Aah... BBC updates about a new album, Seya by Oumou Sangare, the Malian "song bird"

It's been too long since any album proper from the ‘songbird of Wassoulou’. Although the compilation Oumou (2004) included previously unreleased material, (mostly cherry-picked from her Mali-only 2001 release Laban, and reworked), her last internationally promoted record was Worotan in 1996. Thankfully Seya doesn't disappoint – it's the best thing since her marvellous 1991 debut Moussoulou, which is one of the all time great treasures of Malian music. Seya traverses a wide range of moods, from confident and celebratory to more austere, stripped down meditations. And while few artists give as good a groove as Oumou, the latter are often the best settings to appreciate her extraordinary voice; if Aretha Franklin had grown up in Bamako, she might have sounded something like this.

Here's a taste of the music...

 

Now go buy the album, Seya by Oumou Sangare [World Circuit /Released: 23 February 2009 / Catalogue number: WCD 081]

Previous post about Oumou here + a video here of her with the legendary Ali Farka Toure @ the Festival of Deserts in Essakane

Interesting!

The oldest human footprints – left more than 1.5 million years ago – have been discovered in northern Kenya.

Two sets of prints left by Homo ergaster, an early ancestor of modern humans. were found in separate rock layers near Ileret. Laser scanning revealed that feet have stayed much the same over 1.5 million years and the creature walked the same way as people do today.The prints bore all the hallmarks of a modern human stride, including an arched foot, short toes, and a big toe that was parallel to the other toes. As in modern humans, weight was transferred from the heel to the ball of the foot and then to the big toe with each step. The find is the first of its kind since the famous discovery 30 years ago of footprints dating back 3.75 million years at Laetoli, Tanzania. These older prints are thought to have been left by the more primitive and apelike Australopithecus.

 

A fossil footprint left by a human ancestor about 1.5 million years ago in Kenya has been discovered. Photo © REUTERS

The title is is a phrase from an essay Dybek apparently wrote in 4th grade. The piece also has a great anecdote about an experience he had while he was enrolled for his Ph. D. in the esteemed University of Iowa program.

“I had never met a real writer at that point, and it was only after I got there, in the company of people like Richard Yates, Cheever, Don Justice, that I began to realize the enormous commitment writing really demanded.” He surrendered completely to his writing, taking poetry and fiction workshops simultaneously.

His classmates—among them Tracy Kidder, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Denis Johnson, Larry Levis, Laura Jensen, Thom Jones, and Michael Ryan—challenged and inspired Dybek, but he also grew weary of the place on occasion. Dybek recalls: “I was walking across a parking lot in the rain, talking to Jon Jackson, and saying to him, ‘I don’t think I could stand reading another goddamn worksheet this semester’ ”—worksheets were how student work was distributed in those days, on mimeographs—“and suddenly, a wet piece of paper was stuck to my foot, and I pulled it off, and I said, ‘Look, it’s a goddamn worksheet! You can’t even walk without them sticking to you.’ And I looked at it, and I started reading it, and they were these fantastic poems. They were by Tom Lux. So it was that kind of place, where you’d be walking across the parking lot in the rain, and suddenly you’d be reading this wonderful stuff.”

Good writing is of a similar kind...it sticks to you and won't let go long after you are done reading.

Just read about Thierry 'Titi' Robin, who is a multi-instrumentalist from southwestern France, whose music is influenced by the gypsy and North African communities of Angers. So, of course, I had to look up youtube for some videos and share them with you....





And last but not least, an interesting performance in Jaipur, accompanied by a Rajasthani folk dancer, no less!


The dancer is Gulabi Sapera and more about the collaboration with her here.

And speaking of devils, read Salil Tripathi's excellent article in the Mint today: Of Angels and Devils, which talks about two recent incidents in India.

Incidentally, Salil, who mentions Satanic Verses in the above article, also wrote an excellent piece last week on the 20th anniversary of the publication of that controversial novel. Do read -

Disturbing the universe

After two decades, Rushdie’s controversial masterpiece remains a testimony to freedom of expression and the power of imagination

More articles by Salil from the Mint here.

Via an mail from Neel, here's an article by Richard Dawkins on Darwin, which talks about "why we really do need to know the amazing truth about evolution, and the equally amazing intellectual dishonesty of its enemies."

