Customer Reviews

Hommage a Demba Camara

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I love this record. It is classic 1970s Guinean swing music, with vocals in the national language. It has great vocals, solid grooves, and excellent horn work. As a melancholy bonus, the insert tells the story of Demba Camara's demise, lost to the living in a freak auto accident.

Bembeya were the best of the highly original orchestras in Guinea from the 60's and early 70. This is a re-release of a compilation album that was released back in the mid 1970's after the untimely death of Aboubacar Demba Camara, the lead singer in all of the tracks in this album. Camara and guitarist Sekou Diabate were the two stars of Bembeya Jazz National, and this album concentrates on their work right at their prime, between 1968 and 1973.

Camara was a truly great singer, in the same league as Salif Keita or Baaba Maal in my opinion, though a very understated and languid one in comparison to them. His voice was lower and rougher, but he made consistently masterful use of volume dynamics, nasality vs. orality, rhythmic displacement and staccato/legato within the same verse.

The guitarist Sekou "Bemebeya" Diabate is also my favorite West African guitarist of the period. His playing style, as that of his Guinean contemporaries, was influenced by the balafon (the traditional Mande wooden xylophone), but he had a better melodic compass than his contemporaries, and his playing was more exciting and surprise-filled.

If you're contemplating on getting one of the more recent Bembeya Jazz retrospective albums (like The Syliphone Years: Hits and Rare Recordings), I'd say get this instead. The modern compilations cover more of Bembeya's earlier and later work, but this album is just better.

Top picks: "Beni Barale," "Dagna," "Waraba," and "Whisky Soda." The last one is particularly notable for Camara having fun by noisily pretending to be a falling-down singing drunk.