Friday and Saturday, May 21 & and 22, starting at 8pm, Award-winning New York-based Zimbabwean contemporary dance artist and choreographer Nora Chipaumire will be teaming up with musician Thomas Mapfumo — the legendary “Lion of Zimbabwe” — for the New York premiere of lions will roar, swans will fly, angels will wrestle heaven, rains will break: gukurahundi at the Kumble Theater at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus. Along with the live musical acompaniment by the great Thomas Mapfumo & The Blacks Unlimited, dancer Souleymane Badolo will also join Chipaumire for the performance.
We have a pair of tickets to give a way to the performance on Saturday. The first reader to respond to the question by sending an email with the correct answer to family@duttyartz.com (and make sure you include the word contest in the subject line) wins the pair of tickets.
The ticket contest is OVER! The contest question was what does “mapfumo” means in shona? Answer = “spears”
NORA CHIPAUMIRE + THOMAS MAPFUMO & THE BLACKS UNLIMITED
May 21 & 22 at 8pm
Kumble Theater at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus
Sunday May 9th come see myself Matt Shadetek, Jahdan Blakkamoore and Uproot Andy at Glasslands for the Drink Well Do Good tour. The goal of the event is to raise awareness about viticulture (wine making) in Africa. It will also be a great Sunday night party with the Dutty Artz fam back at Glasslands for the first time since our New York Tropical parties. For everyone who has been asking me about those, don’t worry, we’re working on a few things for summer.
The organizers ISAW say: “All proceeds from the tour will go towards to development of a viticultural training center on the M’hudi Estate in Stellenbosch. This campaign also raises awareness for our partners M’hudi and Seven Sisters, South Africa’s only two black-owned estates. ISAW is using the tour to introduce these wines to consumers, and support South Africa’s wine industry which employs nearly 300,000 workers. Please support our campaign through purchasing tickets, going to your local retailer, and becoming ambassadors for our cause.”
- Chief Boima’s Techno Rumba EP is out today! Download/listen/enjoy the special #RUMBA mix Boima made to celebrate the release. Hit up iTunes, Amazon or Boomkat & do your part. Tracklist after the jump -
Chief Boima‘s Techno Rumba EP is available now on iTunes, at Amazon and Boomkat! Read more about it + show some class & drop some change, people!
Techno Rumba is the excellent, official debut EP from San Francisco/Bay Area producer Chief Boima. Techno Rumba, the latest in a stream of digital EPs from Dutty Artz, is a pleasantly fresh and elegant take on Afrobeat and contemporary African dance music. It features two original tracks from Chief Boima; the irresistible “Baobab Connect” and the stunning title cut “Techno Rumba,” which boasts a pair of remixes from Dutty Artz own DJ /rupture & Matt Shadetek and Uproot Andy. /Rupture and Shadetek are fresh off remixing Gang Gang Dance and Telepathe and turn in an immersive and hallucinogenic afro-colombian flavored edit while Uproot Andy aims straight at the dance floor with his Ojalá Rumba version which has been inciting madness at Dutty Artz New York Tropical parties for months. Read the rest of this entry »
Next Tuesday, April 27 Dutty Artz will release Techno Rumba, official debut EP from producer/DJ-extraordinaire Chief Boima. Techno Rumba is Boima’s elegant and fresh take on Afrobeat and contemporary African dance music. Head over to XLR8R now for an exclusive stream/preview of the entire EP – which features two original tracks from Chief Boima and a pair of remixes from Dutty Artz own DJ /rupture & Matt Shadetek and Uproot Andy.
You can download DJ /rupture & Matt Shadetek additional refix with original vocal contribution from performance artist Kalup Linzey. Also downloadable is the free remix EP African By The Bay – to hold you over until Tuesday when Techno Rumba drops in digital shops.
This just in from our Abidjan point man, GREEN DOG:
YES O
NEW MANUSA VIDEO !!!!!!
“BABI “
aka ABIDJAN city
in this track Manusa spit about his luv for ABIDJAN
“ABI MOI J AIME ABIDJAN “
is like “My homie me luv Abidjan “
Surrounded by crazy from CIAFRICA family, this generous LP got some hidden jewels and dancefloor time bombs (dis-moi, black prez) to hit any listener 2.0.
Come check out me and @mr_blakkamoore at this last minute joint tomorrow night in Williamsburg at Zebulon. The flier is extra crazy (gives me myspace nostalgia in the best possible way) and so I’m guessing the party should be good. It’s us and Yacouba Sissoko who is a master kora player from Mali.
“There are so many Africas, and so many arts of Africa. Picasso and Matisse thought they had hit on the essence of Africa during the first decade of the 20th century. The African masks and sculpture that influenced such works as Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1909) seemed to be the very embodiment of a youngish Spaniard’s priapic idea of the primitive: wonderfully, savagely stylised; bursting with a toe-curlingly alien erotic charge. How patronising of Picasso to think that that’s what African art amounted to. Well, perhaps that’s a little unfair. The point was that Picasso, ever grasping, ever restless, was seeking out new ways of representing the female body.
Yes, anthropologists quickly began to prove that Picasso was either wrong or telling just one tiny part of an immensely complicated story. In 1910, the first major excavations took place at Ife, a site in what is now south-western Nigeria, not too far from Lagos. (The walled city-state of Ife, legendary homeland of the Yoruba, flourished for 300 years, from about 1100-1400 AD). Thirty years later, in 1940, another great cull of objects from the same site hit the headlines again: “Worthy to rank with finest works of Greece and Italy”, shrilled the Illustrated London News.