How can you say that evolution is “true”? Isn’t that just your opinion, of no more value than anybody else’s? Isn’t every view entitled to equal “respect”? Maybe so where the issue is one of, say, musical taste or political judgement. But when it is a matter of scientific fact? Unfortunately, scientists do receive such relativistic protests when they dare to claim that something is factually true in the real world. Given the title of Jerry Coyne’s book, this is a distraction that I must deal with.

A scientist arrogantly asserts that thunder is not the triumphal sound of God’s balls banging together, nor is it Thor’s hammer. It is, instead, the reverberating echoes from the electrical discharges that we see as lightning. Poetic (or at least stirring) as those tribal myths may be, they are not actually true.

More at the article. Previous posts on Darwin: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Valentine's Day Chocolates for EVERYONE!

    .
There's an opportunity in every crisis....or in other words, one man's crisis, is another man's opportunity. :)

(Link via a Twitter post by @prempanicker)

...and time that lacks the expansive quality! Three great links from kottke.org

1.  An interesting interview with David Foster Wallace on writers 'working on how to be a human being'
  (.. via)


2. What lines to start a piece remembering your father! Maud Newton reminisces. (.. via)

Exactly how long the prostitute, unbeknownst to my father, stayed at our house and slept in my bed is hard to gauge. Nowadays time lacks the expansive quality it had when I was eleven years old. But more than three weeks and less than five months elapsed between the day she moved in and the terrible afternoon he noticed her crouching behind the frosted glass shower door in the front bathroom, and kicked her out.

and last but not least..

3. The Virginia Quarterly Review has made available their entire archive of articles, poems, essays, and book reviews from 1975 to 2003...all online and free to read for all.  .(.. via)

Long time since I put a music post. Here are couple artists who I had not heard about until now. (Thanks to Anand for the introduction)

Goran Bregović, who wiki enlightens is "a Bosnian musician, of Serbian and Croatian descent"




and next up is Armenian musician and composer, Djivan Gasparyan



Good stuff!

I am eagerly looking forward to two debut novels by people I know -- one who I know fairly well and the other whose blog I have merely followed off-and-on and happened to meet socially during my recent trip to India.

First up, coming this April is Amit Varma's debut book, My Friend, Sancho (Hachette). The book had made the Man Asian Booker longlist ain 2008 and based on the excerpt here, the novel, which is supposed to be a love-story, looks eminently readable. Although Sancho herself does not make her appearance in the excerpt, the suspense created in this short excerpt leaves you eager to find out more about the characters of the book! That's rule # 1 of what a well-written book is supposed to do -- make the reader want to keep turning the pages. In addition to Sancho, more fun is promised in the novel in the form of a talking lizard and a policeman who talks in bullet points. I can't wait for the book to be published!

And in May, Chandrahas Choudhury's debut novel, Arzee the Dwarf (Harper Collins) hits book-stores. Read an excerpt here and be wow-ed. Like I wrote in a comment at that post, if the rest of the book is as good and well-written as the excerpt of Arzee at the wall, I'm going to love it! Chandrahas has made that non-descripit alley come alive... "squelchy slop", "his footprints following him all the way in", "spat into the water, as if expelling the thought" ...and much more to delight. And then there is the whole surreal-ish narrative of Arzee getting on the wall and looking at his reflection in the muck and his  accompanied nostalgic thoughts. Pure poetry!

Here's wishing success to Amit & Chandrahas. Go break a leg, guys!

An interesting essay from Pico Iyer, the travel writer, from 1997 called the The Nowhere Man

The transcontinental tribe of wanderers is growing, global souls for whom home is everywhere and nowhere. Pico Iyer, one of the privileged homeless, considers the new kind of person being created by a new kind of life.

and Forbes this month talks about The Elsewhere Man

Millions of Americans have technological dependencies but no time to give them a second thought. Conley, a sociologist and acting dean for social sciences at New York University, spends much of his time thinking about the significance of this sort of thing, often serving as his own lab specimen. The BlackBerry is a symbol of always being beckoned somewhere else. In comes an e-mail from a colleague, a client, an old flame, each asking for a little piece of our attention, which, if granted, only begets more demands on our time. We're pulled by work when we're at home and by home when we're at work, torn by the multiple things we could be getting done.

In his new book, Elsewhere, USA, Conley calls the class of professionals who live this way "intraviduals" ...."a new breed of modern American who struggles to manage multiple data streams and competing impulses and even selves." We are fracturing and multitasking ourselves into--well, that's not clear, but Conley does offer glimpses of the world ahead.

All the above links via Mohit's blog.