LAND OF KUSH – The big mango

“Following several visits to the city over the years, Osama (Sam) Shalabi moved to Cairo in 2011, arriving at an apartment one block from Tahrir Square, in the midst of Egypt’s ‘Arab Spring’. Shalabi describes The Big Mango, his new and phenomenal work for his Land Of Kush big-band, as “a love letter to Cairo” framed by “the beautiful, surreal madness of the city…as joyous, horrific, historical events were unfolding”. The opening six minutes, a slowly brewing stew of free-improvised instrumentation, electronics, wordless vocalizations and oblique sexuality/sensuality, are an inimitable destabilizing strategy of Shalabi’s that serves to introduce most of the instrumental voices and the montage of genres that will form the rest of the work, while also invoking the album’s deeper conceptual preoccupations: gender, sexuality and the status of women as a culture unleashes seismic/revolutionary energies with the real possibility of attendant shifts in civil society and political structure. In combination with the peaking intensity and electricity of Shalabi’s compositional vision, The Big Mango coheres, sparkles and soars: a distillation of the sonic trajectory Land Of Kush has been charting for the past five years.”