Someone should review this great North African compilation
Geoff Bale | Melbourne, Australia | 11/02/2004
(4 out of 5 stars)
"It occasionally rankles to find that a great CD has gone unreviewed in the Amazon pages. I have rated this CD at four stars, but only because there is no option to confer four and a half stars. Couscous Beat is my favourite compilation of Pan-North African popular music. Maybe you are uncertain whether to buy it as - like me - you have been familiar with several of its tracks for years on must-own albums. Possibly you are wondering whether songs from a trans-continental assortment of countries will properly flow as a compilation. As if to confront such concerns head on, the CD kicks off with a triumvirate of tracks from essential 80's-early 90's albums: "N'sel Fik" from You Are Mine by Chaba Fadela (Algeria), "Ah'la Jarah" from the self-titled album by Abdel Aziz El Mubarak (Sudan), and "Ya Waladi" from Walk Like A Nubian by Ali Hassan Kuban (Nubia) - though Kuban's signature album is actually: From Nubia to Cairo. N'sel Fik has already been used as an opener for various Rai compilations, and seemed like it would be a hackneyed choice. However, N'sel Fik is also, as Robert Christgau said, one of the greatest singles of its decade, and the ensuing tracks on this compilation not only maintain the pace and rhythmic variety, they actually seem to create a varied but of-a-piece musical atlas around the great single's artificially-echoed vocal duelling, authentically Maghrebi eruptions of cheap synthesizer over steady-state electric guitar/programmed rhythm track/buzzing,sinuous squeezebox (?) accompaniment, and inscrutably intense emotion. Inscrutable, that is, to non-speakers of Algerian Arabic. Actually, it is cheating a little to call this a Pan-North African compilation. 10 of the 13 tracks are from Algeria and Morocco, and the three catchy horns-plus-percussion tracks that follow N'sel Fik all originate on the banks of the upper Nile. Nevertheless, there is a unity which comes from modernisations that all mess with styles of music older, more acoustic, and perhaps of wider currency than the narrow techno Rai to which they have a family relationship. These styles of music include Arabic, Berber, Gnawa, and Western - especially Spanish - traditions. The only other unalloyed Rai track on the CD is by Bellemou Messaoud, whose modernisation of Rai included the addition of the trumpet. At the non-Western end of the spectrum is the totemic pre-Rai song "Ya Rayah", in its original version by Dahmane El Harrachi (recently a highlight of the historical 2 CD compilation: Tresors de la Musique Algerienne/Treasures of Algerian Music). Couscous Beat also includes Nass El Ghiwane's modernisation of Gnawa music, and closes with another duet, this time a "traditional song from the Arabo-Andalucian era" w/piano accompaniment. I hope I have sold interested beginners on this compilation, but if the wizened completists who own all the above-mentioned albums still balk, I will only add that this CD is a congenial way for them to get their hands on the reputedly feminist "J'en Ai Marre" (Sick of It) by Najat Aatabou. That track is mentioned in the notes to - but is not included on - her hard-rocking Arabo-Berber CD: The Voice of the Atlas (the best place to acquaint yourself with Aatabou's banshee-wail-over-harsh bendir-and-oud-plus-lush-Arabic-strings). Incredibly, nobody has reviewed The Voice of the Atlas either. Where is everybody?"
Track Listings (13) - Disc #1