C.W. Stoneking: Musings from the Deep South to Kanye West

First published in fRoots issue 423, Winter 2018



C.W. Stoneking is an artist for whom ‘unexpected’ is probably the default setting. How else to describe such a fine purveyor of American roots music who also happens to be a towering, youthful-faced white Australian man? He surprises first-time listeners, throws curveballs at long-time fans, and everything he does contains at least some background level of bafflement for all involved.

There are multitudes in Stoneking’s music. It’s probably easiest to describe him as a ‘blues artist,’ but the term disguises what makes his music special. There’s so much in there. A 1920s pre-war blues sound is key, but there’s almost equal helpings of New Orleans jazz, jug band music, hokum, country and calypso, and he’s lately brought in elements of jump jive, early rock’n’roll and gospel. His gift is that he brings them all together without anything sounding out of place. He finds the strands that connect all of these different styles and gently braids them together. It’s what he values more than anything: “It’s getting everything to unify really. The music, the flow of it, keeping it moving, with no dead spots. Then I guess having the lyrics and the meaning that flows in that too, you know? Getting it all to knit together in a way that, if you didn’t speak English maybe, you’d still be able to feel the melody, or the sounds of the words. If you did, then the meaning would also flow. That’s sort of what I’m trying to do, I guess.” When so many on the blues scene are trying to sound ‘authentic’ – whatever that is – it’s that unity of sound that allows Stoneking to actually achieve it, and with apparent ease, too. Back in the day, no-one was ‘just’ a blues musician, or a jazz or country musician, and so neither is he.

Stoneking’s work can never really be second-guessed; you never know what you’re going to get. After charming his audiences with acoustic parlour guitars, National resonators, tenor banjos and a band laden with brass on his first two albums, he dropped all of that to go electric with his latest, 2014’s Gon’ Boogaloo, which was all about his Fender Jazzmaster and doo-wop backing vocals. While acoustic is still in his plans (his most recent tour was a solo affair: just him and a gorgeous 1937 Epiphone Deluxe), it seems like he’s ditched the banjo for good; he’s been known to go on the occasional but vicious anti-banjo tirade. When I try to ask him about it, he suffices with “I have to be careful with what I say. People get angry about that sort of stuff.” Maybe he’s been advised by his lawyers. Maybe it’s just part of his own epic, enigmatic legend.

Storytelling is one of his most potent powers. That man knows how to spin a yarn. He started his musical life in high school, but asked if he was a blues artist back then, he says: “I wouldn’t have said I was an artist of anything, except for maybe a bullshit artist!” It would seem that never really changed. He has the air of an old vaudeville master, a carnival caller or maybe a market huckster. By 2008, the UK was in the middle of a mini blues boom sparked by the successes of Seasick Steve, and a good story was all-important. Each artist had to have their own romantic blues myth for cachet, and Stoneking had the tallest tales in his backstory, rejecting the down-home believability of the aforementioned Steve for way-out parody. His thing was that he had worked for a time as an assistant to a witch doctor in New Orleans, before getting drunk and finding himself on a ship bound for the Congo, only to get shipwrecked and land on a beach in Gabon…it was a saga that got more madcap and rambling with each retelling. I’m sure I recall hearing some sort of narrative detour to a dildo farm at one point. These are stories to be taken with a bucket of salt.

Naturally, his songs are similarly irreverent and fantastical. His albums are full of tales of talking animals, hoodoo gone wrong and a myriad of characters in unfortunate situations in locations from jail to the jungle to heaven itself. It’s probably easy to tell that a common thread in Stoneking’s music is his humour. If we’re talking about the authenticity thing, it’s one thing that makes him stand out from the crowd. It’s surprising how often musicians today forget how funny a lot of the old-time music really was, blues or otherwise. Almost all of his work is drenched in that humour, whether it be sly innuendo, ridiculous sitcom or his particular knack for extended conversations between fictional friends – the man holds a whole pantheon of personalities under his stylish fedora and slicked-back hair. Simply put, he’s just not so bloody earnest all the time, which is a breath of fresh air to be honest. It also makes the times when he is earnest particularly touching – an example is his straight-ahead ‘Charlie Bostock’s Blues,’ a heartbreaking ode to one of Stoneking’s former bandmates and his tragic end.

