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Louie Vega
ELEMENTS OF LIFE
(Vega)
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The Louie Vega who here creates this continuously segued 15-track session of African and Cubano strolling-through-life songs is the same man who, as DJ Little Louie Vega, creates the sexiest of all house-music works, "tribal" in style, full of daring remixes, delirious diva vocals, and wild changes. In his "tribal" style, which is dedicated to the difference between the dancers’ urban work world and the impulsiveness of their emotional world, Vega spins the dancer back and forth to and from an exotic, expressionistic dreamland; here, however, the music is at peace with life, and the exotic becomes the norm. As such, these tracks, typified by the plaintive "Cerca de mi" and the bossa-nova-meets-mbalax "Africa/Brasil," lack the drama of his house music — but they also part from its exhaustive fury. The mood is relaxed, the vision unclouded by work logic. The language of the songs is chiefly Spanish or African (with a touch of French); the instrumentation is percussive acoustic; the vocals are collective, harmonic, and chanted; the melody is soft fusion-jazz. Here and there, in Anane’s "Mon amour" most obviously, the session veers toward Paris-style "lounge beat"; yet even Vega’s Paris moves have a delicate touch and a tonal color more like pastel pink than fiery red. Anane’s song gives way to "Mosalounge," the session’s closer, in which a pensive piano solo supported by distant percussion and wistful horns reasserts the unhurried, peripatetic confidence that Vega feels for life and all its elements.
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