Discovering musicians like Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya is an unutterable bliss. I remember the excitement of hearing Kadri Gopalnath for the first time, saxophones in Indian classical music! Truly a unique and remarkable musical feat. Lap slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya is even more satisfying (if that’s even possible), because slide guitar tops the greatest instruments list for me as well. And hearing Indian classical music played with slide guitar: the soundtrack to Hindu heaven, if there ever were one.

Born in 1963, Debashish is a prodigious figure who started studying with Indian slide-guitar pioneer Brij Bhushan Kabra at the age of 9. He was given the President of India award in 1984 at the age of 21. He’s well respected in the world music community and he’s shared stage with virtuosos like Derek Trucks and Bob Brozman among others. He has invented his own slide-guitars for god’s sake!

He went on to work developing the Hawaiian slide guitar into a more Indian instrument, adding chikaris and sympathetic strings, and eventually coming out with a 24-string instrument based on the old Hawaiian six-string. This is universally regarded as the highest form of the slide guitar’s development anywhere, making Bhattacharya one of the masters of the instrument, especially when considering his amazing abilities in playing Indian forms on it. Allmusic

These songs come from his Calcutta Chronicles album which was nominated for a 2009 Grammy Award in the category of Best Traditional World Music Album. Truly stellar musicianship on this one don’t sleep on this if you have the remotest interest in Indian music.

The tragedy at Haiti has struck all of us, with 150.000 dead and 200.000 left under collapsed buildings, it’s one of the highest tolls ever, surpassing even Hiroshima. Aids from all around the world and all walks of life are pouring in and I’m proud to inform you that the ticket sales from this weekend’s Bibi Tanga & The Selenites gig at GHETTO Istanbul will proceed to Haiti.

Bassist and vocalist Bibi Tanga has recently formed a new band and is getting a lot of attention, thanks to his p-funky bass grooves and acid jazz vibes, with nods to Curtis Mayfield, Roy Ayers, and the afro-funk tradition of Keziah Jones. Don’t forget, this saturday at GHETTO!

“Dunya (existence in Sango) still offers this fresh iconoclastic Parisian ‘take’ on groove that made the previous album so different from the rest of the world’s funk production. Afro-rhythms in Sango alternate with laidback folk tunes in English and electro tinged soulful songs to form a coherent piece of work that is a great sum-up of this band’s cosmopolitan Parisian experience from the arty South Bank of the Seine to the rough sides of the suburbs.”

There are some new additions to our blogroll and a few touches to the design after I realized how much it sucked. I’ll be editing it more until I can get Boran to help me with a brand new redesign.

Griots as everyone with minimal interest in African music know, are not only story tellers, but they are the embodiment of the oral tradition and keepers of the social memory. There are many well known griots such as Malians Afel Bocoum, Boubacar Traoré, Habib Koité, Guinean Mory Kanté, Senegalese Baaba Maal, but perhaps the best known is the kora player Toumani Diabaté whose Mande Variations told ancient stories from the empire’s heyday. Now another Malian artist, Bassekou Kouyate, who plays the ngoni takes the stage with his sophomore album. He has already played in Diabaté’s orchestra, but this time he’s with his own orchestra; Ngoni Ba. Kouyate brings modern influences as well as Western inspiration to “I Speak Fula”, the debut release of Next Ambiance, an imprint of Sub Pop! Guest appearances by Toumani Diabaté and guitarist Vieux Farka Touré and vocals by Amy Sacko.

It is no coincidence that Kouyate’s music has so elegantly merged with blues-based music. As is well known, American blues has its roots in West Africa, particularly around the Sahel region of modern day Mali. This sonic link became clear to Kouyate in 1990, when a friend who went to Mali in search of the origins of the blues, invited the ngoni virtuoso to play with noted American bluesman Taj Mahal. “I didn’t even know who Taj Mahal was,” Kouyate recalls, “and we had no language but music to communicate. He began playing and I joined in. When we stopped, Taj said: ‘So you already know the blues!’ but it was the first time I had ever heard blues. I was just playing my Ségu (home village) style, and it is the same music.”

For my apologies / frame of mind when making the list – check the mentions post:

Some notes : Hate to sound like a white suburban teenager, but the hazy lo-fi sounds of Matt Mondanile & friends has been the soundtrack to this year. Beware! too much of this will make you think that you live in a two storey prefab with American siding, have a bunch of lazy teenagers in trucker caps as friends and make love to sleazy girls at the beach. Which is quite the contrary to what we get in the urban jungle that is Istanbul. Anyway, kudos to everyone who’s managed to make “new age” a proper genre again. This also includes Mark McGuire and his work in Emeralds.

The most sublime musical moments this year were devised by Rune Grammofon’s In the Country, I’m shocked to see it neglected consistently on best of lists. Well, too bad.

Inspiration Information is hands down the hottest series around as I announced before, and two installments make it to the top cut. Akwaaba’s compilation of Carlos Lamartine was spectacular. Although the songs date back to the 70s, Benjamin did an amazing job to hunt and issue them for the first time outside Angola. Hopefully more will follow next year.

On the jazz front Steve Lehman and Vijay Iyer continue their roles as standardbearers of a newbreed of contemporary jazz. Haven’t checked enough Tzadik releases this year, but I’d have to have some form of dementia to miss an Ahleuchatistas album. Top class!

