The Very Best (and Josianne)

[Charlie]

Congolese outfit getting quite a bit of attention outside the usual territory

http://www.myspace.com/theverybestmyspace

[Charlie]

And now I have a new friend, Josianne, who turns to be a dancer on the US tour by The Very Best. It's a wide world.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fu ... did=529787

[Charlie]

Not Congolese but all is revealed by Gareth Grundy in today's Observer:


The Very Best [photo courtesy The Observer]

A Frenchman walks into a shop… it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, not the origins of a band. But that was exactly how the Very Best's distinctive, globally minded dance-pop came together, after Etienne Tron, an expat producer living in Clapton, east London struck up conversation with the man who ran the second-hand shop down the road from his flat.

Tron was a regular, often rummaging through the assorted clutter – furniture, toys, bicycles, anything worn out or unwanted from the local area – on his way to or from home. Chatting to the owner, Esau Mwamwaya, another ex-pat, this time from Malawi, he learned Esau could play the drums a bit. Tron and his production partner, a Swede, Johan Karlberg, were on the lookout for new musicians with whom to record and, keen to add flavour the hip-hop and dance influences in their own work, had developed a strong interest in sounds from around the world, especially Africa. Tron was having a house party. Mwamwaya was invited.

The morning after the night before the trio found themselves sketching out ideas in Tron and Karlberg's studio, bowled over not by Esau's percussion skills, but his voice, high, warm and euphoric. Immediately, Tron and Karlberg twigged they were on to something, completing the bulk of an album in the following months. Released this week as Warm Heart of Africa, it's the fruit of an accidental collision between three different nationalities in a down-at-heel corner of the capital.

"That's the power of London," says Tron, squeezed on to a dressing room sofa alongside his band mates, all of them staving off the cold and damp after a rain-soaked mid-afternoon performance at the Øya festival in Oslo (not that the crowd – uniformly clad in primary coloured rain coats and sou'westers – seemed to mind the grim conditions; it looked like the Very Best were rocking a crowd of hip trawlermen).

The 28-year-old Tron, an anglophile who used to work for the dance label Ninja Tune and is crazy about Roots Manuva (the Brixton MC who raps about "beans on toast"), was lured to London seven years ago by its flourishing urban music scene. Stubbly and serious, he's the straight man in the partnership with the tubby, jolly Karlberg, a former hip-hop producer who lived in squats when he first arrived here eight years ago and whose speaking voice blends mid-Atlantic twang with Scandinavian lilt.

The pair DJ and create dance tunes together as Radioclit, as well as running a club night, Secousse (it means "shake" in French) devoted to street sounds from everywhere, whether that's rockabilly from Brazil, dabke from the Middle East, or bubu from Sierra Leone. They both defer to Esau, partly because, at 34, he's a bit older, and also because, given that he is tall and straight-backed, smiley and never shy of holding eye contact, it's hard not to. When he calmly explains that he was unconcerned by the cultural differences between east Africa and east London when he emigrated a decade ago because he "never gets afraid", it doesn't seem like the usual frontman's bravado.

Warm Heart of Africa has something to say to about the possibilities for music in a world made small by technology and its hand-maiden, globalisation. Esau's voice and melodies might come from somewhere specific but the provenance of Tron and Karlberg's backing is more mongrel, the product of time spent continent-hopping as DJs, not to mention saving on the air miles by harvesting the internet for fresh sounds. The combination is an enigmatic, hard-to-place but always accessible patchwork of styles. "We didn't want to make an African album, or a European album," says Karlberg. "We gave Esau some of our least African beats, and he brought the African part to it, and we met in the middle. It's more interesting when you let things collide rather than reach towards something."

The album also features guest appearances from Ezra Koenig of Afro-pop influenced New Yorkers Vampire Weekend and Grammy-winning Sri Lankan-born rapper MIA, both poster children for the network of open-minded artists, producers, DJs and bloggers to which the Very Best belong. (If you're looking for a bluffer's guide to this internationalist sensibility, try the mixtape of remixes and cover versions released by the Very Best towards the end of last year. Its pileup of African, indie, hip-hop and pop tunes has been downloaded more than 300,000 times). "Neither us or the Very Best restrict ourselves in any way," says Koenig. "I relate to the idea that any decision that you make with your music is on a wide open playing field."

Cynics have referred to this trend as the global "illage", borrowing hip-hop slang to suggest fashion victims strip-mining obscure indigenous music on their laptops, simply for street cred, that it's merely an accelerated version of the cultural tourism that afflicted the boom in so-called "world music" throughout the 80s.

The difference, though, is that 20 years later technology has also made the flow of ideas a little less one-sided. "It's hard to know where things start and end anymore," says Karlberg. "For example, kwaito music is from South Africa, but it has a strong American house and European techno influence. The more people have access to the internet, the more that kind of thing will continue."

Esau picks up the thread: "It's no longer a question of people stealing music from somewhere. Or people going to Africa and making music there. People like me are here now. Just like I knew about western music growing up in Malawi, European people know about African music. And it's not a fusion or any of those kinds of words people use – we're just sharing."

There was never much question of Esau switching to singing in English either. Well, the band's management suggested they give it a try. "It didn't work," says Karlberg. "We thought, 'Fuck that, we'll do it without." Besides, people are ready for this. Bonde do Rolê, Sigur Rós – there are already people doing well singing in different languages."

Sometimes practical difficulties get in the way of the trio's utopian vision. For a start, there are the vagaries of immigration. "There was a point last year when everyone we were working with had visa problems," says Tron. "The laws have tightened in the last year, especially for artists. What made England such a rich, artistic country in the first place was immigration, and now that's closing down."

With Malawi a former British colony, Esau encountered no such difficulties, though he has recently moved back, meaning the band are rarely together when they're not playing live, and he's just missed out on the birth of his daughter, who arrived early, two days before the Øya gig.

Family is important – his father, a special branch policeman, introduced him to Western music through the tunes he would bring back from his travels abroad (Esau: "I used to love Dolly Parton, her voice!"), while his brother-in-law Leonard plays bass on the album, his nieces pitching in on backing vocals. Then there's the track "Angonde", which concerns the tribal tradition of burying ancestors in the back garden: "So each and every person from my tribe, the Angonde, have their own graveyard. I'm proud of my country."

Always being on the hunt for something new means the DJ-portion of the Very Best often find themselves in some intriguing situations. Usain Bolt briefly made an appearance on the dance floor when, a couple of weeks after the Øya festival, they played at a party for the end of the world athletics championships in Berlin. Then there's the late night taxi rides.

"We were on the way home from a club one night when we met this illegal Iraqi taxi driver," says Karlberg. "He was listening to all this great music. We ended up buying his CDs off him for £60."

Which is the Very Best's magpie outlook in a nutshell. When talk returns to the fate of Esau's shop (it's no longer there), Tron admits it wasn't that great, apart, of course, from its owner: "But it was the kind of place you just kept going to, because it made you curious, because you hoped you might find a treasure there."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/se ... -best-band

[judith]

Charlie, that's one smokin' collection of friends you have on MySpace.