World Music Matters

Brazilian rapper Edgar hails from the favelas, using recycled materials to make his clothes and MPCs to make music. His debut album Ultrassom (Ultrasound) delivers a dystopian view of Brazil's future, yet brims with poetry. He recently gave his first concert abroad at the Mama Festival in Paris and talked to RFI about how music keeps madness at bay and his fears over the country's swing to the far right.

The poor shanty towns known as favelas around Rio de Janiero and São Paolo have produced not just samba, Brazil's national music, but funk and more recently hip-hop and rap.

Rappers like MV Bill, Emicida and Criolo have become voices for its people, suffering from the same prejudice and lack of opportunity.

Edgar's territory is Guarulhos favela on the edge of São Paolo.

"As well as kids dealing in drugs, there are lots of funk parties every night with 3,000 people crammed into small venues," he told RFI's Musiques du Monde.

The 30-year old has known the rough end of life and spent several years living on the streets, but his music explores the way society is heading rather than his own past.

Has love been taken prisoner?

The track Plastico envisages an apocalyptic future for planet earth in 2022. The video shows him biting into a fish to find a stomach full of Rio carnival sequins.

“It’s the plastic era," he sings, "the future is beautiful like a bird without wings, our future will be beautiful like a rainbow forming in an oil spill, the future is a video game fanatic, the future is a child who’s afraid of us."

On O Amor Esta Preso? he questions whether we're still free to love. The video shows him hung upside-down in a straightjacket.

"Love’s been taken prisoner, in a condom," he sings, "reality’s been placed in a straightjacket, hospital wings and school corridors are strangely similar. [...] You want to civilise rather than humanise us."

The road to dystopia quickens under Bolsonaro

With far-right Jair Bolsonaro set to take up office as Brazil's next president in January, Edgar sees the outlook as bleak. His father is of Amazonian Indian descent and there are fears Bolsonaro will work to convert more Amazon rainforest into farmland and put business concerns ahead of biodiversity.

In the song Que estas libelulas entrem em extinçao (before the dragonflies disappear) Edgar warns of the dangers of failing to protect the environment.

"Dragonflies are bio indicators," he says. "When a lake starts being polluted dragonflies are the first insects to go. So it shows pollution levels. Without dragonflies we just won’t know."

He fears his future as an experimental artist may be compromised.

"Having opinions, being different, makes you a target [in Brazil]," he laments.

But doubts his work will change much for society at large.

"I have no ambition and very little hope of changing anything. I do what I do just to bring myself back from the brink of madness.

“I feel I’m in danger," he continues. "But [this situation] gives me inspiring subject matter, trying to build things which are the very opposite of what’s happening. You have to explode from the inside."

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Bongeziwe Mabandla sings a distinctive Afro-folk in his native Xhosa language. Just 30, he's fast becoming one of the strong voices shaping the South African scene. A finalist in RFI's Discoveries Awards in 2011, he's now released his second album Mangaliso meaning miracle in Xhosa.

Bongeziwe Mabandla sings a distinctive Afro-folk in his native Xhosa language. Just 30, he's fast becoming one of the strong voices shaping the South African scene. A finalist in RFI's Discoveries Awards in 2011, he's now released his second album Mangaliso meaning miracle in Xhosa.

Mangaliso "is really about my realisation about the beauty of life, the gift of life and how precious life is," Mabandla tells RFI ahead of a concert at the MAMA festival in Paris. "When that happened, when I started to be grateful for life and to see life in a brighter and better way."

Mabandla grew up singing "in church, at home, at play, at school" in the rural town of Tsolo in Eastern Cape. He remembers a happy, if poor, childhood.

That sense of longing for something better drew him to folk music and singers like Tracy Chapman.

"That sadness and story-telling, music about people’s needs and people’s struggles and people who feel unjust, that’s what attracted me to folk music."

One of 10 finalists in the 2011 RFI Discoveries Award, he released his debut album Umlilo in 2012.

He's come a long way since then: comfortable with pared down accoustic guitar or with a more orchestrated sound drawing on genres like reggae, maskandi and electro.

His haunting, ethereal voice carries messages of heartache and healing from the Eastern Cape and yet captures the contemporary urban-African landscape.

Mangaliso was produced by Tiago Correia Paulo (Tumi and the Volume, 340ml). It features Mike Wright (Zebra and Giraffe), Robin Brink (Beatenberg), while electronic music producer and rapper Spoek Mathambo makes a classy contribution to the contagious track Bawo Wam.

Mabandla is currently on the Black Identity tour. Check facebook for details.

