After Gao: how important are mixed patrols to Mali’s future?

With the world’s media riveted to events in Washington, the West African nation of…

The Bataclan and the battle for music

Anyone who walks out onto any stage – in Paris, or London, or Madrid, Melbourne, Mumbai and Osaka – is now in the front line of a battle. Music itself is on the front line. Take courage. We’ve got to win. The alternative is too bleak to contemplate: a life without joy, relief, togetherness. A life without music.

A camel procession at the Nuits Sahariennes d'Essouk Festival, Essouk, Adagh 2007. (c) Andy Morgan

In truth, neither Ghadafi’s fall nor AQIM nor drugs and insecurity are the prime movers behind this latest revolt. They’re just fresh circumstances in a very old struggle.

SEYDOU CISSÉ of GANDA IZO – “We should have followed the MNLA from the start”

Here’s an amazing news story: http://maliactu.net/mediation-dans-la-crise-malienne-nous-preferons-ouaga-a-alger-dixit-moussa-ag-attaher/ On February 9th last, the MNLA and the…

Touareg boy watching Camel Race, Tin Essako, Jan 2001

A few years ago, on a beautifully calm Saharan evening, I was drinking tea…

WOMEX 2013 AWARD SPEECH – What the Festival in the Desert did for one dumbfounded tourist

Ladies, gentlemen and fellow Womexicans… On the third of January this year, Ansar Eddine,…

What does Morocco want from Mali?

The big story to emerge from the inauguration of Mali’s new president Ibrahim Boubacar…

The Ouagadougou Accords – Peace in our time?

An accord between the government of Mali and groups representing the Touareg-led rebellion in the north, primarily the MNLA and HCUA, was signed two days ago in Ougadougou at end of several weeks of intense negotiation. Le Monde has a concise and fairly comprehensive report on this possibly historic event. So is this peace in our time?

Northern Mali – Options, what options??!!

The Rubik’s cube-like complexity of Mali’s problems, especially in the north, presents one of the greatest conflict resolution challenges in recent African history. Success relies on solving a short list of pressing problems, each of which look like a challenge fit for gods not men.

Alghabass Ag Intalla is undoubtedly one of the most important players in the drama that is current unfolding in the far north east of Mali. An opportunity to interview him was one that I could not refuse.

An extract from my book Blick Bassy ‘1958’

Blick Bassy 1958 Book Cover Slider Image

In this, the opening passage from my book Blick Bassy – 1958, I imagine the nocturnal reveries of Ruben Um Nyobè, the revolutionary leader of pre-independence Cameroun who was gunned down by the French army in September 1958

FINDING THE ONE (extract) – If your name is Keita, you’re still royalty

It was only after he’d started living in Europe and having kids of his own, that Seckou Keita started to wonder about his father. “I was in that mood,” he says, “I just wanted to find out.”

FINDING THE ONE (extract) – Meths, gunpowder and the revival of harp making in Wales

The news of Aberfan shocked him into a new awareness. What was the fire that had destroyed his workshop compared to the river of slurry and filfth that snuffed out the lives of 116 children?…

FINDING THE ONE (extract) – How the kora came to mankind

No one is one hundred precent sure of how or when the kora came into being. Strangely, the first person to ever mention it was a Scotsman by the name of Mungo Park, who wrote…

MUSIC, CULTURE & CONFLICT IN MALI (extract) – Tisrawt: The epic tale of a theatre company from northern Mali

BOOK EXTRACT: “Tisrawt is a microcosm of Touareg society,” Melissa explains. “That’s to say, it is a group of people who come from many different clans. Some are pro-MNLA. Some are pro Ansar ud-Dine. Some are pro-Mali. Others say that it’s all nonsense. And the aim is to understand each other, to live together and work together on a common project.”

MUSIC CULTURE & CONFLICT IN MALI (extract) – “We have come here to teach you the true faith”

BOOK EXTRACT: In important ways, the scenes of vandalism and destruction that were played out in Timbuktu following the Salafist takeover in April 2012 weren’t new at all. There was something very old about them. Mostly white Arabic or Hassaniya speaking men from the northern deserts were ‘teaching’ the blacks how to worship Allah in the ‘proper’ manner.

Japan 2019

In April 2019 I travelled to Japan. I took far too many photos. Here are just a few of them…

Songhoy Blues in Laffiabougou, Bamako, Mali, 2014 (L-R Garba, Nat, Ali, Oumar). Photo: Andy Morgan

My 2014 photoshoot of Songhoy Blues in the Laffiabougou district of the Malian capital, Bamako, which yielding the cover shot of their hit debut ‘Music in Exile’.

Here’s a selection from a series of photo sessions I did in 2013 of Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita live in concert in Nottingham, Cardiff and Cardigan.

In 2011 I was sent to New York to write a feature on Tinariwen for the Observer. It was one of the hottest summers in decades – wet hot, rather than dry hot. It was a time of extremes for everyone. Here are some photos I took. My feature ‘TINARIWEN – Guitar poets in Nueva York’ is posted on this site.

In February 2014, I was invited to The Festival on the Niger in Segou, Mali. This is a selection of some of the photos I took. I also wrote an article which is posted on this site. In a nutshell, those four days on the banks of the old Niger were a blessed chance to renew my love for Mali, with eyes and mind as open as I could make them to the full gamut of joy, pride, frustration and struggle that I saw. Many thanks to Mamou Daffé, Marisa Segala and whole team at the Festival for giving me this unforgettable gift.

The summer 2013 Welsh photo sessions with Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita that produced the cover image for the award winning album ‘Clychau Dibon’

TalkingGig: Songhoy Blues

Songhoy Blues in Bamako, 2014 Photo: Andy Morgan

TalkingGigs marry stripped down musical performance with conversation, stories, lyrics, anecdotes, images and video – a kind of musical theatre that engaging, insightful and entertaining.

Yakala 'Coco' Ngambali (c) Renaud Barret

MBONGWANA STAR – Kinshasa’s Afro-junk revolutionaries

KINSHASA SYMPHONY – The art of Haydn and debrouillardise

JUPITER – Kinshasa’s rebel general stands tall

BALOJI (Part 1) – Super sorcerer of Belgo-congolese rap

‘BENDA BILILI’ – “They never told us it was impossible…”

SOCKLO – The genius guitar maker of Kinshasa

Music & Culture

Politics & Society

Book Extracts

Photography

TalkingGigs

Congo