This is a record that up to now has had almost universally good press, which rather surprises me. I’m cynically inclined to speculate that it’s the strong Third World connection that has attracted interest, because to these ears, spoiled by Blue Note Hancock, Headhunters and Future Shock, Village Life sounds extremely insipid.
Suso’s 21 stringed kora predominates, except on Hancock’s comparatively hi-tech and grooving Early Warning, and his West African griot style music is shamelessly consonant. The odd thing is that Hancock, a man well-versed in the joys of dissonance, makes little attempt to inject drama into this flat soundscape. Rather, he matches Suso’s innocuous twiddlings with like; even his diverting classically tinted introduction to Kanatente serves only to throw Suso’s elemental vernacular into sharper (and by comparison, duller) relief.
We could just about compare Suso’s stuff to the minimalist music of composers like Steve Reich. Both forms share a love of bright consonance and repeating patterns, but Reich’s is the more interesting for its seductive use of rhythmic displacement. Otto Karolyi, in his famous primer Introducing Music (Pelican A659, published 1965) tells us that ‘In art, monotony is the unforgivable sin’. Buyer beware.
Discography
Moon/Light; Ndan Ndan Nyaria; Early Warning (20.37) – Kanatente (19.59)
Hancock (Yamaha digital synthesiser/drum machine); Suso (kora/talking drum). Recorded in Tokyo, August 7-9, 1984.
(CBS 26397)
