The sleevenotes talk about this band being derided for being from the poor part of town; the sleeve is shouting luridly at my hangover and I think I’m going to go blind. I can’t help but feel that this is Tanzania’s answer to Happy Hardcore. Moreover, all the songs are towards the pulmonary-antagonising side of tempos, and tend to get faster.
The promo flappery talks about them being similar to Konono No 1, but that feels like a bit of a superficial thing to me – this is drum-lead music, rather than mbira – the big difference being that the mbira (I could pretend I knew they’re actually called likembés if you’d like) is a relatively melodic instrument, whereas percussion tends to be a very different beast. Plus East Africa is bloody miles away from Central Africa. And Jagwa Music are about a million times faster – if Konono are a sedate cup of tea in first class on a high speed train, Jagwa are like being strapped naked to the windshield.
It’s entirely exhausting music as well – I’m sticking with the Happy Hardcore comparison – all of the tracks start off very fast and get faster. Most tracks start with half a melodic motif repeated on shonky Casio keyboards with a singer, but the mix is such that it’s more of an assault of crazy complex drumming (the live videos suggest the live mix is a bit more melody-heavy). I mean, the Konono comparison probably fits in terms of how it’s exciting and dense music from Africa, but Jagwa seem substantially less Grammy-friendly (a good thing, likely).Sleevenotes – it’s always a disappointment to have a record from overseas, from a world you’ve a minimal idea about, and not get furnished with a bit of context. So much kudos to Crammed Discs for furnishing us with plenty of info about the group – background, information on the instruments, a smidge of music theory. We’ve also got translations of the lyrics, which is great – especially because they’ve got a song (“Jagwa Watoto Wa Mjini”) which is basically them going “We’re Jagwa Music, fuck you, we’ll kick the shit out of you because we’re amazing.” That’s the sort of rabble-rousing attitude you need from your mchiriku, right?
I get the slight impression that some of the lyrics are a bit more political than is immediately obvious – while there’s a few that are pretty plainly about the authorities not liking the poor kids, there’s one in particular (“Maji hayapandi Mlima”) which has the lyrics “it would be a wonder for us humans/In this world for water to flow uphill.” Now, it might just be that that sentiment is lost in translation, but given the rest of it seems to speak for/to the poorer folks of Tanzania, it leaves me with the impression that it’s similar to the trick that TPOK/ Franco used to do – mbwakela, which is a kind of political criticism through apparently innocent lyrics. What I’m saying is that if there’s any Tanzanians reading, I’d appreciate a heads up on their lyrics.
And yeah, the music – seriously amazing, multi-rhythmic amazingness being amazing. The rhythm section (the largest, and loudest on this recording) are apparently oriented around a kind of ‘lead’ drummer, and there’s innumerable times on this record where you can just about perceive that it’s suddenly got a smidge faster, but all the drummers are so entirely together that there’s no real catching up – so either these are incredibly taught, rehearsed-to-all-hell recordings or it’s a band who are just psychically intuitive with each other. Really though, at this speed, it’s a wonder they can play it live at all (and looking at their touring schedule, that’s not even slightly the case).It’s a bit of a mind=blown moment for me, if I’m honest. It’s a massively dense, fast, and quite overpowering record but if you’re hankering for something with the intensity of (say) Atari Teenage Riot raised in Tanzania, this’ll do you handsome, sunshine.
-Kev Nickells-
