Rokia Traoré's latest Nonesuch album, Tchamantché is due to hit stores in the US come January. It was released earlier this year in the UK to rave reviews. The Independent calls it her best yet and recommends her set this Wednesday at London's Jazz Café as a "show you shouldn't miss." The album earned a perfect five stars from The Guardian, which called it "an intriguing, sophisticated and often intimate set that is quite unlike any of the other great music Mali has produced." The Times gives the album four stars, exclaiming that with it, "the breadth of her artistic vision has emerged fully formed in her music." The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, and The Evening Standard all give Tchamantché four stars as well, and The Daily Telegraph named it Pop CD of the week upon its release.
Rokia Traoré's latest Nonesuch release, Tchamantché, the follow-up to her 2004 album Bowmboï, is due to hit stores in the US come January. It was released earlier this year in the UK to rave reviews, and, The Independent declares, "[I]n light of the fact that her latest album Tchamantché is her most interesting to date," her show this Wednesday at London's Jazz Café is a "show you shouldn't miss."
Upon its late-summer British release, Tchamantché earned a perfect five stars from The Guardian. The paper's Robin Denselow says that in the years since Bowmboï, the Malian singer-songwriter "has changed direction once again, with dramatic results ... Now comes an intriguing, sophisticated and often intimate set that is quite unlike any of the other great music Mali has produced."
Referencing Rokia's eclectic choice of instrumentation, Denselow calls it "an exquisitely recorded set that manages to sound contemporary but still distinctively African. It's remarkable mostly because of the quality and range of her singing, which can be quietly slinky and personal, rousing, as well as breathy."
The review cites the album's "wildly individual treatment" of "The Man I Love," the Gershwin tune made famous by Billie Holiday, as an example of how "Traoré has become the experimental diva of Africa."
Read the five-star review at guardian.co.uk.
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The Times (UK)'s David Hutcheon gives the album four stars and rejoices that with Rokia's new album, "the breadth of her artistic vision has emerged fully formed in her music," declaring her "ready to join the big league." Read the review here.
Hutcheon's colleague at The Sunday Times, Clive Davis, also gives Tchamantché four stars and names Rokia "the most lyrical" of the many Malian musicians to have appeared on the world stage in recent years. Also refering to its creative instrumentation, Davis finds "a beguiling journey across borders" and lauds the "startlingly intimate nod" to Holiday on the Gershwin track. "Traoré’s wispy vocals," he concludes, "remain mesmerising." Read his review here.
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Tchamantché earns four stars in The Financial Times as well, with reviewer David Honigmann calling Rokia "the cosmopolitan outsider of Malian music" and writing of the album's tracks: "All prickle with thorny instrumentation, throwing Traoré's voice upfront." There's more at ft.com.
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The Evening Standard has a four-star review too, with Simon Broughton complimenting Rokia's "understated voice" and describing the album as "stripped down in its textures with guitar, ngoni desert lute and soft percussion behind her gentle caressing voice." After citing "a cool version of 'The Man I Love,'" Broughton concludes: "It's very beautiful and very Rokia." Read the review at thisislondon.co.uk.
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The Independent, in addition to the aforementioned recommendation of the live show, also sees how Rokia stands out from other Malian artists, with reviewer Howard Male stating: "A number of things distinguish Ms. Traoré from other Malian divas: her voice is intimate rather than epic; she's as interested in innovation as she is in tradition."
He echoes the other reviews when he writes of "her fourth and best album" that "it's the delicate tracery of her unique arrangements, in which Gretsch guitar, n'goni and classical harp discreetly impose themselves on silence, that make this exceptional."
Read the review at independent.co.uk.
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Just after Tchamantché's UK release, The Daily Telegraph named it Pop CD of the week. Reviewer Mark Hudson calls Rokia "one of world music's figures to watch" and credits her previous album, Bowmboï, with seeming "to open up a new direction for the continent's music—cosmopolitan, sophisticated and, dare I say it, intellectual."
Hudson says of Rokia's distinct voice that "whether she's raising it in a yearning vibrato, arranging it in breathy layers or coming on angry and assertive, she invests her singing with a certain gravitas."
Read the review at telegraph.co.uk.
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