The Music In Africa Foundation celebrated its 10-year anniversary at the African Music Days concert that was held in Munich, Germany, on May 24th and 25th.
The performance, which took place on the same day as Africa Day, drew seven bands from eight different African nations to the Bavarian capital. At the Muffatwerk live arena, the musical performances from Togo, South Africa, Mali, Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, the DRC, and Senegal brought the audience on a diverse and unique voyage of African sounds and expressions.
The music complex, which is known for booking musicians from a variety of genres, has two performance spaces: Ampere, a smaller room with an overhanging gallery, and Muffathalle, a sizable hall that will host artists like Kurt Vile & The Violators, Monster Magnet, and Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog in 2023. These bands are well-known and relevant alternative bands passing through a city with the unfavourable reputation of being more “provincial” and On the first night.
The general vibe of African Music Days was that the Munich crowd, both the locals and the numerous African expats residing there, have a taste for alternative music as well as the less mainstream sounds of Africa. Even German music journalist Jonathan Fischer, who has conducted in-depth musicological research in Mali, Senegal, Tanzania, and other countries, praised African Music Days for its expertly curated lineup of alternative African musicians, many of whom many other festivals in Germany won’t consider to book but who represent the pulse of their home cities. This praise can be found in his preview for Süddeutsche Zeitung(link is external).
On Day 2 at Muffathalle, Sholo Mwamba and his seven-person band brought down the house with singeli, the frantic, trembling urban music of Dar es Salaam. His performance features a lot of gymnastics, and when it spills into the floor, the crowd becomes fervently engaged. Then there was the equally captivating Fulu Miziki collective from Kinshasa, which employs ostentatious costumes with LED lights, insect-like eyewear, Mad Max armour and instruments made entirely out of trash, such as a device made of two long PVC pipes that was played with old flip-flops.
The previous night at Ampere, the unlikely but highly symbiotic duo of South African singer and guitarist Sibusile Xaba and Ghanaian-Belgian multi-instrumentalist Esinam opened the concert with a spare but moving performance infused with fine electro and maskandi-inspired inflections. Xaba has recently been involved in a number of intriguing initiatives, most notably IzangoMa, a 15-piece avant-garde band at the forefront of African musical expressionism, for which Gilles Peterson has praised him for creating “extraordinary” music.
On Day 1, the Lomé, Togolese band Arka’n Asrafokor, which combines regional rhythms with various heavy metal subgenres, was another hit with the audience. The members’ acute sense of polyrhythms and intimate knowledge of layering sounds at quick tempos and in noisy environments are the sources of this band’s unrelenting intensity.
The impressive Ami Yerewolo, who is Mali’s biggest female rapper and is based in Bamako, gave the local audience a taste of the power of hip hop to change stereotypes and perceptions on the continent. The upcoming R&B/electro female duo Defmaa Maadef from Dakar was another well-received act to take the African Music Days stage with a convincing performance that rode on high energy and peppy stage movement.
The ACCES 2023 music conference, which will be held in Dar es Salaam for the second time in November, is one of the events that the Music In Africa Foundation will host during 2023 to commemorate its tenth anniversary.
African Music Days was made possible with the support of Goethe-Institut, Muffatwerk Munich and Siemens Stiftung.
