Kevin Brown and Moussa Kouyate - KORA BLUES
This latest offering from slide guitar maestro Kevin is a stylish follow-up to 2001’s Mojave Dust, similarly atmospheric but in a completely different way. It teams him up with Senegalese master kora player Kouyate for the first time on record, although the two musicians have played together much over the past two years, ever since their chance meeting at the Bath Fringe festival in 2000. It’s a shame that there’s only 37 minutes of music on this CD, for I could easily have listened to twice that amount, so intoxicating and beautiful is the blend of instrumental textures and so stimulating is the musicianship. There’s a striking empathy between the two musicians, but this was hard-won, and emanated not as you might expect from the common kinship between West African music and the country blues, but from what Kevin has described as the discovery - following many hours of struggles of understanding, efforts to find common ground and eventually finding through their faith in each other’s musicality and inner strength - that their ‘internal clocks beat from the same pulse’. This is a genuinely uplifting album, a highly spiritual experience yet one that’s fully accessible and not in any way discordant or unduly esoteric, and more than all that it exudes a very real sense of collaboration, with music-making that’s utterly natural and unforced. Captured live in the studio, with all the immediacy and low-key dynamism that implies, this is a superior product indeed, full of joyous spirit and so much more than a one-off memento of the two musicians getting together.
“Traditional Music Maker”-review, 2001
Kevin Brown is a Lancashire lad, the son of a sign writer and schoolteacher However, you might be forgiven for thinking that he hails from the Mississippi delta or Chicago since his feeling for the Blues is inherent in his playing. He may not be a household name but don’t be put off by that, this is the real thing. Kevin cut his first disc Pickin Good Tunes on his own label in 1984. This was subsequently released by Hannibal as Road Dreams and since then he has released Time Marches On via the Chrysalis label, followed by ‘Sunny Side Up’. Kevin is now firmly estabtished and well recognised in the Blues field. Although equally at home playing solo or with a band this latest release ‘Mohave Dust’ is his first solo CD and is made up of his own tunes, bar one, Travelling Riverside Blues by Robert Johnson. The playing is quite superb and delicate. Kevin knows how to pick the tune and keep a gentle rhythm going. No savage sweeps up the fingerboard here. Apart from the playing Kevin has a centred, in-tune voice with no resort to gimmicks and is easy to listen to. Of the 12 tracks on the album, the title track Mohave Dust and his closing track When Saturday Comes, take the biscuit for me. Self-recorded in his home studio this is an object lesson for all would be singert/song writer/guitar players, or people who just like good slide guitar and the Blues. Don’t miss out on it.
Brian Healey, “traditional music maker”