With some free tickets in hand, courtesy of Serious, last night S and I went over to the Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell to see two fantastic African artists perform as part of Muntu Valdo’s Sawa Blues Tour.
Descending into the dimly lit basement performance space of this terribly hip venue, we settled down on one of their comfortable sofas to watch the support act first – Bumi Thomas. She made quite an impression with her refined good looks, hair piled high, and then there was her voice – slightly fragile, it perfectly suited her material – chilled out soul aching with love, longing and hope (probably the perfect audio accompaniment to a quietly romantic evening at home with a glass of wine in hand, cuddling your partner I think). I’m not exposed to this kind of material very often and I do wonder whether I’m rather missing out – you can find out more about Bumi on her myspace page here, and do take the opportunity to listen to some of her material while you’re there.
Muntu Valdo was the main performer of the evening. Hailing from Cameroon, he was absolutely mesmerising, with a set mainly focused on his own particular brand of blues – ‘sawa’ blues, which incorporates powerful singing, plaintive harmonica playing and rhythmic guitar tunes. He said during the set that he draws musical inspiration from Dibango, Bona and other stars of the Cameroon music scene, although given what we saw this evening I suspect his own star is very much on the rise. His material is mostly sung in his native language (one of the many African languages spoken in the country – I’m not sure which one – it certainly wasn’t the ‘official’ languages of French or English), but, although we couldn’t understand specific meanings, the general sentiments were clear; joy, pain, defiance – a whole melting pot of emotions came across as he performed. Perhaps to appease the audience (although I’m not sure why – people were enthusiastically tapping and clapping along despite the language barrier) his singing did drop into heavily French-accented English towards the end of the set when he upped the pace of the rhythms, at which point the place had got so hot and humid that we were all glad to be on our feet, swaying and clapping along to the beats. Of course, being on stage alone meant that he had to be inventive, and while I’ve seen lots of people use technology that allows the artist to layer vocals and rhythms until it sounds like there’s a whole group of singers and musicians on stage, I have *never* seen it done with this level of technical precision before. Remarkable.
If you want to familiarise yourself with this intriguing and talented artist there are still opportunities to catch his other performances as part of the current tour – he’ll be performing at WOMAD on 25 July and in Basingstoke at the Anvil on 17 October. His debut album, “Gods & Devils” is also highly acclaimed, and keep an ear open for the autumn release of his second, “The One & The Many”. Of course you can also find some of his material to listen to on his Myspace page, and being a very 21st century guy, you can also follow him on Twitter.