She Came Out Of The Karoo-The Music Of Tony Bird-A Review

She Came Out Of The Karoo-The Music Of Tony Bird-A Review

CD Review

By Zack James

Sorry Africa, Tony Bird, 1986

During the 1980s Seth Garth had been taking on more and more purely political assignments for the New Times Gazette, a successor newspaper to the old alternative The Eye for which he had gotten his first jumps in journalism as the film and music critic. It wasn’t that he had lost interest in covering the happenings in the world of independent cinema and the edges of popular music but that in that period there were political trends around the struggles for liberation in Central and South America and Southern Africa that for the first time since the slowdown of the Vietnam War back in the early 1970s that required attention. And so Benny Gold, his editor from back in The Eye days who had moved on with the Gazette assigned him more and more of those political assignments with the idea that he would weave those in with some off-beat cultural pieces.    

One night he had been in the Open Space, a new music club in the Village [Greenwich Village]that had previous been a coffeehouse, a popular one, the Unicorn, to hear a new guy out of Africa who Seth was told had an interesting beat, had combined the sounds of Mother Africa with more popular Western music. This was the kind of off-beat combination that he was sure Benny Gold would go for. As the MC for the evening announced the performer, Tony Bird, he was surprised that out came on the stage a young white man backed up by an all black group of sidemen. Seth had known that there were some, not enough, white youth who were supporting the various black liberation struggles in Southern Africa, particularly in South Africa but he was not prepared for a white musician to surface who supported those struggles although he should have known that fact going in.    

Tony Bird let everybody in the place know where he was coming from when he started singing a very heartfelt and upbeat song, Sorry Africa, taking on the burden on his shoulders of expressing sorrow at the way the white man, the way his people had treated the ones they had conquered one way or another. Very moving.  

What had gotten Seth that night though and he was as surprised at this as he was that Tony Bird was a white African man was a song that he finished up with, She Came From The Karoo. The Karoo being the outback in the country he came from. What was strange about the song was that except that the locale was Africa it could have been a song of love and lost in America. More to the point was the vision that Seth had of the woman Tony was speaking of, a woman who came out of the msit with a red sundress on and effected all around her with her bright Botticelli smile and demeanor. Seth thought that little idea, the idea that a woman could spark such imagination out in the bush was the hook that he would use in his article. That and that Tony Bird, a balck liberation  struggle fighter in his own right had no apologied to give to Africa.    

***A Man Of Africa- The Music Of Tony Bird

Click on title to link to Rounder Record promotional material on the "Sorry Africa" CD reviewed below. I could find nothing on YouTube of Tony Bird doing that title song, "Mango Time" or the incredible "Rift Valley" and my personal favorite "She Came From The Karoo". Maybe someone else will have more luck.

CD REVIEW

Sorry Africa, Tony Bird, Rounder Records, 1990

Blues and rural folk music, historically important on the American music scene, have always been in debt, acknowledged or not, to the sounds of Africa. Without getting into a treatise here on that subject if one is interested in the blues then it should be one's business as it was for a poet like Langston Hughes, for example, to dig into the African roots. The same quest, obviously, needs to be taken for those in who live in an increasing urbanized Africa today. Tony Bird, the artist under review here, is a man of Africa and takes that identity seriously. Moreover he is a white man of Africa. And to top that off he is a white man, one of the few unfortunately when it counted, who stood up against colonialism, neo-colonialism, white racism and apartheid. Hats off.

Somehow, someway Tony Bird through that experience has incorporated the language, the sound and, most importantly, the spirit of Africa in his music. That feat is put on display front and center in this nicely done, although all too short, CD that shows that he has assimilated those traditions. Starting from the lushly poetic, upbeat "Rift Valley" through to his signature jump tune "Mango Time" through the politically-driven title track "Sorry Africa" his sense of his African homeland shines through. He is not as successful when he slows down the beat and gets caught up with trying to deliver a message on a track like "Athlone Place" but that is merely a minor flaw in this well-produced CD by Rounder Records. By the way, Tony, for your efforts against colonialism and white racism there is no need to say sorry. The new Africa that is struggling, painfully, fitfully and with reverses to be `aborning' should recognize that.

Note: I first heard Tony Bird many years ago on an old vinyl record album entitled "Tony Bird" where I was mesmerized by his "Rift Valley" and more so by "She Came From The Karoo". The reason that I am reviewing this 1990 CD is that I recently attended a Tony Bird concert where he did a few of the songs from that old album. I make the same comment about that performance as I do about this CD. He does his Africa-centered songs as lustily and with the verve of twenty years ago, and still is as mesmerizing. His `message' songs, none of them included here, are more uneven. "New Jerusalem' is very powerful (if a little long) concerning the need for some kind of just settlement to the Palestinian question. However, "Mr. Meanie" a parable about the Bush years, "Aint't Nobody's Business Who You Love" about the varieties of possibilities inherent in the love experience and "Well Done, America", his Africa tribute to the election of Barack Obama as the first black American president were less so. Still, if you get a chance, he is well worth seeing when he hits his stride.