Throw Down Your Heart: The Complete Africa Sessions ［3CD+DVD］

バンジョーのマスター、ベラ・フレックが2009年にリリースした『Tales From the Acoustic Planet, Vol. 3-Africa Sessions』のコンプリート盤でリリース。

バンジョーのルーツをアフリカに探しに行きセッションを行う旅、3CD＋DVDでのリリースで高い評価を得ているドキュメンタリー映画「スロー・ダウン・ユア・ハート」のDVDが含まれており、フレックとその兄弟であるサシャ・パラディーノのコメントとともに、14のボーナス・パフォーマンスも収録。

In 2009 and 2010, Bela Fleck released two separate volumes of recordings entitled Throw Down Your Heart as partial soundtracks to a five-week documentary filmmaking expedition to Africa with director Sascha Paladino. It sought to trace the cultural origins of the banjo. Fleck traveled, played, and met with over 40 different groups and individual artists in Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal, the Gambia, and Mali. The initial volume included music with internationally established artists such as DGary, Baba Maal, Vusi Mahlasela, Bassekou Kouyate, and Oumou Sangare. But it also showcased musicians unknown outside their homelands including vocalist and kalimba player Anania, the Luo Cultural Association in Uganda, and the Muwewesu Xylophone Group, who perform on a gargantuan marimba that takes eight people to play, as townspeople join in on various flutes, fiddles, and percussion. The original album won a pair of Grammys for Best Contemporary World Album and Best Pop Instrumental Performance. The second disc collected unreleased tapes from the journey; it too balanced well-known and unknown artists including guitarist Afel Bocoum, bowed lyrist Albert Bisaso Ssempeke, Jr, kalimba player Haruna Walisimbe, the Haruna Samake Trio, and traditional Malian music with Bassekou Kouyate. A decade later, Craft Recordings with Rounder issue this boxed collection that packages those two albums with the Throw Down Your Heart documentary, and The Ripple Effect, an unreleased live album between Fleck and kora master Toumani Diabate. One reason the banjoist went to Mali was to search for the kora legend, but he was unavailable. Diabate later added overdubs to a couple of tracks on the first album, but they never had the chance to play together in Mali. They did, however, begin working together in a 2008 workshop at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, and continued with and a 22-date duo tour in 2009. The latters highlights comprise these ten recordings. The interactive rapport between these men offers what seems an instinctive level of communication that reflects friendship, intimacy and goodwill. Bamako and Nashville trace intersections and differences in the musical cultures of both cities. The pair retain their individual identities even as they commingle in creating a new collective musicality. On Elyne Road, they trace one anothers in-the-moment improvisations and extend them with nuanced inversions of scale, time, and mode. On Throw Down Your Heart they channel Malian and American blues, swing, Stephen Foster, the original songs of Diabates family, classical music, and Appalachian cum Malian folk. Kauonding Sissoko is a tour de force of entwined, cascading single lines and stacked, overlapping melodies that touch on Oh Susanna, and Flatt & Scruggs, as well as Tunde Jegede and Kasse Mady Diabate. After Fleck offers Katmandu, a modal Eastern blues solo, the pair enter a call-and-response improv that transforms -- humorously -- into a stomping, humorous Dueling Banjos. The Ripple Effect is offered for standalone purchase and can be enjoyed as such. But its inclusion in the packaged box set with the film and other discs rounds out the portrait of Flecks African sojourn and showcases the impact the continent and its musicians left on his work, making Throw Down Your Heart: The Complete Africa Sessions a life-affirming, musically dazzling treasure trove. ~ Thom Jurek