There was much to praise in 2008’s music releases. The re-emergence of Sainkho is always to be cherished and, guesting on Huun-Huur-Tu’s Mother-Earth! Father-Sky (Jaro, NI 419), both she and her Tuvan compatriots were in fine fettle. Hector Zazou’s early death was all the sadder given the new directions that he and his collaborators, Swara, pointed towards on In the House of Mirrors (Crammed Discs, NI 417). Laments also featured on Toumani Diabeté’s Mandé Variations (World Circuit), an album of dedications to the departed, including one for Ali Farke Touré. (Diabaté’s album, one of the most luminous of the Malian kora virtuoso’s recordings, sadly slipped through our net.) We gave five stars to Umalali, a first album from The Garifuna Women’s Project (Cumbancha, NI 415). This graceful release, from the descendants of African slaves and indigenous Carib and Arawak people living along the coastline of Belize, Guatemala and Honduras, was instrumentally pleasing, but it was the vocalists who made it glow.
From A to X: A Story in Letters (Verso, NI 416) showed John Berger as passionate as ever. This heartrending love story was a searing indictment of authoritarianism in all its forms and a beautiful, poetic hymn to the human spirit. The Rebels’ Hour by Lieve Joris (Atlantic Books, NI 416), was a semi-fictionalized portrait of one of the central players in the tragedy of DR Congo. Our reviewer wrote: ‘I have not read a better account of the daily terror that is life in Congo since Michele Wrong’s In the footsteps of Mr Kurtz’. Taxi by Khaled Al Khamissi (Aflame Books, NI 413) was simple and brilliant – bringing together 58 short fictional dialogues with some of Cairo’s 80,000 cab drivers, drawn from the author’s own experience of taxi journeys through this polluted, turbulent city. My Grandmother by Fethiye Çetin (Verso, NI 412) was a simple, heartwarming memoir with a tragic taboo at its centre – the unmentionable Armenian genocide.
