MICK FLEETWOOD

The Visitor

[RCA AFL1-4080]

Picasso’s masklike faces, the Coltrane/Oiatunji collaborations, Bryne/Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Periodically, artists turn to Africa, a fertile source of inspiration and vitality for much of 20th century Western culture.

If, a 1960’s Malcolm McDowell film, used the “Sanctus” from “The Missa Luba” as a soundtrack; its complex cross-rhythmed drums and exulting high-pitched voices serving as an anthem for repressed English school kids edged into rebellion. This recording of a mass in Congolese became something of a hit in left wing Catholic circles.

Less successfully, David Fanshawe’s African Sanctus imposed Western instruments and choirs on a becj of Kenyan, Sudanese and Ugandan music. The two strains never really melded, a project possibly doomed from the start as evidenced in Fanshawe’s good-hearted but patronizing liner notes - “African music is fascinating, weird, wonderful.”

Babatunde Olatunji’s unfortunately titled Drums of Passion remains the most influential African album, providing “jingo” on Santana’s first and most rhythmically compelling album, and inspiring John Coltrane (already incorporating non-Western elements in his work) toward an alliance with this master percussionist.

Mick Fleetwood’s The Visitor is the latest of these musical trade-offs. Album photos show the grinning Englishman towering over Ghanain tribesmen looking equally pleased. There’s reason for such happy spirits as the music here, vibrant, unselfconscious, graceful, is uniformly pleasant. On the blues-period Fleetwood Mac “Rattlesnake Shake,” the quasi-legendary Peter Green returns, reclaiming his own “roots” through the use of the name “Greenbaum,” playing tough and easily. Famed Eastern dabbler George Harrison puts in a nice appearance on slide and twelve-string. Fleetwood himself, one of drumdom’s masters of understatement, supplies his customary minimalist effectiveness. The Africans range from Superbrains, a pop band, to the Ghana Folkloric Group.

Though the musicianship is skillful throughout, one wishes for a closer union of styles. Though the pop songs are enlivened by the black choruses and drummers and the African pieces are made both swaggering and more focused through the use of electric bass and a rock ‘n’ roll drum kit, a little less shyness on the part of the players might have created a new synthesis that’s only hinted at here. This hybrid almost occurs in the inspired choice of “Not Face Away” - white boy Buddy Holly’s tribute to Bo Diddley’s imitation of Congo bopping which has now come back to its source.

Finally, more than the music, it’s the expansive spirit here that must be commended. Few solo albums depart so radically from previously established work and one nice benefit of stardom is having the power to see projects like this one through to completion. A lot of good music goes unheard; Fleetwood deserves credit for introducing this music to a wider audience.

-Paul Evans