Many of the works that those anthropologists found are now on display in this major show of north-west African sculpture, and the works here lend credence to that headline writer’s claim. At the same historical moment that Andrea del Verrocchio was doing his wonderfully painstaking, high-Renaissance drawing of a female head which can be seen elsewhere in this building, anonymous artisans in Ife were working with brass, bronze – yes, these Africans knew all about bronze casting long before the Europeans arrived to show them how – copper and terracotta to produce a series of exquisite heads that are not only the equal of Donatello in technical brilliance, but also just as naturalistic in their refinement. So much for African primitivism.” – Michael Glover (The Independent) reviews Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa, British Museum, London – read the full article here.
A few days ago, I found a CDR compilation labeled Super Hits of Nigeria in the ungoogleable/bootleg section of my CD-DVD collection. It was a gift from my cousin who bought it in the streets of Freetown sometime last year. The opening track from the comp is “Yori Yori”– a massive pan-Nigerian/pan-African (global) hit in 2009 by the duo Bracket. This tune was large from Lagos to Nairobi, Freetown to London, even nightclubs in Guangzhou were unsafe from the contagious tune (Guangzhou has the largest population of Africans in China.) I saw a video for the tune in early ’09 while watching Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) in northern Virginia. Boima also mentioned it over at Ghetto Bassquake.
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Timaya, who appears on at least 6 tracks on the compilation also had a great year in ’09. I saw a few of his videos on NTA – epic, conscious Nigerian rap grooves. Here are two more tracks -
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I’m New Here, Gil Scott-Heron’s first album in sixteen yearswas released last week on XL Recordings. The album was recorded between 2007-09 and produced by Richard Russell. On the opening and closing tracks “On Coming From a Broken Home (Part 1 & Part 2) – Scott-Heron offers a tribute to the women of his family, not so much an explanation but a reflections, giving us a portrait of the women who raised him. Producer Richard Russell provided the perfect backdrop, a sampling the intro (just a few seconds on loop) to Kanye West’s “Flashing Light.”
I first heard this tune at a party in the Bronx, Summer 2005 or maybe ’06– I don’t remember exactly. Big up all Ghanaian massive in the Bronx. I can recall a friend telling me at the time that “You May Kiss Your Bride” was a smash in Accra, on the radio, in bars and clubs, at football marches, and of course at weddings. This clip also appears on a VCD compilation titled Ghana Vs Nigeria: Super Hits Videos –purchased in a street market in Freetown in December ’09. By the way, if you dig this track don’t sleep on Akwaaba Music’s Move It Chaleh — more recent hiplife goodness among other things (like Monou Sidibe’s incredible “Mali Mousso.”)
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Janka Nabay is a countryman of mine (which means he is from Sierra Leone, West Africa) with a very interesting backstory you can read on his MySpace. I’m not fluent in Temni, but I understand what Janka is singing about in “Eh Congo.” I spoke to him last year to confirm my interpretation and draw some connections, because the lyrics to this song sounded like a free association exercise (that’s what happens when you leave your home country and get lost/immerse in foreign culture –language, communication changes/words are forgotten.) I could write about the song’s lyrics, but I won’t –that will spoil the mystery, or just diminish the song’s already understated mystique. After all, this is music/rhythms used to soundtrack rituals involving secret societies, coronations, burials of village chiefs and prominent society members. But I must say, that has nothing to do with the lyrics here, which makes it even more intriguing.Anyway, Ahmed Janka Nabay Bubu King is coming out soon True Panther. You can pre-order a 12″ EP here.
I imagine I like Afrikan Boy, he seems like a fairly relaxed and pleasant person. This new video, shot in the imaginary offices of ‘Afrikan Airlines’ is quite enjoyable. Ever since he did a grime influenced tune a few years back about getting caught shoplifting in Lidl (a very very cheap European supermarket chain where I used to buy groceries in Berlin) I’ve been rooting for him. Also I think it’s cool that he raps in a Nigerian accent, which up til now has been (and still is?) considered uncool, giving rise to a bunch of Africans in grime who try to sound yardie and end up completely unintelligible. via Ghetto Bassquake.
I’m joining DJ Still Life tonight (10pm to midnight) on his weekly radio show Worldwide Smash on East Village Radio. At some point in the first hour of the program, I’ll be selecting new beats and bass from round the globe, might even drop a live set, so tune in - Worldwide Smash - weekly vetting of global bass music, Worldwide Smash delivers a double dose of raw beats: from instrumental hip-hop, dubstep and glitch through emerging forms of electronic music aimed…
After the program, we’re off to Que Bajo?! @ Santos Party House with international playboys Geko Jones & Uproot Andy for some serious bashment!
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Friday and Saturday, May 21 & and 22, starting at 8pm, Award-winning New York-based Zimbabwean contemporary dance artist and choreographer Nora Chipaumire will be teaming up with musician Thomas Mapfumo — the legendary “Lion of Zimbabwe” — for the New York premiere of lions will roar, swans will fly, angels will wrestle heaven, rains will break: gukurahundi at the Kumble Theater at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus. Along with the live musical acompaniment by the great Thomas Mapfumo & The Blacks Unlimited, dancer Souleymane Badolo will also join Chipaumire for the performance.
