Karantamba

Tiny Gambia has always struggled to maintain a musical identity beside its mighty neighbour, Senegal. For long periods its music industry has disappeared altogether. But guitarist Bai Janha has flown the flag for Gambian music through every adversity, as a mainstay of the country's two best-known bands, Guelewar and Ifang Bondi, and as mentor to generations of younger players. If it's slightly overstating the case to describe him as ‘undisputedly the most important musician to have come from Gambia,’ as this enthusiastic archive release does, he more than deserves greater exposure.

Featuring a group of younger players convened by Janha in a lull in his activities with Ifang Bondi, Karantamba is a hitherto unreleased album from 1984, featuring impassioned vintage mbalax from the time when the fusion's template was still being formed. The big-rolling, open-ended grooves, based around traditional Wolof and Mandinka songs, are powered by Janha's slippery, hypnotic guitar phrases, a spacey keyboard trading phrases with muscular sabar percussion and some dark-toned, rather worn-out sounding trumpets. If some of the music sounds a lot like top Senegalese band of the time Super Diamono – the big-voiced singer is a dead ringer for Diamono's Moussa Ngom – these tracks pre-date Diamono classics such as ‘Pastef’. Indeed, Ngom, also Gambian, played with Janha in Guelewar, and many Senegalese musicians, not least Youssou himself, have acknowledged Senegal's debt to Gambian bands, notably Ifang Bondi. But whether this is an intriguing uber-obscurity or a vital piece of the Senegambian musical jigsaw, the music justifies attention purely on its own merits. The furious percussion and fired-up vocals of ‘Linga Ham’ are held in dynamic tension by Janha and his jangling co-guitarist, while the deliciously expansive groove of ‘Gamo Jigimar’ features a Santana-esque solo that seems to fly in from nowhere. This is the sound of an absolutely classic period heard from a subtly and refreshingly different angle.