How does Stoneking make that world so relevant to his own life? How does Australia impact on his sound? It’s not something he’s really pondered too heavily, but his answer is a musing that takes him off on a ramble about the nature of aesthetics. “When I first was driving around in the south of America, it was the first time I realised the Australian lens that I was maybe hearing stuff through. You know when you’re daydreaming, you hear music and you sort of feel like there’s a landscape emanating from the person’s voice or the sound of the music? Hearing Charlie Patton or Son House sing back in the old days, I realised that the landscape of that internal world wasn’t really the world that those dudes were actually in. It wasn’t cut-down jungle and floodplains and green, which is what it made me think of. It was more like where I grew up: desert, an Australian sort of arid. Which I’d never thought about, and I was like ‘huh, it might be different.’” Maybe his music doesn’t sound Australian, but those experiences as an Australian in Deep South America have informed the sound: that never-quite-real landscape he heard in the voices of blues masters certainly does emanate from his own.

And his voice is probably the most recognisable thing about Stoneking. It certainly helps with that authenticity too. It’s a voice that has been mistaken many times for an aged African-American porch-dweller of the 1920s, perhaps with some shortage of teeth. Except he’s not putting it on. Not really. The accent isn’t quite his own (although he owes that proficiency to his American parentage), but when he speaks, it is in that same soft, slow drawl that caresses his music. With another musician, it could all come across as somewhat tacky and distasteful, but not with Stoneking. He is so deeply immersed in the world that his music conjures that it’s hard to imagine him any other way, somewhat like a Lord Buckley of the blues.

That unique voice of his also has a habit of cropping up in strange places. Really, who else would be better to provide the voice of a gentlemanly vegetable fellow, as Stoneking did alongside Elijah Wood in the charming cartoon short, Tome of the Unknown, in 2013? He could most recently be heard on notorious blueshead Jack White’s album Boarding House Reach earlier this year. Such things are unexpected even for Stoneking himself: his blues skills were not needed here; his contribution is a somewhat opaque spoken-word poem, written by White. “It was all kind of mysterious. I had to wear black and be at this plain-looking building on a certain floor at a certain time. They’d taken all the light bulbs out and put all black lights in. He had this sheet of paper with these words written on it, and I just read it. I didn’t really understand the content of it, it’s just…me talking something I don’t fully understand, or even partially understand. But he was into it, so that was his thing. He sent me the record just before it came out and I was like ‘Oh my god…’ Millions of people are going to hear this and it’s going to be a track that everyone goes ‘what the hell is this? Hit the skip button!’ Who cares, though?”

After such an odd experience, would he ever want to collaborate with other artists in his own work? His answer is immediate, and unsurprisingly surprising: “Kanye West. Yeah, I’d like to make a record with him. He’s about the only one.” That was an answer that hung in the air a bit. Does he care to elaborate on that? “I just like how he puts stuff together, his rhythmic piecing of sounds. I would like my flavour but using his ideas a bit, you know?” He definitely sounds sincere, but there is that bucket of salt from earlier…

Who really knows what is next in store for C.W. Stoneking? He does, maybe, although I wouldn’t bank on it. There was a six-year gap between his second and third albums. It’s already been four years since then, and he says the ideas for the next one are just about starting to emerge from the ether. Band or solo? Electric or acoustic? Old-time blues or some other star in that constellation…or Stoneking x Kanye? No idea. All that can really be certain is that it won’t be what you’re expecting.

The Scorpions & Saif Abu Bakr - Jazz, Jazz, Jazz

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 144, January/February 2019.

The Scorpions & Saif Abu Bakr
Jazz, Jazz, Jazz
Habibi Funk (44 mins)

Jazz. Jazz? Jazz! Jazz. Well, except, not really. Barely any jazz at all, actually. Funk and soul definitely, and more besides, but jazz…not so much.

This record by Sudanese band the Scorpions with singer Saif Abu Bakr was originally recorded in 1980 in Kuwait. It’s since passed into a degree of legend among record collectors, with copies going for up to $1000 on eBay. Now Habibi Funk has reissued it for those of us without such expansive purses.

The album starts with a couple of instrumentals, but it really gets going when Abu Bakr joins in. His voice is full of personality and gives a good contrast to the tightness of the band’s groove. But yes, for all the title’s talk of jazz, stylistically there’s much more funk than swing, and it even drifts into Motown territory on occasion. There’s not that much to mark the music as Sudanese, either. Apart from the vocals and a sometimes pentatonic feel, the record could have been made across the Atlantic. In fact, the track ‘Bride of Africa’ wouldn’t have sounded out-of-place in 70s Kinshasa; it’s a lovely take on rumba Lingala.

In the end, this album probably isn’t worth $1000. But it’s a goodn nonetheless.

John Falsetto & Mohamed Sarrar - Sounds of Refuge

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 144, January/February 2019.

John Falsetto & Mohamed Sarrar
Sounds of Refuge
Good Chance (33 mins)

John Falsetto and Mohamed Sarrar met as fellow actors in the award-winning play The Jungle. The play tells the stories and journeys of the residents of the Calais refugee camp, and Sounds of Refuge is no different. The album evolved from informal dressing room jams, but it soon took on a life of its own that took it all the way to Abbey Road Studios.

