Africa Express presents… Bahidorá (World Circuit Records, 2025)
Eighteen years after its unannounced Glastonbury debut, Africa Express continues to defy categories and borders. The collective’s sixth album, Africa Express Presents… Bahidorá, captures the results of its first project in the Americas: a five-hour performance and recording residency in Mexico during the 2024 Bahidorá festival. The album gathers 70 artists from across four continents for 21 genre-blurring tracks recorded in field studios, hotel rooms, and tents.
Africa Express began in Mali in 2006, connecting West African icons like Toumani Diabaté, Bassekou Kouyaté, and Amadou & Mariam with Western guests such as Canadian singer-songwriter Martha Wainwright and co-founder English singer-songwriter and producer Damon Albarn. Since then, it has produced collaborative performances across Europe and Africa, reimagined Terry Riley’s In C through an African lens, and reunited a Syrian orchestra scattered by civil war. The project’s spirit remains focused on improvisation, cross-cultural dialogue, and shared authorship.
Bahidorá reflects this spirit through its diversity in language, style, and mood. The opening track is a romantic bolero-influenced titled “Soledad,” where Damon Albarn and Mexican singer Luisa Almaguer trade melancholic verses in Spanish.
Highlights include “Defiant Ones which features an engaging chorus and marimba rhythm. The Mexican Institute of Sound reimagines The Smiths’ “Panic” as brassy ska. Meanwhile, “Frenemies” features Bonobo and Hak Baker on a darkly comic tale of digital-age betrayal.
The album’s Tamashek ballad “Dorhan Oullhin,” sung by Sadam of Imarhan with Albarn on piano, offers a laid back, quieter meditation on love and longing.
The closing West African flavored track, “Adios Amigos,” draws the curtain with an ensemble performance featuring Baba Sissoko, Luisa Almaguer, Joan As Police Woman, and others—evoking farewell as a shared ritual.
As a listening experience, Bahidorát falters. The transitions between tracks are abrupt, sometimes jarring. Hip hop dominates the rest of the album. The shifts from roots music to insipid hip hop often feel out of step with the broader musical arc. Some of these hip hop tracks impose themselves, halting the album’s rhythm.
Buy Africa Express Presents… Bahidorá.
Author: Tyler Bennet
