The Rough Guide to West African Music is aworld musiccompilation album originally released in 1995. The second release of theWorld Music NetworkRough Guides series,[1] it largely focuses onMalian music, with six of the twelve tracks coming from that country. This is followed bySenegal (two tracks), andGuinea,Niger,Ghana, andMauritania (one track each). The compilation was produced by Phil Stanton, co-founder of the World Music Network.[2]
Chris Nickson ofAllMusic gave the album four stars, but lamented the broadness of the topic, stating "the real problem with this album isn't the music, which is glorious throughout, but the fact that it suffers from the size of its ambition and the inability to fully realize it."[3] Michaelangelo Matos, writing for theChicago Reader, praised the record's focus on slow to midtempo music, stating it "succeeds in sustaining a meditative, inner-gazing mood."[4]
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