Album Review
Angola 72
Keunza Bonga
Tinder Records
[Compay Segundo comes into the study carrying a portable CD player.]
Compay Segundo: Listen to this! It ripples. What a sound!
Joseito Fernandez: Where is it from? It's not Brazilian?
Compay: No, from Angola in South-West Africa. The man was born Barcelo de Carvalho but now he's Keunza Bonga, I am supposing because he wants to support his country's independence from Portugal. Can you hear the way he uses his mouth to accompany himself with a dry whistle between his teeth? Sshht, sshhht. It's beautiful. Why had I never heard music before? It's an outrage. Hush - the fourth song starts - and suddenly the fast music falls away and we listening to fado -
Joseito: He has the saudade, the longing sorrow that the Portuguese say is at the heart of fado music.
C: He is the reason I began to look for fado singers. I thought, if this musician has a little bit of fado in him, as I have heard he has, then what must the complete thing from Portugal sound like? What's more he is a man and all the fado singers we've heard have been women, so this makes a change. I think there might be political content but I cannot understand the lyrics. He was in exile in the Netherlands when he made this record. The Portuguese forced him to leave their territory because he was in contact with groups that were trying to free Angola from colonialism.
J: Perhaps putting Angolan music together with Portuguese music so very well is a political act in itself; you don't need political lyrics as well.
C: He is certainly as good as anything else I've ever heard. Do you hear that dry little slithery rattle moving so slyly towards the front of the song? The CD cover is ugly however. The picture looks as if it has been wallowing in dry blood. What a muddy colour, I'm disappointed. Albums that sound good should always have good-looking covers.
J: Albums that sound bad should have bad-looking covers. That way we would know what to listen to. H'm, the music has changed with this track, why?
C: It says this is a traditional song; the rest were written by him or by other modern musicians. I suppose that's it.
P: Rainforest percussion. Well, it's different.
C: There's not enough to criticise about this album. I don't know what else to say. If I hated it I would be able to talk for ages. Oh - it is a reissue. I will say that. We must thank Tinder Records for bringing out in 1997 a record that was made in the 1970s. I only wish that they had given us more information about the songs. Translations would have been very welcome. It is all very well to write that his music is 'firmly African in its sentiment and intention' but if you don't tell us what that intention is, well then, what are we to think?
