Afrique Mon Désir

For more than two decades, Laurinda Hofmeyr has specialised in setting the poetry of her native South Africa to music. As a French graduate, she was inspired to focus largely on Francophone African poetry on this fifth album that reflects, in her words, ‘an almost wistful nostalgia for a mythical place that may never have existed’. The poems of reverie and exile are translated into English and Afrikaans in the lovely accompanying sleeve notes.

Those of Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, a celebrated poet of Madagascar, feature in three of the numbers and Hofmeyr's interest in the island led her to invite the Malagasy musician, Régis Gizavo, to add his accordion to the basic piano, bass, drums and guitar mix and give this lovingly packaged album its signature sound. Poignantly, though, Gizavo died a few weeks after the album was recorded in the Western Cape. To these ears, there's a slight disconcerting sense of fastidiousness that leaves one thinking ‘very nice’ rather than ‘very good’. However, it is beautifully performed and sensitively sung (in French, Afrikaans and Lingala) by Hofmeyr and a Congolese trio; there's nothing to dislike in these 13 tracks.