Green Mamba, from Cheelo village, Zambia

This bubbly, brilliant, set of new field recordings features informal performances by totally acoustic groups encountered along the unpaved roadways of Zambia's Southern Province. This is the land of the Tonga people, many of whom moved out of the Zambezi gorge, particularly since Zimbabwe flooded much of it to create Lake Kariba, and are hence known as the Plateau Tonga. Thirteen of these fifteen tracks are Tonga, many of them in the effervescent, acoustic-guitar driven chingome style.

Typical is "Maggie," a cautionary tale about AIDS performed by Short Mazabuka on a huge, self-made guitar with a fabulously raw, twangy tone. The music works around a thumping four-count beat with skittering, cycling guitar melodies suggesting the triplet, 12/8 feel so often found in southern African roots music. Mazabuka spits out staccato bursts of words while his son answers in a clear, pleasant voice. The story, about a girl who straightened her hair to look "like a cat," dated Indian guys, got AIDS and would up "six feet down," is not the only one to make explicit reference to the Zambian resentment of Indians, against whom they rebelled violently in 1995. It is also not the only one to warn about AIDS, perhaps the overriding theme in these songs.

Just the same, this is party music, whether Tonga chingome, the more general Zambian kalindula beat, or in the case of "Busiku Bwanduuma (I Haver Been Bitten by the Night)," acoustic Congolese rumba, featuring a homemade bass with an amazingly rich tone. Three pieces by Green Mamba are particularly rich, layering high-pitched ukulele with homemade guitars and sweet vocal harmonies. The Kalonda Band from Sinazeze also has a great sound, with vocals reminiscent of Zimbabwean jit groups, and the sharp, trusty beat of a struck glass bottle.

The roadside boogie is interspersed with some unusual pieces, notably two women's choral pieces from the Tokoleya people called "Wbelelwa (Expressing Joy)." Here, forty women sing in distinctive, haunting harmonies accompanied first by the kankowela thumb piano, and then by clapping and ululating. The second and more powerful piece celebrates the awesome sight of Victoria Falls, for the Tokoleya, "the water that thunders." The collection ends with a acapella, call-and-response piece by the women singers of the Hachaanga Squad, again a lament about AIDS.

These recordings were made in 1996 and in 2002 by Michael Baird and released on the Dutch Sharp Wood label, which in recent years has been producing invaluable CD compilations from the Hugh Tracey archives in Grahamstown, South Africa. Following in Tracey's footsteps, Baird demonstrates that there is still plenty of great, undiscovered music to be found off the beaten track in Africa.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre for www.afropop.org