The trendy Ace Hotel in Shoreditch hosts one of the most talked about new jazz-world artists to have emerged over the last year timely with the release of new OKeh album The Lagos Music Salon, an aural portrait of Illinois-born singer Somi’s spell spent living for an extended period in the Nigerian city of Lagos. Somi is seen in some quarters as the new Angélique Kidjo and has come of age musically of late. Appropriately, world music icon Kidjo underlines that strong association between the two by guesting on the album.
For this project Somi performed with a band that included pianist Toru Dodo, guitarist Liberty Ellman, drummer Otis Brown III, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and the bass guitarist Michael Olatuja, Angélique Kidjo guesting on ‘Lady Revisited’, a song Somi introduced on her 2007 album Red Soil in My Eyes, and rapper Common appearing on ‘When Rivers Cry’, a song about the environment and ravages of pollution.
Somi is not afraid to tackle serious issues but is neither preachy nor frothy although the album has a scintillating and very accessible Afrobeat-derived sound you can dance to. There is also a series of important messages to be gleaned within the album, and a new version of a Nina Simone song, from Simone’s classic 1960s album Wild is the Wind, in a new version as ‘Four African Women’, touches on the horror of genocide, a significant highlight. Ambrose Akinmusire’s solo on another socially conscious song, this time turning to sexual exploitation, ‘Brown Round Things’, is one of the most dramatic moments, while the romantic side in high contrast is captured magically on the vivacious ‘Ginger Me Slowly.’
