Later with Jools Holland returned to the TV last night. As usual it was a bit of a curate's egg, but always worth watching.  I specifically put it on to see Tinariwen, who played a couple of tracks from their new-ish album Aman Iman.  A great album which I got from eMusic.com as soon as it was available and which is every bit as hypnotic as the previous one. By the way, isn't it great that a group of Taureg nomads have their own web site and domain name!

The headliners were the Arctic Monkeys. I wasn't too excited by the prospect, but I really enjoyed the couple of tracks they played, especially the first one Brianstorm. I have added the album to my wishlist.

I was impressed by the band CSS.  I have seen a lot of stuff written about them, but never read it. I got the gist, which was that they are a Brazilian dance band, but that hardly does them justice.  Seeing them play on the TV I realised they are another band where all the publicity has some substance -they were bloody good!

After it was over I went to eMusic just on the off-chance that they had the Arctic Monkeys or CSS available to use some of my monthly allocation of downloads on. They didn't, but once there I saw that there is a new Angelique Kidjo album out so I downloaded the whole thing.

I have been a huge fan of Kidjo for about 12 years. I have seen her play live a couple of times and have all the CDs.  A couple of the recent ones have lacked some of the energy and excitement of earlier ones, but nothing bad enough to stop me wanting to hear more.

This new one is, I think, her best since Fifa in 1996 (although Black Ivory Soul from 2002 grew on me eventually).  The reviewer at eMusic says that this one has been given 'the Santana treatment', referring to the last couple of Santana albums which were stuffed with guest appearances.  I prefer to think of it as 'the John Lee Hooker treatment' as I am sure this was done with his CD The Healer first, to great effect.

Anyway, the Santana comparison holds true as well, and Carlos himself appears on one track. Not a bad track, but nothing special: the sort of guitar part that Santana can knock out in his sleep these days.  I know Santana is a bit of a Kidjo fan anyway: he covered one of Kidjo's songs for a CD and when I saw him play at Wembley Angelique Kidjo came on stage to sing. 

Other guest artists are Josh Rogan, Alicia Keys, Branford Marsalis, Joss Stone, Peter Gabriel, Ziggy Marley and Amadou & Mariam.   I was a little worried to see that the last track was a cover of Ravel's Bolero, but it turns out to be a highlight of the whole album, haunting and reminiscent of the Missa Luba.  Obviously the big names have been piled on to try and get Angelique Kidjo some attention. A blatant ploy, but I think she deserves to be better known as, despite having 4 Grammy nominations, a Mobo award, being a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, and cropping up on quite a few film soundtracks not many people seem to have heard of her.

The album is called Djin Djin and is produced by Tony Visconti who, just to bring this post full circle, also popped up on Later with Jools Holland last night.  Small world isn't it?