Kevin Brown and Moussa Kouyate - KORA BLUES (DooDah)
This latest offering from slide guitar maestro Kevin is a stylish follow-up to 2001's Mojave Dust, similarly atmospheric but in a completely different way. It teams him up with Senegalese master kora player Kouyate for the first time on record, although the two musicians have played together much over the past two years, ever since their chance meeting at the Bath Fringe festival in 2000. It's a shame that there's only 37 minutes of music on this CD, for I could easily have listened to twice that amount, so intoxicating and beautiful is the blend of instrumental textures and so stimulating is the musicianship. There's a striking empathy between the two musicians, but this was hard-won, and emanated not as you might expect from the common kinship between West African music and the country blues, but from what Kevin has described as the discovery - following many hours of struggles of understanding, efforts to find common ground and eventually finding through their faith in each other's musicality and inner strength - that their 'internal clocks beat from the same pulse'. This is a genuinely uplifting album, a highly spiritual experience yet one that's fully accessible and not in any way discordant or unduly esoteric, and more than all that it exudes a very real sense of collaboration, with music-making that's utterly natural and unforced. Captured live in the studio, with all the immediacy and low-key dynamism that implies, this is a superior product indeed, full of joyous spirit and so much more than a one-off memento of the two musicians getting together. www.kevinbrownmusic.com
David Kidman