Falsetto and Sarrar are both refugees themselves, from Zimbabwe and Sudan respectively, and Sarrar lived for a time in the Calais Jungle: there is no doubt that these songs come from the heart. Falsetto’s mbira lays the foundation of the album, building layers of bright and clear tones for his and Sarrar’s vocals to lie upon. The sound is rounded off by Sarrar’s djembe and darbuka drums, piano from Duncan Webb and occasional spoken word from Syrian actor Ammar Haj Ahmed.

The result is strongest when the Zimbabwean and Arabic styles come together, especially with Sarrar’s singing, but that doesn’t happen often enough. Instead, most of the album tends towards a very gentle, middle-of-the-road feel, with little to surprise or stand out. The project represented here is definitely interesting and worthy of attention, but the music is lacking in adventure.

Eric Bibb - Global Griot

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 144, January/February 2019.

Eric Bibb
Global Griot
DixieFrog (2CD, 90 mins)

Eric Bibb knows what he’s doing by now. He’s released about 40 albums, give or take, and netted a bunch of awards in the process. Bibb uses his music to examine his own place in the world, and Global Griot sees him continue on that journey. The album is described as Bibb’s ‘most collaborative project yet,’ which rings true: it’s filled with guests from across North America, the Caribbean, West Africa and Europe, and it was recorded in seven different countries. There is a particular focus on the African, and it is the sound of Solo Cissokho’s kora that stands out across the album, the nylon strings rippling across the lilting blues in a completely natural way.

With his signature style of chilled-out, cheerful and slightly cheesy blues, this is essentially Eric Bibb doing what he does best, and it yields some lovely moments, such as the tracks ‘New Friends’ and ‘Mole in the Ground,’ featuring gospel singer Linda Tillery and reggae legend Ken Boothe, respectively.

The album may not be as ground-breaking as it promises, and the collaborations don’t result in anything particularly new, but as a world-facing blues album, it still hits the mark.

Various Artists - Two Niles to Sing a Melody: The Violins & Synths of Sudan

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 143, December 2018.

Various Artists
Two Niles to Sing a Melody: The Violins & Synths of Sudan
Ostinato Records (2CD, 96 mins)

They dipped their toe into vintage Sudanese music with an album by Abu Obaida Hassan a few months ago; now Ostinato Records are taking a deep dive into that fertile ocean with this double album. This time they’re exploring the music of Khartoum, the capital city at the confluence of the Niles. The rivers are key to Sudan’s unique musical heritage, bringing in influences from North, Central and East Africa to give it a special swing.

The tracks on this compilation span from the 1970s to the 90s, and it’s interesting to hear the changes in style as time goes on. As the title suggests, there is a bunch of violins and a bunch of synths. The trend moves from one to the other over time, the pure disco of the massed violins and wah-guitars slowly making way for full-on synthscapes that really get the heart racing.

All the tracks here have been digitised from cassettes, so the audio quality is understandably varied, which can either be endearing or sonically troubling, depending on your ear. But as with most compilations of this sort, the sheer musical quality is excellent throughout – a wobbly track or two is a fair trade for a wonderful musical journey.

Kronos Quartet - WOMEX 18 Artist Award

First published in the WOMEX – World Music Expo 2018 delegate guide.



To become a pioneer in one musical stream requires immense dedication, determination and, of course, prodigious skill and creativity. To become such a leader in more than one stream must truly signal that there is some intense genius at work – genius that the Kronos Quartet possess in abundance.

They have gone through some line-up changes over the years, but Kronos Quartet as we now know them comprise David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), and Sunny Yang (cello). You may recognise that set-up as a string quartet, a mainstay in the Western classical tradition for over 250 years, but Kronos are anything but stuck in the past. Throughout their history, they have always been new; impressive for a group that have been going for more than 40 years.

Founded in 1973 under the intoxicating influence of Crumb’s terrifying avant-garde piece ‘Black Angels,’ Kronos have never quite been your usual quartet. They were a breath of fresh air in the often all-too stuffy world of classical music. Working with composers of cutting-edge contemporary sound art as well as revisiting the old masters, they were the very vision of counterculture where previously there was only orthodoxy. Their artistry was second-to-none and the music was of utmost importance in everything they did. They didn’t do anything that wasn’t complementary to the music, even if that meant rethinking what a string quartet looked like: if the music suited leather jackets better than evening dresses, then so be it.

