Madalitso Band
Ma Gitala
(Bongo Joe)
★★★★★

MADALITSO BAND were formed in 2002 when Yosefe Kalekeni arrived in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, with a four-stringed guitar — emaciated from walking for days. Yobu Maligwa saw him and suggested forming a band. They had left their home villages to avoid a national famine.

The meeting changed their lives, playing on the bustling streets with Yosefe’s battered guitar, Yobu’s homemade instrument he calls a babatone, and a cowskin foot drum.

They met British expat Neil Nayar, a singer-songwriter who got them on the bill at Zanzibar’s Sauti Za Busara, one of Africa’s biggest festivals where they went down a storm and connected with European booking agents and record companies.

“There was a real authenticity, a uniqueness,” says Yusuf Mahmoud, the festival’s director. “You could feel the energy and passion.” Two albums, WOMEX, BBC 6 Music and Glastonbury followed. This is foot-stomping stuff.

Gabriel da Rosa
Cacofonia
(Stones Throw)
★★★★

GABRIEL’s second album is an ode to Brazil and the country’s indigenous and working-class people that marks his return home from Los Angeles after eight years.

Sung mostly in Portuguese, the album contains a poem written by his mother about the war in Gaza — Sabor Humanidade (Taste of Humanity) — and other songs are about class inequality in Brazil and the impact of the right-wing former president Jair Bolsonaro, and especially his mining policies and the impact on the Amazon and its people.

Gabriel sings about working life, his grandmother’s stories about the fight to preserve the Brazilian national songbird, the market workers outside his house in Sao Paulo as well as his own Guarani ancestory.

As would be expected the album is underpinned by swaying bossa nova rhythms — and influenced by Brazilian musicians like Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso.

Femi Kuti
Journey Through Life
(Partisan Records)
★★★★★

FEMI KUTI’s first standalone album for six years sees him producing, composing and arranging all the songs on the album, recorded at the Kuti family studio in Nigeria and mixed in Paris.

Born in London and raised in Lagos, like his legendary activist father Fela, Femi is known for his songs about political corruption and social injustice.

He learned to play saxophone at the age of 15 and became a member of his father's band — but cites his grandmother, a formidable political campaigner and women’s rights activist who died after being wounded in a military attack on the family property, as his main influence.

Rooted in Afrobeat, key tracks include the album opener Journey Through Life with great horn arrangements and Femi’s saxophone, the horn-driven Oga Doctor, After 24 Years and Politics Don Expose Them. Unmissable.