Cast your mind back to 1996 for a moment. A group of old-school Cuban musicians are assembled -- with some help from
Ry Cooder -- for a recording intended to introduce the rest of the world to classic Cuban music. The resulting
Buena Vista Social Club album -- aided by a documentary about the process -- becomes a worldwide phenomenon, inspiring an unprecedented degree of interest not only in Cuban music, but international music of all kinds. A brilliant idea works out perfectly, right? Sure, except that this wasn't actually the original plan. Initially, World Circuit Records' producer
Nick Gold had planned for
Cooder and the Cubans to be joined by lute player
Bassekou Kouyate and guitarist
Djelimady Tounkara, two of Mali's finest musicians. At the last minute, the Malians were unable to secure visas to travel to Cuba for the session, and the agenda was re-jiggered. Fast-forward 16 years into the future -- the plans for that original Cuban/Malian crossover are finally realized with the recording of Afrocubism. And this time, not only are
Kouyate and
Tounkara on hand, interacting with an all-star cast of Cuban players like singer/guitarist
Eliades Ochoa and percussionist Jorge Maturell, but there's an additional batch of Mali's finest, including renowned kora master
Toumani Diabaté and innovative balafon player Lassana Diabaté (no relation to
Toumani). But Afrocubism shouldn't be viewed as some sort of alternative-universe version of
Buena Vista Social Club -- it has its own very singular sonic identity. The most immediately striking element is the way the tumbling riffs of the Malians -- particularly
Kouyate and both
Diabatés -- seem to fall so naturally into the percolating Cuban polyrhythms underlined by Maturell and elaborated upon by
Ochoa. There's a lot of listening going on in both camps, and an obvious musical empathy between them. Whether they're playing more Malian-leaning compositions like
Djelimady's "Nima Diyala" (where Lassana makes amazing use of dual balafons tuned a semitone apart) or a Cuban classic like the late
Beny Moré's "La Culebra," the
Afrocubism ensemble puts a whole new slant on the "Afro-Cuban" tag, making for a true musical meeting of minds between the two cultures. ~ J. Allen