Cosmopolitan and Sophisticated: Italy's Mau Mau and Venus Nabalera

When I first heard Venus Nabalera, by the Italian group Mau Mau, I wasn't really very versed in world music. I believe that I started listening to what is commonly labeled as world music or global music as the result of a happy accident. I was living in New Orleans in the early 2000s, and my journalist wife was tasked to write some entries on a series exploring the places where New Orleans musicians had lived. I forget which musician, a trumpeter who lived in the early 1900s, she was writing about when we headed to the Bywater neighborhood to look at an address, but we made the acquaintance of the woman who lived in the house that he had lived in for a little while. The woman turned out to be the wife of Dan Storper, the man who founded Putumayo World Music. They had bought the house and were in the process of restoring it. She gave us three or four Putumayo CDs, and I believe one of them had Venus Nabalero on it.

I remember being surprised that 1) this was an Italian band and 2) that I liked it, along with the rest of the music she had given us. I shouldn't have been surprised. In the 1990s I had become turned on to Celtic music at Milwaukee's Irish Fest when I sat in the audience as a new group named Capercaille played and blew me away with their modern take on traditional Scottish/Celtic music. My naive idea of Italian music involved accordions and violins and probably some mixture of Dean Martin and Louis Prima ("When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie..." or "Buona Sera Senorita Buona Sera...") song by a guy in a checkered apron. So hearing a group like Mau Mau do a song that was vaguely reminiscent of Brazilian music I had heard by chance, but sounding so modern, made me rethink my stereotypes and preconceptions. I listened to that Putumayo album, and the others, over and over. For the first time in my life, I felt sophisticated - like I shouldn't be privy to this type of music but I was. I also felt cosmopolitan, and vaguely like I had discovered a secret nobody else knew about.  I still feel that way sometimes.

In the years since, whenever I hear a new group that really captures my fancy, I have that same feeling that Venus Nabalera and other new world songs give me for a fleeting moment.  There is nothing more satisfying when you feel  like you've discovered something.  And there is nothing more wonderful, after you've savored it, to share it with others in the hopes that they will find it just as amazing as you have.

So, here is Venus Nabalera by Mau Mau, one of the songs that started me on this world music adventure so many years ago.  Just a few words about Mau Mau.  They are a group that formed in Turin in 1991, and they have released six albums to date.  Their name, in the Piedmont region dialect, can mean "one who comes from afar."   The name also references the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya that challenged the British colonial rule.  Venus Nabalera is from their 2000 release Safari Beach.