New Music From Tonada Baile Cantado, Hama
Tonada Baile Cantado
Rueda de Bullerengue, Volume 2
(Names You Can Trust)
The Rueda de Bullerengue series from the Brooklyn label Names You Can Trust grew from the New York collective Bulla en el Barrio, dedicated to putting a spotlight on Colombian music—bullerengue, in particular—through monthly performances and workshops.
While the first volume of the series was credited to Bulla en el Barrio, the new, second volume was recorded by the ensemble Tonada Baile Cantado, in a studio in its hometown, the north Colombia city of Barranquilla, near the Caribbean Sea and produced by Bulla en el Barrio members Camilo Rodriguez and Diana Herrera.
The bullerengue tradition draws from African and Caribbean sources, with a frantically upbeat and celebratory style of music, incorporating essential elements of hand-struck drum rhythms, spirited chants, and dancing. On these recordings, core rhythms based on the structures of chalupa and fandango are showcased.
The four songs of Rueda de Bullerengue, Volume 2 are crammed on a 7-inch vinyl EP, also available as digital downloads, and once it starts playing, it’s pretty much an unstoppable force, driven by intense and passionate percussion including conga drum beats and rumbles, insistent and jittery maraca shakes, and hand claps.
The women’s voices are organized into charged call-and-response exchanges between a solo singer and a chorus, with occasional interjections, as if exploding forth from the song structures, of enthusiastic and uninhibited outbursts and vocalizing—however, the songs are tight and precise, never going off the rails.
The specific rhythms and brisk speed are key to defining these varieties of north Colombian bullerengue music with an energy injection that doesn’t let up for the EP’s duration, and these subtle differences underscore the richness of this culture, yielding rewards for those who dive into the details and can both make connections between styles and also understand distinctions.
Hama
Houmeissa
(Sahel Sounds)
Making a techno version of a traditional folk song might seem like a hopelessly ill-founded idea, and there are supporting examples such as the novelty 1994 Eurodance rendition of “Cotton Eye Joe” by the Swedish band Rednex—a track so obnoxious it goes beyond the realm of mere aesthetics and taste, capable of triggering an allergic reaction for this writer.
Then there’s the keyboardist Hama (real name: Mouhamadou Moussa) from the city of Niamey in the West African nation Niger, whose instrumentals—based on traditional folk song melodies and Tuareg guitar tunes—gained popularity as MP3 files being swapped from cell phone to cell phone.
While his previous album Torodi was created using a hard-to-find Yamaha PSR-64 keyboard, which had the capability of playing quarter-tone Arabic scales, since then the keyboard was destroyed in a house fire.
Hama’s new album Houmeissa utilizes a wider variety of keyboards, synthesizers, and beatboxes, made with Niamey-based engineer Harouna Habib, and it’s a pointedly slicker affair than Torodi.
While perhaps the homemade charm of Hama’s previous work isn’t as prominent, Houmeissa needs to be judged on its own terms, being more complicated and expansive than before.
An oddity for techno music is Hama’s use of 3/4 (waltz) time signatures, rather than the standard 4-on-the-floor thump, and familiar, classic drum machine beats (think early ‘90s), particularly the hard-edged bass and snare drum sounds, emphasize patterns that only initially feel unusual.
“Terroir” kicks things off, sounding like it could be the theme song for an ‘80s PBS science show for children, with bright and glossy synth lines that scream “we are in the computer age.”
On tracks such as “Dounia” and “Baoura”, in sharp contrast with deliberate beatbox slams are artificial whooshes and hazy synths, and although the songs are computer-sequenced, echoes of minimalism provide a space for hypnotic meandering.
One of the most interesting tracks on Houmeissa is “Takamba”, which seems to break an unspoken rule, where conflicting music modes are laid on top of each other, causing a compelling, bristling dissonance; however, Hama pulls it off like it’s no big deal, just as his embrace of artificiality to reinterpret African folk melodies just feels natural.