In Britain, King Midas Sound’s propagating of dubstep with trip-hop was a sigh of relief from the wonky dancefloor madness, although it definitely has way too much Tricky. Another release that I was going mental about was the Broadcast / The Focus Group collaboration. Like all good hauntologists I was interested more in The Focus Group than Broadcast. Frankly, found it a little bit underwhelming, but it’s still heads and shoulders above many.

Not quite sure about Thee oh Sees & Masha on the top 20 list, they might be more suitable for the mentions list. I’ve already realized that I forgot to put Masada Quintet, Peter Broderick vs Machinefabriek, Thomas Köner, Zomby, Yusef Lateef’s At Cranbrook and Elsewhere, Kreng etc. on either list, but it’s too late and life isn’t perfect.

Happy New Year. Hope to see you around for another year of great music and dismal writing.

Rest in Peace everyone who passed away this year. We suffered a lot of losses, but none hurt as much as the untimely deaths of Dani Baquet-Long of Celer and Jack Rose. Never forget!

Making a best of list has been considerably harder for 2009. First things first, together with Can we’ve dug an immense amount of vintage Brasilian music, lots of easy listening, old soul/funk/disco gems and the quality on most of these records put 2009 music to shame. Face it, you can’t keep up with João Donato, Yma Sumac, Piero Umiliani, Prince Buster etc.

I haven’t listened to Grizzly Bear, Mumford & Sons, Mos Def, Natural Snow Buildings and lots of other stuff seen on mainstream lists.

Try as I might I couldn’t get into Animal Collective, Ben Frost, Converge, Fuck Buttons, Clark, Zu, Moritz von Oswald Trio, Leyland Kirby (although I appreciate bits of each).

I listened to lots of cassettes, CDRs of lo-fi music, drone, experimental stuff, but frankly most were either half baked, too short to be labeled proper releases, had a few good ones but sucked as albums, or too experimental to end up on a end of year list.

I’ve missed a lot stuff on say, mapsadaisical or milk factory’s list like Black to Comm, Hildur Gudnadottir, Symbiosis Orchestra, Elm etc. I’ve given some a chance, and they’re actually quite good, but it would have been lame to put them on without giving them proper airtime.

So, taking all of these into consideration, here are our mentions in random order. The followup to this post will be the top 20. Bibio and John Zorn has two albums written beside them as none of them have been decisive IMHO.

We were absolutely stoked when Ali Farka Touré passed away at the end of 2007, the world has instantly become harder to bear without the wisdom coming from the Malian lion. So imagine the exuberance when our friends from World Circuit announced the posthumous sequel to Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté’s collaboration and sent us the single, Kala Djula. Diabaté, the virtuoso kora player and band leader as you all know, is the crown holder of Malian music after Farka’s death and although a posthumous release is never equal to having Farka back, it still is fantastic to hear more music from the man. Out in February 2010.

Born in February 1994 when Xavier Demerliac (guitar and brass) and Jean Stéphane Brosse (piano and accordion) met and transformed into a quintet in 1996, L’Attirail takes Balkan folk & klezmer into new & cinematic territories with their 2007 album Kara Deniz, and continues to do so on their recently released “Wilderness”. And it’s exactly their progressive tone and soundtrackist mentality that sets them apart from traditional Eastern European folklore/ klezmer bands. There’s a distinct Spaghetti Western influence on Wilderness (as the name suggests) with sliding guitars and galloping rhythms; I may not be correct but I sense an instrumental Calexico in there. 15 tracks of quality balkan-jazz-pop that unfortunately lacks in a bit in the memorable pieces department. Out on Les Chantiers Sonores

“Every album is conceived as a musical road-movie between Paris, Moscow and Istanbul. ‘L’Attirail’ band ‘s music throws a bridge between two opposite worlds : country life and big cities, trip and slow progress, the Eastern and Western European countries, tradition and modernity, reality and dream…”

Last night we heard the news that the father of modern anthropology and noted figure of structuralism Claude Lévi-Strauss passed away, aged 101. An important thinker of 21th century and one of the greats who did much to celebrate different cultures of the world. A proper way to thank him would be with a diverse selection around the world, that’s when our friend Ozgur Uckan gave the keyword “Tristesse Tropiques”. This selection is a collab between him and me, features music from Brasil, Angola, Hawaii, Egypt & Cuba, more or less around the tropics, and almost exclusively sad. Please read the obituaries. RIP.

“The world I knew and loved had 2.5 billion people in it. The terrifying prospect of a population of 9 billion has plunged the human race into a system of self-poisoning.” Claude Levi-Strauss at 100

Image by Carles Solis

On Khan’s death in 1997, South Asia women wailed and men wept as if a god had removed himself from the earth. And in a way one had, because Khan had made the rich religious poetry of the Sufi tradition even more magical, bringing words and music together in an ecstatic celebration of the divine. To listen to him was to hear the harmony of the spheres. TIME

His fans praise him like a gift, calling him The Master. He is known throughout the world as Shahen-Shah, the Shining Star. To compare his stature to even the greatest performers in the West would still be an understatement. Yet, he remains a humble servant to God, never allowing his fame to defeat his purpose. Andy Carvin