All very groundbreaking, yes, but what do they have to do with WOMEX? Well, as it turns out, everything. They treat all music with the same passionate fervour and deep respect that other string ensembles would usually reserve for classical music. And that really is all music. It doesn’t matter if they’re sitting down to play Hildegard von Bingen or Harry Partch, Geeshie Wiley or Alim Qasimov, Konono No. 1 or DJ Spooky; Kronos’ music spans a thousand years and six continents. The interpretation of worldwide music is not a new thing in Western art music, but the way Kronos approach their musical adventures is revolutionary. They do not treat Western art music as immutable or unmovable. The usual balance is flipped: instead of fitting musics of other cultures into their own frame of reference, they mould their way of playing around the music itself.

This open-eared philosophy has been fundamental to the existence of Kronos, right from the beginning. Harrington tells of this lightbulb moment: “When I was 14 years of age, I had one of those moments that every one of us gets once in a while, if we are lucky, and it was while I was looking at the family globe. I realised there were a whole lot of cities other than Vienna where music composers lived. There were a whole lot of other countries with a lot of other religions and languages, and at that moment I realised I need to find out more about the kind of sounds that are present in other countries. I started to explore, and I haven't stopped ever since. I feel like I am just getting started because the world of music is so immense and anyone that thinks they know much about it is mistaken.”

One of the most important factors about the Kronos Quartet is that they are many more than four. Their extended family numbers in the hundreds. Collaboration has opened up soundscapes that would otherwise be inaccessible for a humble string quartet. The list of their collaborators is mind-boggling and features some (if not most) of world music’s greatest stars. It’s no longer a surprise to see them grace the stage with guest musicians playing balafon, dan bau, tabla, bandoneón, oud, pipa or rubab, or singing in any number of languages – in fact, one of their most recent successes was last year’s album Ladilikan, made together with the Malian Trio Da Kali, hit showcasers at WOMEX 16. The key to these collaborations is that they encourage everyone involved to reach new heights; together, they are more than the sum of their parts. Each collaboration brings new dimensions to each participant’s sound, and also adds new strings to the Kronos bow, as it were. Harrington says: “I believe with every collaboration we have ever had, I have learnt so much about life, music, and my instrument. I am not competing with anybody. All I want to do is the best work we can do with those partnerships that make us better musicians, and better people. I feel this is what our collaborators do for us.”

Collaboration for Kronos goes beyond performing with other musicians. It also extends to the lifeblood of our art: new music. It’s no exaggeration to say that they’re ultimately responsible for the creation of a whole new string quartet repertoire. Over 900 pieces have been composed especially for them, and one of their latest (and most ambitious) projects aims to take this even further. Over five years, Kronos have used their ‘50 For The Future’ project to commission 50 composers from around the world (25 male and 25 female) to each create a totally new piece of music for string quartet. All of the resulting pieces are then made freely available as recordings and scores for anyone to access via their website, opening up a wide range of potentially canon-upsetting music to flourish on the scene and encourage the next bright young string things.

The sheer scope and impact of this quartet’s work is impossible to condense into just a few pages of text. It would take listening to their 60+ albums, and even that would barely scratch the surface. So it is for their tireless efforts in the pursuit of the new; for bringing international music of all styles new audiences, new works and new outlooks; and for their stature as the most important string quartet of their generation, it is with delight that we award the WOMEX 18 Artist Award to the Kronos Quartet.


Photo: Kronos Quartet perform at WOMEX 18, by Yannis Psathas.

Dur-Dur Band - Dur-Dur of Somalia: Volume 1 & Volume 2

First published in Songlines Magazine issue 142, November 2018.

Dur-Dur Band
Dur-Dur of Somalia: Volume 1 & Volume 2
Analog Africa (2CD, 108 mins)

They were the biggest band in 1980s Somalia, huge across the whole Horn of Africa, and they’re not completely unknown outside the continent, either. Dur-Dur Band’s album Volume 5 was reissued by Awesome Tapes From Africa in 2013 to much acclaim, and now Analog Africa have taken the reins to release their remaining albums. This collection includes the band’s first two albums from 1986 and 1987, as well as a couple of previously unreleased tracks.

And wow. It’s a hot one, alright. As expected from Analog Africa’s output, this album is filled with funk, and Dur-Dur go hard: the track ‘Doon Baa Maraysoo’ is an intense seven-and-a-half minutes of driving groove, and it’s not alone in that. It all has its deepest roots in Somali traditional music, particularly the powerful sounds of the saar possession rituals. There’s also a surprisingly heavy dose of roots reggae in there too, complete with amazing bass guitar by Abdulahi Ujeeri Ajami. Add saxophones, synthesisers, electric guitars and the legendary voice of Sahra Dawo into the mix, and you won’t wonder why this band was so big.

Somali music is shaping up to be a world music phenomenon; Dur-Dur Band is a great place to start.