Lucas makes a Rendez-vous with The Lagos Thugs – a 15 strong afrobeat band fresh out of Lagos to talk inspiration, protest, and what’s in a name? Plus music from Kokoroko and Made Kuti Track list: Kokoroko – Abusey Junction [from We Out Here; Brownswood Recordings] Made Kuti –...
All posts by Lucas Keen
Rendez-vous with Lucas for a beginner’s guide to Baloji – the multi-faceted artist from DRC via Belgium making some of the most inventive Afrofuturist music and visuals about. Track List 1. Baloji – Le Reste Du Monde [from Hotel impala, EMI Music Belgium, 2007] 2. Baloji – Congo Eza Ya Biso [from Kinshasa Succursale; Crammed Discs,...
![Album Review: Oumou Sangaré – Acoustic [No Format!; June 2020]](http://www.rhythmpassport.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/oumou-sangare-acoustic-cover-335x335.jpg)
Acoustic is a rootsy reimagining of Malian superstar Oumou Sangaré’s 2017 album Mogoya, but where Mogoya used a palette of beats and synths, Acoustic says more with less. Opening with ‘Kamelemba’, a song of counsel warning women away from sweet talkers and playboys, Oumou’s majestic voice converses with the jittery...
To end 2020 we make a Rendez-vous with three generations of afrobeat and celebrate a Nigerian musical dynasty. As Fela is honoured with a Black Plaque at his old music conservatoire Trinity Laban in Greenwich, we consider how the musical idiom he created remains more popular than ever. Track list: 1....
![Album Review: Nubya Garcia – SOURCE [Concord Jazz; August 2020]](http://www.rhythmpassport.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/nubya-garcia-source-335x335.jpg)
SOURCE is the first long player by tenor saxophonist and one of London’s young jazz luminaries Nubya Garcia. London has been the campus for what has been happening in jazz lately, and the hothouse of Tomorrow’s Warriors and Trinity Laban Conservatoire along with nights like Jazz Re:freshed and Church of...
The EFG London Jazz Festival goes fully online for its 2020 edition and among many high highlights produced by the good people at Serious is the all star band of the London jazz scene SEED Ensemble fronted by award winning alto saxophonist Cassie Kinoshi. Live streamed from The Barbican, Kinoshi’s...
Something a little different this month as Lucas Keen makes a rendez-vous with the greatest jazz musician you’ve never heard of! Celebrating the West African origins of jazz – A Waltz in New Orleans is the fictionalised account of the birth of the modern drum set in New Orleans narrated...
To celebrate October when the UK’s African film festivals usually happen and to mark Black History Month (though Rendez-vous à Bobo is here for Black history 365!) Rendez-Vous à Bobo salutes the great Ousmane Sembène, the polymath director known as ‘Le Vieux’, the father of African cinema, and one of the greats,...
Lucas Keen makes a rendez-vous with gqom – the South African dance music that emerged in the Durban hills and has gone global from Marvel’s Black Panther to Beyonce’s Black is King. Listen for the blueprint to making a gqom track and learn how to gwara gwara the signature dance...
2020 marks 60 years since independence for 17 African countries. For his latest Rendez-Vous à Bobo, Rhythm Passport’s Lucas Keen revisits 1960 sometimes known as ‘The Year of Africa’ to explore the euphoria and cultural renaissance of the epoch that followed via music from Nigeria, Congo, Burkina Faso and Mali....