Kasai Allstars - "Quick As White". I like magic. I have always liked magic. I like the magic of wardrobes, opals, old groves, secret passages. I remember the disappointment I felt one morning, age 7 or 8, realising I would never touch a magic sword. There's even some magic in the book I'm writing (and there's magic in most of the favourite books I've read). The magic of my childhood, the magic I still listen for at the trunks of willows or in the cries of birds, was a northerly magic. I was born in Scotland and came of age in Canada; of course it was a northerly magic. I did not dream of wizards in Africa, of their spells under stars. And yet, so strangely -- this is the sound of magic. This song, here: the most fiercely magic sound I have ever heard.

There are drums and voices, and electric guitars in shades of fizzy starlight; there are thumb-pianos like light in lamps; there are bells, sticks, shakes, slips, and a hundred kinds of glimmers. Though the Kasai Allstars are from Kinshasa, Congo, and this is the third in Crammed's Congotronics series, the Kasai Allstars are not some mere Konono no. 2. They are sorcerers, wonder-workers, enchanters pulling hopes from throats and making me wonder, here in Montreal sun, if maybe one day I will touch a magic sword.

"Quick as White" is from an album titled In the 7th moon, the chief turned into a swimming fish and ate the head of his enemy by magic.

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My friend, hip-hop head Jay Smooth, will be talking in New York tomorrow along with Ze Frank and the Sound of Young America's Jesse Thorn. It would be a wonderful way to spend a late afternoon.

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