This week's edition of World Music Matters features Malian singer-songwriter Salif Keita. Known as the "golden voice of Africa" he's also devoted much of his life to helping people who, like him, have albinism. His new album Un Autre Blanc - another white man - is released on 26 October on Naive records. After a 50-year career in music, he tells RFI it will be his last.

This week's edition of World Music Matters features Malian singer-songwriter Salif Keita. Known as the "golden voice of Africa" he's also devoted much of his life to helping people who, like him, have albinism. His new album Un Autre Blanc - another white man - is released on 26 October on Naive records. After a 50-year career in music, he tells RFI it will be his last.

Keita gives a free concert in the town of Fana, Mali, on 17 October in tribute to five year-old Ramata Diarra, a young albino girl beheaded in May this year.

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Listen to a preview of the album

Jamaican reggae artist Winston MacAnuff and French accordeonist and pianist Fixi seem worlds apart. But with their third joint album, Big Brothers, they prove once again that there's strength and excitement in difference. The charismatic duo talk to RFI about working class instruments, Calais migrants and doing the cha cha cha on top of a van through the streets of Kingston.

Jamaican reggae artist Winston MacAnuff and French accordeonist and pianist Fixi seem worlds apart. But with their third joint album, Big Brothers, they prove once again that there's strength and excitement in difference. The charismatic duo talk to RFI about working class instruments, Calais migrants and doing the cha cha cha on top of a van through the streets of Kingston.

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In concert at 104 Paris, 5 December

Jowee Omicil is a free-form multi-instrumentalist born in Montreal to Haitian emigrants. His new album Love Matters blends African rhythms, melodies by Bach and Mozart, and pays tribute to jazz greats like Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. "We don’t have no boundaries," he tells RFI. "Those lines, like Hugh Masekela said, those lines were handmade and we’re trying to eradicate those frontiers with the music again, we’re trying to unite."

Jowee Omicil is a free-form multi-instrumentalist born in Montreal to Haitian emigrants. His new album Love Matters blends African rhythms, melodies by Bach and Mozart, and pays tribute to jazz greats like Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. "We don’t have no boundaries," he tells RFI. "Those lines, like Hugh Masekela said, those lines were handmade and we’re trying to eradicate those frontiers with the music again, we’re trying to unite."

Omicil is the son of a pastor. His dad encouraged him to do music but at 15 the youngster had other ideas.

"I was into hockey, billiards, video games. He forced me to go to music school and three months later I realised the alto saxophone could become my video game."

He became obsessed with the sax but soon widened his repertoire.

"Because of the church [my dad] wanted us to play an instrument to accompany the assembly and I chose the sax. My other brother chose the trumpet. And then we ended up playing the trumpet, the piano, the drums, the bass. Whenever something was missing we had to jump on this instrument because we were the PK, you know, the pastor’s kids."

He went on to study at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and then moved to New York where he'd jam with the likes of Ornette Coleman and Roy Hargrove.

Now an accomplished multi-instrumentist, he switches effortlessly between sax, piano, harmonica, flute, with the odd flight into rap.

Love Matters! is a follow up to the 2017 album Let's BasH! (let's love) and came out of an improvised recording session in 2015 at La Buissonne studio in the south of France. His fellow musicians were from the Caribbean, Europe, Africa and Canada.

"Let's BasH! was a suggestion," he told RFI, "Love Matters! is an instruction. I'm a love dictator."

Taking jazz back to its African roots

Omicil went to Conakry, Guinea, to record the video for the track Mende Lolo.

"Mende Lolo is dedicated to Hugh Masekela because it's the type of groove he did, the type of lines that Masekela would do so I put it into Jowee's style.

"Mende Lolo is like a question, in Creole mende means ask and lolo is the elder, lolo is love. Mende is also a Rara groove, a Martinique rhythm and a Rara groove for us Haitians in vaudou."

Omicil plays a tin whistle on the song, similar to the fula or tamashek flutes seen widely on the continent.

"Haitians roots are from Congo, Togo, Guinea and Benin. Our Haitian roots are deep and we wanted to do that musically, to show that this is the music of Africa that has travelled and can continue to travel, it's actually a global sound.

"It's not new, it's nothing new. It might be different the way I interpret those grooves but it's nothing new, so we're giving credit where it's due. It's the land."

Jowee Omicil in concert at Paris's New Morning 11 October 2018.

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Hurricaine Kristel swept into Paris this week. The pop-rock band from Madagascar is fast becoming the voice of a young generation ready for change and opportunity. RFI caught up with the explosive frontwoman, Christelle Ratri, in concert at La Bellevilleoise in the capital to talk about rock music and her band's debut album Irony, co-edited through the RFI Talent programme.